On the Front Porch: Easter Weekend 2003

Easter Weekend 2003

Talking with Grandaddy

     Owen refers to the time in his life when this photo was taken as "the good old days, you know, back when I was still an only child."  He's kidding - mostly.  Easter was on April 20th in 2003 so we took advantage of our trip to Knoxville to celebrate Owen's 2nd Birthday out at his Great-Grandma's house.  I took this photo shortly before the birthday festivities began.  It is a perfect example of what a Saturday afternoon on the front porch was all about.  And just look at how green everything is. 

Keeping All of My Eggs In One Basket

 

Julie Catherine

Easter Sunday, 1976

     I was just shy of my 5th birthday and in the beginning stages of my Little House on the Prairie  obessession when this photo was taken on Easter Sunday in 1976.  If you look closely at this picture you can see my Grandma in the background bending down, probably helping one of my cousins find an egg. If you look very closely at this picture you can see the bonnet that matches the dress I'm wearing covering the eggs in my basket. There was also a matching purse. My mother went wild with the sewing machine that spring.  Anyhoo, back to the point of this story.  We were having a family egg hunt which was all fine and dandy until I realized that in order to participate in this egg hunt I was going to have to give up my eggs - eggs that I had worked very hard to color - just so that they could be hidden and hunted for.  I feel that it's necessary to interrupt this story for a minute to point out that we were hunting for actual eggs, not fun candy-filled eggs, but real hard-boiled eggs that we colored the night before which seems, I don't know,  a little icky.  Anyway, giving up my eggs so somebody could hide them and then take the chance that somebody else would find them just didn't make much sense to me. Of course the story that's been told in the intervening years centers on the fact that I wouldn't hide my eggs - like it's some sort of character flaw.  What I want to point out is that while I did not hide I also did not hunt.  I started the day with 12 eggs and I ended the day with 12 eggs. Even steven. 

     In the photo on the right you can see that my cousin Wendy looks a little bit unhappy.  Maybe it's because she gave up her twelve eggs and then only found ten.  Maybe it's because one of her favorite eggs was cracked during the frenzy of the hunt.  Now look at me sitting there smiling down at the top of Wendy's pouting head holding my can of Grape Fanta and my basket FULL of eggs.  I was a happy camper. Why?  Because I kept all of my eggs in one my basket.

     I don't know if there have been any scientific studies conducted on this particular genetic link but my own experience has led me to conclude that "not hunting for Easter eggs" can be an inherited genetic trait.  This photo of Owen and me was taken in 2004 at an Easter Egg Hunt here in Nashville where Owen politely but ever so firmly refused to hunt for eggs. We are who we are.

Lute, I Am Your Father

Luther John "Lute" Hurst and his wife, Syntha

My great great grandparents

      Forgive me for the title but sometimes these things just write themselves.  Luther John Hurst, known as Lute, was born in 1843 in a part of Claiborne County that would soon be incorporated into Union County in East Tennessee. He was seventeen years old when Tennessee seceded from the Union in June 1861.  Like many of his fellow East Tennesseans, Lute was conflicted about which side to join during the war.  His father, Squire Caldwell Hurst, was a Union sympathizer and his uncle, Allen Hurst, became a Major in the Confederacy and he had cousins who fought on either side.  According to family lore, rather than choose a side to fight for or against he hid out for the duration of the war, something that probably wasn't all that easy to do in a region overrun with both Union and Confederate troops.

     In 1870 he married Syntha Ann Lay and they had two children, Harietta Tennessee (b. 1873) and Attie Hugh (b. 1875).  Attie Hugh is my great-grandfather.  Lute and Syntha's daughter, who apparently went by the name Tennessee, married Brown Troxler.  I can remember hearing my mother talk about her when I was little and thinking that "Tennessee Troxler" was just the most wonderful name - like a storybook character.  Even now I love the name because there is such a lyrical rhythm to it - Tennessee Troxler. I wonder if her father's conflicted feelings about his Union or Confederate loyalties had anything to do with choosing her name?  Tennessee Troxler died in 1975 at the ripe old age of 102.  I'll bet she had some interesting stories to tell.

Gone Quiet

My great great grandfather, John Williams.

The very large original of this photo hangs in my den . . .

taunting me.

     This is the sum total of the information I have about my

gg* grandfather, John Williams.  My mother learned all of this from his daughter, Mary Williams Hurst ( a.k.a Grandmother Hurst).

       John Williams married Louella (Elly) Beeler.

He was the father of Mary Williams Hurst,

Catherine (Cassie) Williams Wolfe,

Jake Williams (settled in Oklahoma) and

John Williams (went to Texas).

He died at the age of 22. 

His youngest child, John, was born after his father's death.

    What's frustrating to me is that even with all of this information as a jumping off point I haven't been able to locate him on ancestry.com. It's also interesting to me that in contrast to the the dozens of people who keep asking to "connect" to my Hurst branch of the family tree, the Williams branch has been very quiet.  Maybe that aloof  Hurst nature that my grandfather was known for is actually a Williams trait,  just like those obviously blue eyes that look out from this photograph. 

*This is not a typo.  I'm getting tired of typing the word "great."  So gg = great great.

      

Graduation Day

Norma Jean Hurst

Graduation Day, June 1964 

East Tennessee State University

   

     My mother, Norma Jean Hurst, was THE FIRST MEMBER OF HER FAMILY to graduate from college.  My grandparents each attended school through the eighth grade but because the only high school in Union County was too far from where they lived they weren't able to go.  My grandfather was determined to get an education however, and he attended the local schoolhouse for two more years until his brothers made so much fun of him for being in the eighth grade for three years that he finally stopped going. 

     While serving in the Army during WWII my grandfather was given an IQ test. His score was somewhere in the 130 range. When he returned home he was encouraged by someone in the armed forces to attend college and was told he would do well.  By this time though he was 24 years old, recovering from battle injuries, had a wife and two daughters at home and another child on the way.  I can only speculate at his reasons for not going but it seems he had a lot on his plate. His three daughters all went to college though.  All three. And his five grandchildren - we have earned five undergraduate degrees and five post-graduate degrees.  There are many factors that have contributed to the five of us succeeding in college but I think that being raised in households where going to college was expected and encouraged by mothers who were raised in a household where attending college was a real possibility contributed significantly to all of our success.     

On the Front Porch: May 1971

Wendy Jean with her Aunt Jean, her Uncle John

and her new cousin, Julie

On the Front Porch, May 1971

     One of the many ideas I keep tossing around is compiling a photo book of pictures taken on the front porch of Grandma and Gran's house.  The earliest front porch photos I have show the original builders and owners of the home (The Sam P. Smith Family) and the last ones I have show all of  us gathered on the porch the week that Grandma died in August of 2008.  Birthdays, graduations, homecomings, departures - I lived a lot of it and I am still amazed at how many life events revolved around that porch.  

    This is the first photo of me on my grandparents front porch.  I was about eleven days old.  My cousin, Wendy, who was two and half at the time, was in for a big adjustment.  She had been the only child and grandchild in Tennessee up until that point and had therefore been the focus of her grandparents' and mother's and aunt and uncle's attention. And now?  Well, now she was going to have to share.

What Could Have Been

Hurst Mansion

Purdy, Tennessee

     This house was the home of Col. Fielding Hurst, a man who made himself notorious during the Civil War (and a person whose story is a topic for another day).  It is located in Purdy, Tennessee. Today, Purdy is a rural unincorporated community 3.5 miles northeast of Selmer in McNairy County. A failed railroad development in the 1850s kept the community rural and without industries or major business ventures the town of Purdy disappeared in the years following the Civil War. Fielding Hurst (who is my great uncle to the sixth power) had to give up his beloved home because of war debts.  The home changed hands many times in the following years and was finally willed to McNairy County in 1993 in the hopes that it would be preserved.  It sits now in a state of disrepair and ruin.  It has been vandalized many times.  The county does not have the means to restore or maintain this house and its future looks grim. 

    I have had a few people ask me why more wasn't done to preserve my grandparents house.  I can say that several of us thought about it but the economic realities were overwhelming.  Maintaining the house and the land was a full-time job for my grandparents and later for my aunts and uncles.  When it came down to making a decision about what to do with the property selling it to the county so that a much-needed school could be built was the best solution - although is was not the easiest.  What I know is that not one of us would want to see the house falling down and vandalized.  I like to think that my grandfather in particular would have liked the idea of a school being built on the property.  He was a man who valued education.

Drawing of Paulette Elementary

Groundbreaking Scheduled for April 1st, 2010

Saved by Grace or by Works

Cleo Malone Hurst being Baptized

on what I'm hoping was a warm day in 1942

"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations,

baptizing them in the name of the Father,

and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

                                                                                  - Matthew 28:19

     I have ecuminical family roots. My mother's parents were Baptist (Grandma) and Undeclared Independent (Gran).  My father's parents were Roman Catholic (they were also "Northern" but that's too much of a digression to deal with right now). My mother was raised in the Baptist church then baptized as a Presbyterian in her early twenties before finally becoming Catholic on Easter Sunday 1988. My mother's sisters grew up and became Lutherans and Methodists and my cousin, David, is a Methodist minister. We are a multi-denominational family and as a result I feel at home at just about any kind of religious service from Mass to a Tent Revival.  Although Grandma and I had many discussions about faith we never really talked about "religion" - Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Undeclared Believer - just different avenues to the same end. My oldest child, Owen, summed up my family's approach to religion pretty well when he attended Vacation Bible School at a local Methodist Church last summer.  After his first day at VBS he was so excited to tell me that "the Methodists use the same Bible that we [Catholics] do!" 

   

The Sam P. Smith Family

Sam P. Smith & his wife, Lucy Ann George Smith

with their children Ida Bell (b. 1874), James Parnick (b. 1875),

Thomas W. (b. 1879), Ethie (b. 1882), Claude (b. 1885)

Barbara (called "Bobbie" & born 1896).*

     In the summer of 1986 my Mother was working on her Master's Thesis in Interior Design at the University of Tennessee. Her chosen topic was a study of her childhood home in the Paulette Community. I went with her one afternoon to meet with Mr. H.C. Hines to get some background information about my grandparents house.  The afternoon we spent with him was one of the most interesting research trips I ever took with my mother.  Mr. Hines was the grandson of Sam P. Smith and the son of Mrs. Ethie Smith Hines. He began the conversation by saying, "So, you want to know about my old homeplace in Union County."  He then talked at length about the house and his grandfather's store and the woods and creeks he spent time playing in when he was a boy. At one point he went and found a sheet of paper and drew a map of the way he remembered things to be.  He graciously gave my mother this family photograph as well as several photographs of the house in it's full gothic splendor. My mother's thesis, entitled "Evolution of a Folk House" was published in the winter of 1987 and she received her Master's Degree that spring. 

* A seventh child, Sallie, was not born at the time this photo was taken.

The Smith-Hurst House of Union County: Beginnings

     "A house is a person's corner of the world, and if looked at intimately, the humblest of dwellings has beauty.  Memories of former dwellings remain in us and with us for all time."

  - from "Old American Homes" by Henry K. Williams

      

    This is the earliest known photograph of  the Smith-Hurst House which was located in Union County, a mountainous region of East Tennessee.    Folklore in the Paulette community tells that Sam P. Smith and his wife, Lucy Ann George Smith, built the house shortly after the Civil War.  The 1875 Tennessee State Gazetteer and Business Directory lists Mr. Smith as postmaster of Paulette as well as the owner of a general store.  It also explains that "the Paulette settlement was located seven miles southwest of Maynardville, the county seat of Union County, and fifteen miles northeast of Knoxville."  By the late 1800s the house was at the center of a growing community that was home to several blacksmiths, a gristmill, a church and a school*.  The house was long known as a stopping place for travelers and according to my great-grandfather, Richard Ross Malone, they would look forward to the stop for miles beforehand.

      A map drawn by Mr. HC Hines, a grandson of Sam P. Smith, shows that the general store was located across the road from the house.  Butter, eggs and other items that needed to be kept cool were stored in the springhouse behind the store.  A barn and tool shed were across the secondary road from the house.  Those outbuildings that contained supplies used in the home (like the smokehouse and woodshed) were placed closer to the house.

* According to "Our Union County Heritage" (Volume 1), Paulette Academy was established in 1888 in the southern part of Union County, on State Highway 33.  The property where the school was located was thought to have been owned by Sam P. Smith.  The continuity of use of this parcel of land that was my grandparents home for so many years astounds me. 

Precious Memories

A family tree that I made in Girl Scouts (Brownies).

It was an invitation to come to a GS Party and

is dated October 16th, 1979.

My mother had it filed in with all of her geneology research.

     Sifting through all if this family memorabelia continues to be an interesting experience. There are some afternoons and evenings that I've become so involved with it that I can't tear myself away.  Finding links on ancestry.com and putting photos and letters together to round out the stories I have been told about things that happened a long time ago.  But there have been some days - many days lately - where I'm overwhelmed by the sadness of it all - by all that is gone and by all that I'm missing. My grandparents, my homeplace, my mother's advice and input.  Memories can make you lonely sometimes.  

     What I am certain of though is that I have some really great stories that I want to tell.  I hear my grandmother's voice in my head talking about her Mother and Daddy and her sister, Marie, and have boxes and boxes of my mother's family research  and I have instant access to historical information that was unimaginable when my mother began her geneology research 30 years ago. I feel an obligation to my grandmother who told me stories and made notes on the backs of calendar pages and scraps of paper about people and places that were important to her.  I feel an obligation to my mother who spent so many years tracking down wills and deeds in county court houses and living rooms and family gatherings.  I feel an obligation to all of those faces looking out at me from the hundreds of photographs I have inherited. I feel an obligation to my children to let them know something about the people who were here before them - ordinary but amazing people who built lives and raised children and had dreams and disappointments of their own.  It's a gift to have this much history at my fingertips.