These pictures are of the 460 acre farm I grew up on about 10 miles outside of Lake City, South Carolina (see map). This documents the differences between the vestiges that remain today and the farm as it was when I was a child. Most of these pictures were taken by my brother, Dan, with a digital color camera. My photographs are on slides which I hope to scan and publish here someday.

Family

That's my mother, Nancy, at the right, with Donna, Dan's wife. Mom graduated from Wintrop College in home economics. She worked for the Home Extension Agency during the war until she was married and eventually became superintendent of the Lake City School System where she worked until retirement. She lived in this house after my father died for many years, then moved to the Bethea retirement home near Florence S.C. where she resides today. Dan and Donna celebrated her 90th birthday with a surprise birthday party at the Bethea Home's reception center. Almost 400 people came, which give you some idea of the influence she had on that community.

Dan (picture below) is my younger brother by 18 months. He graduated in forestry from a university near Nacadoches TX. He is General Manager of the Stone Container Plant near Florence after serving as their pulpwood purchasing manager for many years. He lives with his wife, Donna, at the country club north of Lake City. They have two sons, Niel and Chad. Niel lives with his wife, Wendy, in the old farm house with their young daughter, Brooklyn. I'm not sure where Chad lives and have not met his partner. They also had a daughter recently and everyone is in a snit about their not being married. The horror! Niel runs his landscaping business, Wendy runs the child-care center they founded in Lake City, and Chad works for Niel.

My father, Dewey, graduated from Clemson College in agriculture. In WWII he became a Captain and was put in charge of an Italian prisoner of war camp in Georgia. He devoted his life to bringing the agricultural techniques he'd learned in college to reality in a world that was already moving in the opposite direction from the one he had in mind. He gave up after his first heart attack, sold the cows, rented out the fields, and converted the dairy barn into a woodworking shop. He taught woodworking to high school students in Lake City until his death from another heart attack when I was in graduate school. He is buried in the cemetary of the tiny Bethesda Baptist Church that he'd attended as a child, about 3 miles from the house on the road to Cades S.C. I still have one of the old pine pews that church sold off when it disbanded as a reminder of how much I disliked church and all it stood for, then and now.

Mom was the daughter of a prosperous dentist in Lancaster S.C. Unlike everyone else in my family (including me), he loved to drink and eventually died an alcoholic. She had numerous siblings, most of whom have died except for the youngest, Helen, who lives in the same retirement home with Mom today.

Mom and dad were devout Christians, as were everyone I knew in the bible belt. Dad prefered the tiny one-room Bethesda Baptist church on the road to Cades because his parents went there, but Mom persuaded him to switch to the Indiantown Presbyterian church on the way to Hemingway near Indiantown school. He was a Deacon and liked by everyone who knew him. I struggled understand the value they and so many others see in religion, but never got it at all. I eventually concluded that its about social bonding, similar to the feeling sports fans develop for teams, and focused my energies elsewhere thereafter. Mom still tries to save my lost soul occasionally but she's pretty much given up on that. Its a pity to be so unable to understand religion, the largest single force shaping human history over the last 2000 years. I've pretty much concluded that I'll never will and have given up trying to make sense of it.

I remember my grandmother, Fannie, as a grandmotherly Jabba the Hut who tolerated no nonsense from children and Granddad, Wabbleton, as a frail and kindly old man with a yellow-stained mustache from the Red Devil plug tobacco he constantly chewed, cutting off chunks with his pocketknife and spitting in all directions. I'm told he saw action in France during WWI but I never heard him mention it. He spent his retirement days at the pond fishing with his bamboo cane pole and his cat, Mary Ann, following behind like a pet dog. He died of tuberculosis when I was young. I'm told he was relentlessly hen-pecked by my grandmother, who held the deed to the farm and was the entrepreneur behind all those buildings. In her will, she left the money, land and buildings to her children and just a shotgun to my grandfather.

Granddad (Wabbleton) was from the old Cox farm near Johnsonville. Although I remember visiting there once, I was too young to recall much about it. Grandmother was a Graham, related to Lynwood Graham who lived about 2 miles away across the woods in front of the house. Her father was a root doctor known for his medical abilities. My mom tells me that when dad's younger brother, Theoron, fell off the porch and stuck a knife in his temple, he stopped the bleeding with spider webs and smut from the chimney. Theoron had a dark spot in that area the rest of his life. Lynwood was one of my favorite people and I remember him well. He was a tobacco farmer who repaired guns in a tiny wooden shack behind the house. He had quite a reputation with local hunters and his shack was always full of guns leaning against the back. I was forever biking over there to get my BB gun repaired. I always offered to pay but he always refused. He repaired a cracked stock on my .22 rifle by insetting a nut and bolt through the break. I still have that little pump action .22 rifle, the 12 gauge autoloading shotgun Dad used to guard prisoners and the .32 revolver he kept under the bed. It was never locked and always loaded even with curious kids in the house. Far more reliable techniques than trigger locks were used to protect children against guns. I'll describe how I was gun-proofed a bit later.

Our geneology vanishes with my grandparents parents. I suspect the farm originated from land grants to soldiers and perhaps carpet-baggers after the War between the States, which damyankees know as the Civil War. I'm told the name, Cox, is Scotch-Irish but I'm aware of no facts either way.

The Main Farm House

The farm house stood empty until my brother Dan's son, Niel, moved in with his bride, Wendy, and renovated it into what you see in this picture. The farm itself is run by my brother, Dan, who lives in Lake City with his wife Donna. He rents the fields to other local farmers who grow soybeans and other crops there to this day.

The kitchen was in the far back and was the center of family life. When I was very young it had a wood cookstove and fireplace with a large firewood box by the entrance. There was a large firewood pile just in front of the butcher shed, and a truly murderous 4' rotary saw dad salvaged from a sawmill. It was mounted on a home-built wooden frame with no safety guards at all between you and that spinning blade. Dad and C used it each fall to saw wood for the winter. It was powered by a belt to the tractor PTO (power take off) pulley as was most of the farm equipment. The wood stove was eventually replaced by a gas stove and the fireplace was converted likewise, but the firewood box remained until much later. There was a huge pantry as big as the kitchen that was used to store bulk groceries: 5 gallon buckets of lard, 50 pounds bags of flour, and so forth. It had shelves for the canned vegetables that mom grew in the garden. As automobiles made it possible to get to town frequently, the wall was removed and the pantry became part of the kitchen with most of the kitchen cabinets, the refrigerator and the freezer. A washing machine and dryer were added where the old firewood box once stood. My mom usually kept the radio on while she was cooking, which may be where I got my taste for instrumental country music, especially bluegrass. Most meals were in the kitchen except when there was company, which was about the only time the dining room was used.

When I was very young the entrance to the kitchen was via a screened porch that ran the length of that side of the house. It contained rows of rocking chairs where the women would shell peas and gossip. My dad walled the old porch in with pine paneling and installed our first TV at the end towards the front of the to become an extension of the hall that ran between the bedrooms. The antenna was mounted on a rotor on the peak of the roof, with a control box on top of the TV. Channel surfing was a matter of changing the channel selector on the TV and then using the rotor control to search for an acceptable signal. Reception was terrible but the programs themselves were usually good, quite unlike Comcast Cable's 150 worthless but flawlessly received channels.

My room was in the front in the nearest corner in this picture. My parent's room was the other front room, just across the hall. The hall contained the upright piano that I practiced whenever I wasn't studying or at the pond. The house had no central heating: The only heat was from the fireplace in the kitchen until that was replaced with a propane heater. We take central heating and air conditioning so much for granted today, but I don't remember the slightest feeling of inconvenience when it wasn't available. There was no insulation except perhaps in the kitchen. I removed an electrical outlet in my room once and could look right into the yard through cracks between the clapboards.

Farm Buildings

There was a lot more to see when I lived there. The house was completely surrounded by my mother's gardens and landscaping, all of which have vanished. Also gone are the orchards and large stands of huge pecan trees, at least twelve in an orchard across the main road in front of the house and a similar number scattered around the house and farm buildings. There were also several large oaks that we prized for their shade. The trees attracted crows which I used to hunt for my father for a dime apiece. I collected exactly once in many years of trying with an incredibly lucky 200 yard shot with the .22 rifle. Crows are smart!

The trees and farm buildings succumbed to hurricanes over the years. This lists the ones I remember, most of which have now vanished without a trace, victims of dryrot and various hurricanes over the years:

1. A two-car garage for the family car and farm truck. Immediately behind it was my mom's garden. Beside that was a large walnut tree that shaded a large mechanics vise, and a weed-grown patch of raspberries that nobody seemed to know about but me.
2. An outdoor sink in front of the garage for cleaning fish. The heads and entrails were simply thrown into the yard for the chickens. In the summer-time, strictly defined by my mom as after the dogwoods bloomed, we discarded our shoes and went barefoot, continually on the alert for the spines of discarded catfish heads. Underneath was a faucet with a hose for washing the car. Under that was a frying pan kept filled with water for the farm dogs and cats. There was several varieties of mint growing there in great profusion and a pomegranite tree that I planted myself.
3. A windmill that my grandparents installed to pump water before electricity was available. The windmill itself had vanished and just the wooden water tank remained on a platform 20' in the air, supported by rusted steel pipes embedded in concrete blocks. When my dad needed to find the pipe between the windmill and the house, he located it by "dousing" with a pair of welding rods bent into L shapes and inserted into metal tubing to rotate freely. I wonder if they taught him that at Clemson.
4. A brick pump house that my father put in to pump water when the REA (Rural Electric Corporation) brought electricity to rural America. We always had hot water, but I can't remember where the water heater was, perhaps in the kitchen.
5. Three large chicken houses which had fallen into disuse. Raising chickens for eggs and meat was the major enterprise by my grandmother. My mother scaled back to chickens, turkeys, and guinea fowl for use around the home, giving up my grandmother's ambitions to be a commercial chicken farmer. Each time we had company, Coot would kill a chicken by lopping off its head with an axe on a chopping block by the butcher shed, letting it thrash aimlessly on the ground "like a chicken with its head cut off" and spraying blood in all directions.
6. A cotton house used for storing cotton, with two large sheds right and left that were used for storing tools, fertilizer, and so forth. My dad kept his army trunk here, locked against kids curiosity. But he didn't count on this kids curiosity and that lock never stood a chance. The trunk contained his army Captains' uniform and a 30 calibre rifle shell that became one of my prized posessions. There was also a cabinet with the cane farm's last batch of molassis, plus sacks of farm pesticides that would qualify the place as a toxic waste dump today. We never gave toxicity a second thought in those days. Its a wonder we survived for DDT was pretty nasty stuff.
7. Two tobacco barns for curing tobacco. These were back alongside the fields and not at all near the house. Tobacco was started each spring in muslim-covered beds and hand-planted in the fields when a few inches tall (when the nematodes and cut worms didn't get it first). It grew into head-high leafy stalks that required constant pruning of flower-bearing "suckers" that would draw energy from the leaves. This was a truly nasty job because the leaves were so sticky they attracted dirt and insects. The leaves ripened from the bottom and were harvested by hand, 2-3 at the time, and hauled to the tobacco barn in mule-drawn sleds called "drags". A favorite prank was to hide a snake in the load (non-poisonous, of course) to surprise the women at the barn. The wives and children worked at the tobacco barn, tying the leaves onto tobacco sticks by looping them with cotton tobacco twine onto alternating sides of each stick. The sticked tobacco leaves were stacked until the men returned from the fields to lift them into the barn for curing. This was an overnight process of heating them to drive off the water, emerging a beautiful golden brown. They were hauled to a sorting barn where they were sorted into "grades", gathered into small bundles, and tied by wrapping each bundle with a wrapper leaf. They were taken to the auction barn for sale to the tobacco companies. I spent a summer working at one of those auction barns.
8. A small building of crumbling hand-made, unbaked bricks that had apparently came from a circular clay mine still visible in the woods near Dan's pond cottage. This was not used in my time, except for birds who loved to take dust baths in the eroded old bricks.
9. A smoke house made of notched logs with a large head-high box for curing salted pork. My mother used it as a landscaping shed until I adopted it for my snake collection. She had a home garden of at least an acre behind the smoke house, fenced to protect it from stray cows. C plowed it for her with his mule each spring. My mother grew tomatoes, beans, corn, watermelons, cantalopes, peas, squash, and potatos in amazing quanties, using a pressure cooker to put them away for the winter in glass Mason jars with domed vacuum-tight lids.
10. A butcher shed with 50 gallon wood-fired cauldron for scalding bristles off of hogs during butchering. More about this later.
11. A large barn with a tractor PTO-powered hammer mill for grinding corn and an antique hand-cranked device for removing kernels from the cobs after shucking them by hand. This barn was mainly used for sorting and storing tobacco. It had two sheds on each side to keep tractors, trailers, etc out of the weather.
12. A large livestock barn between the silo and the dairy barn. The cows stayed here in the evenings. There were also two mules, a horse, and numerous calves housed in stalls with sliding wooden doors. Upstairs was a large hayloft. Large numbers of pigs were kept in a large pasture just behind this barn. These thrived on the vast quantities of cow manure we tossed over the fence behind the dairy barn.

13. The implement shed. This was a pole barn with open sides where my father kept his two tractors, the wheat combine, and other major implements out of the weather. The older tractor was an antique John Deere with a single large piston you could fit your head into. It was started by spinning a large flywheel by hand. The newer tractor was also a John Deere that was reasonably modern.
14. The cane shed was a smaller pole barn behind the implement shed with a hearth and cauldron that my grandparents used to boil sugar cane into molasses. To the right was a sugar cane mill for extracting juice from the sugar cane, powered by a long pole that a mule pulled around in a circle. I distinctly remember the cane refining process, the piles of squeezed cane pulp, and the delightful smells of the molassis refining, but they gave up cane farming when I was very young. The shed hearth, cauldron and cane mill remained unused and rusting thoughout my youth.
15. The diary (not to be confused with the concrete dairy barn) was an outdoor cupboard on stilts with a wooden shingle roof. We called it the dairy because my grandparents used it to keep milk cool via some cooling process now forgotten. My father kept his tools here along with the dynamite he always kept on hand for digging ditches, blasting stumps, etc. He also used it at the pond to settle the earthen dam when crayfish holes made it leak and to deepen the pond by blasting underwater ditches. My father loved his dynamite.
    I used to help him blast stumps and still recall the splitting headaches from nitroglycerin fumes.

16. The silo in the following picture was built when I was in my early teens. More about that below.
17. The concrete dairy barn behind the silo. More below.
18. A smaller white wooden house down the road that my parents used when they were married and rented out thereafter. We lived there until my grandmother died, then moved to the main house to care for my grandfather.

19. Five sharecropper houses of which only two were in use in my time. Coot McFaddin, as an old black woman who served as maid, cook, nanny, and Grandad's nurse, lived in one with her children. Mom tells me one of the others was used before my time by Henry and his wife Flossie who bled to death during childbirth as Henry drove her to the Florence hospital. The other was the original farm house my grandparents lived in before building a new one up the road to escape the yearly scourge of mosquitoes, malaria and yellow fever. It was occupired in my time by my Dad's sharecropper and right-hand man, C Cooper, and his wife, Maggie. C is not his initial. It his first name, possibly shortened to make it easier to sign his name since he couldn't read or write. They had numerous kids of whom two, Poot and Meanie, were my age. Maggie told me the names were because Poot had trouble with gas as a baby and Meanie cried a lot. C was my father's sharecropper and general farm hand as far back as I can remember. It was his house that Dan jacked up, moved to the pond, and renovated into his vacation cottage. When Coot died, C and Maggie moved to her house which had been modernized with brick siding and other conveniences. C was blind in one eye from an old injury. I remember him as always wearing a broken down old hat, baggy trousers, and knee length rubber boots. He never drank as far as I know, his only consuming passion being possum hunts with the neighbors and their dogs. I once got him to take me on one of these hunts. I enjoyed the camraderie of stomping through the swamps at night with a lantern, but didn't really get the point. Possums are like huge non-mammalian wharf rats but uglier, just as vicious when cornered, and really nasty to eat.
20. Two fuel pumps with underground tanks for gasoline and kerosine. The latter was used by the old flywheel tractor which had fuel tanks for both. The kerosine pump was the antique kind with a graduated glass tank at the top that you pumped kerosine into with a hand pump before dispensing it to the tractor. My mother sold it to an antique dealer before moving to Bethea.
21. There was a large wooden barn across the main road in front of and to the right of the main house. This was not used in my time, but I was told by my uncle, Theoron, that it had held a mill my grandparents built to grind grain for the neighbors for a fee. There was an open shed at the back that held the rusting chassis and engine from a Model T automobile that had once powered the mill.
22. A one-room wooden country store immediately across the main road from the house. My grandmother built this to sell things to sharecroppers, not realizing that sharecroppers have no money and no means of getting to remote country stores. Of course, there was no heating, electricity, refrigeration, nothing. My brother and I used it as our clubhouse. Some of the stock was still there; thread, cloth, Asafoedita tablets (a foul-smelling gum worn in amulets to ward off colds), mouse-bitten Mary Jane peanut butter candies, and two large drawers for salt pork. I added wire mesh lids to these drawers and used them to house the larger snakes in my collection. Dan and I used the store to wait for the school bus, so we spent lots of time there. I added a board ramp in front and used that to practice knife/axe throwing.

That makes 20 separate buildings on that farm that vanished without a trace in a little over thirty years.

Farm Practices

I went to Indiantown High School through the eighth grade, a tiny school near Hemingway. The first three grades were in a tiny outbuilding just barely larger than the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. I did well enough there that my mother managed to get me transferred to the modern high school in Lake City, skipping a grade in the process through some finagle I never understood. Indiantown was almost 15 miles away, which meant more than two hours each day on a dusty school bus, because it had to turn off on every tiny side road to pick up kids. I hate school buses to this day. Dan, on the other hand, thrived on them, even taking a job as school bus driver until he graduated, as unthinkable as giving such responsibility to teenagers seems today.

The cotton house was in the foreground of this picture, with a small orchard to the left and one of the unused chicken houses behind it (to the right in this picture). The "dairy" was just beyond the cotton house, the two fuel pumps just beyond that. The white barn shown here is the shop for Niel's landscaping business. It stands about where the large barn with the hammer mill once stood. The garage was between the house and this barn. The windmill just to the left of the garage, followed by the smoke house, a fig tree, the butcher shed, the original open-stop well and its wooden enclosure, and the two other chicken houses surrounded by a chicken-wire fence. There was a grape arbor in front of the chicken houses and another behind the barn.

Turning to the right, the next picture shows the silo and the diary barn behind it. The livestock barn was between the silo and the dairy, which are all that remains of the numerous other buildings of the original farm. The silo was built from pre-cast inter-locking concrete blocks, which my Dad had trucked in. He and I assembled it by standing each row of interlocking blocks on end and tightening steel bands around them to hold them in place. He hired a team of professionals to plaster the inside to make it airtight. He converted much of the farm from hay to corn silage thereafter. He bought a silage harvester to chop the corn in the field and blow it into a silage wagon. These were ordinary rubber-wheeled farm wagons with a gate that was dragged with wire cables. These ran over a pipe turned by a removable gasoline engine. My job was to drag the silage into the trough of a silage blower as the silage was dragged to the back by the gate. A tractor belt-driven blower shot the silage up a long pipe into the top of the silo. The silo had an enclosed ladder with removable wooden doors at each level. The silage was removed from the top through the top-most door down the ladder enclosure to a feed trough at the bottom. The silage was supposed to cure through anaerobic fermentation, but there was always enough air trapped inside that alcohol was produced as the process was getting started. This drained into a puddle that the chickens found irresistable. Ever seen a tipsy chicken? Hilarious!!

Behind the crumbling mud-brick building was a huge pecan tree. Just in front of where the cane mill once stood, was an enclosure my Dad used for killing hogs which he dragged to the butcher shed with the tractor. This was the site of one of the most memorable events of my youth. I'd started for the pond with my dad's .22 rifle when he stopped me, saying he and C needed it to kill pigs for butchering. I don't know to this day if it was thoughtlessness or genius on his part, but he asked me to shoot it, pointing out the correct spot at the base of the ear. I fired and immediately transformed a squealing live animal into a twitching, inert lump. The immediateness of that transformation, and the knowledge that it could have as easily been dad or C lying there twitching, gave me terrible nightmares for months afterwards and even occasionally to this day. But the trauma guaranteed that I'd never treat guns casually, the perfect antidote to the hormone poisoning of my teenage years.

This was only part of the extensive process of training kids to use guns and other dangerous equipment safely. Training began with simply being around guns, watching them in use, and observing their effects on small game like rabbits and squirrels. We were never allowed to touch them unsupervised until the age of 10, and even then until we'd passed an NRA (National Rifle Association) test administered by my father. My granddad (mother's side) gave me a single shot .410 shotgun the Christmans before my tenth birthday and I thought I'd die of excitement before my birthday rolled by. Unwilling to waste a single day, I studied the NRA booklet until I had it memorized, even though it was mostly common sense like "Never point a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot". But the NRA added questions to each such quiz and some of these were real stumpers. "Explain why an unloaded gun is as dangerous as a loaded one". I pondered and I worried and then ventured the only answer I could devise: "If a shotgun is stored leaning against a wall, rust might build up high enough to position a stray pellet against the firing pin and that might put out an eye." Another was: Explain why alcohol and gunpowder don't mix. That one was easier: Gunpowder is a mixture of charcoal, sulpher and saltpeter, and only the last is soluble in polar solvents. NRA's writing style was plainly lost on this literal-minded budding chemist.

Butchering was a labor-intensive assembly-line process involving parallel operations by everyone in the neighborhood with hogs to butcher. C was the man in charge. The hogs were usually killed and their throats cut to bleed near their pens and moved to the butcher shed by mule and later tractor or truck. The wood-fired cauldron would be filled and heated with a roaring fire, started with the "fat lighterd" kindling we always kept at hand. Each pig was processed one by one, man-handled into the cauldron and scalded until the hair was loosened, then moved to the ground to be scraped clean. A pointed butchering stick was inserted into cuts alongside the back leg tendons and lifted to the crossbeam suspended by two poles just outside the butcher shed. C used a special knife that he resharpened with a file before each use that was worn down to almost nothing. He'd use that to cut the hog open from breastbone to crotch, tie off the rectum and bladder with a piece of twine, and empty the entrails into a tin washpot to be cleaned and sorted by the women. He'd then split the hog along the backbone with an axe and dismember the parts into manageable chunks to be processed by the women.

In first operation of this kind I can remember, the women worked in the back yard of the white rental house where we lived at that time, working on temporary tables made from lumber and sawhorses. Nothing was wasted but the squeal, with the black folks gratefully accepting what the white folks didn't want. Hearts were processed here, livers there, hams yonder. Maggie specialized in intestines, squeezing the contents out, carefully washing them clean, for use as chitlins and sausage casings. The fat was rendered to lard and cracklin's in a black kettle over a wood fire. At that time, meat was preserved with a red salt with preservatives like sodium nitrite. I remember this salt well because my mother gave me a piece of pork to roast on the coals by the cauldron, observing closely from a distance to be sure I cooked it really well. That piece of meat, flavored by the coals and preserving salt, was the best I've ever tasted. Later, when power machinery, automobiles and freezer lockers became available, the community aspect diminished to just us and C's family. We always butchered together with the two families working in close coordination.

My job, every evening from as far back as I can remember until I left for college was to help Dad milk the cows each evening, wash up afterwards, and shovel out the manure that the cows skillfully used to make our lives difficult. C helped dad in the mornings when I had to go to school. That means 5:00pm every day, year in and year out, with never a day off. There were about 50 cows, 6 milking stalls and two vacuum-powered milking machines. The task involved washing each cow's udder with warm soapy water followed by a cold disinfectant solution, attaching the milking machine, removing it when done, and switching the milking head to an extra milk bucket for the next cow. While the machine was milking into one, I hauled the full bucket to the next room and emptied it into a overhead container to drain over refrigerated coils to cool rapidly. It flowed from there into 10 gallon milk cans that we stored in a large two door cooler to await sale. My father eventually installed a bulk collection system after I left to spare his heart the strain of lifting those ten gallon milk cans to and from the cooler.

Dad never kept a bull for they were too dangerous and provided insufficient genetic diversity. He preferred the "modern" artifical insemination techniques he'd learned about in college. This was a highly hands-on procedure involving... well, that's a bit too much information. But I vividly recall the night when my mind made the connection between animal and human reproduction. It felt like a spark had jumped a gap. I was so astonished by the implications insofar as where Dan and I came from that I woke him (we shared a bed then) and brought him up to date. He told me that was impossibly outrageous and went right back to sleep. I was about seven at the time, he about five.

The Farm Pond

The rutted farm road in the silo pictures continues along the margin of several fields about a mile to the main pond shown below. My grandfather built this by damming a small stream with wheelbarrow and shovels. There are also two smaller ponds my father built for irrigation.

The main pond was my favorite haunt as a child, a place to hunt bullfrogs, turtles, snakes and other critters with my .22 (a tiny Remington pump-action called a "bicycle rifle" because of its convenient size) and the 12 gauge auto-loading Savage riot gun my dad used as a prison-of-war guard. Eventually this attention-hungry teen grew a brain and realized that snakes were quite beneficial even in the snake-phobic south. So I started collecting them instead, using a home made snake stick and burlap sack for the dangerous ones. During my last summer before I left for Chicago, I caught an awesome 6' eastern diamondback rattlesnake basking on the road near Singleton Swamp driving home from Lake City with my parents. I also caught a 5' cotton mouth mocassin near Savannah GA for the Furman Univ zoo. I fed them frogs that gathered in deafening crowds after heavy rains and chicks from the Feed and Seed store when frogs weren't available. I also kept non-poisonous varieties too numerous to recall exactly. My favorite was a beautiful corn snake I found hunting rats in one of the old sharecropper cabins. I had many hog-nosed snakes, chicken snakes and a large black racer that was so aggressive I had to release it when it wore its nose bloody striking at the cage wire. I released them all in the woods in front of Coot's house the summer I graduated from college and left for graduate school.

Word of my interest in snakes spread and I started getting called whenever someone found a snake. Once a fruity-sounding gentleman called in a real hissy fit, having found "a big black snake in his kitchen", of all places. He insisted I come and remove it so I loaded up the pickup with my snake stick, .22 rifle, and 12 gauge (hey, you never know!) and set off for town. He met me in the yard having deserted the house after barricading the kitchen door with every encyclopedia he owned. Once I got past the barricade and into the kitchen, there was, of course, no sign of the snake, which had left in all the commotion through the hole he'd come in through. A snake hole? In my kitchen! Whereupon he took a crowbar to every single cabinet and cupboard in that kitchen as I stood guard with my shotgun against a possible counterattack. He never did find the snake or the hole he'd gotten in through, but he wreaked thousands of dollars damage looking. Through nothing more than an irrational fear of a harmless black constrictor that had probably been coming and going unnoticed for years in its eternal hunt for mice. For all I know, it still comes and goes there to this day.

Faded Memories

Only the house, silo, and dairy barn remain today, the latter converted by my father into a wood working shop. Everything else succumbed to hurricanes over the years. Neil added a swimming pool and a shop for his landscaping business where the old barn once stood.

I often reflect on the tremendous effort my grandfather poured into clearing almost 460 acres of trees, building the pond and buildings, followed by my father who devoted his whole life to building up the soil, erecting endless fences (not one of which remain today), adding irrigation ponds, breeding the dairy stock, and adding the silo and the new buildings. He was so determined to bring that farm to modernity that he failed to notice that post-modernity had arrived and had him squarely in its sights.

How completely that way of life has vanished in only a single generation. Are we better off with all our modern conveniences? I'm not at all sure.