Appalachian History

"You want to know when l really entered public life.

“I did not enter; I was shot into it, as by a catapult, and I learned politics in front of Gatling guns and Mauser rifles. The foe left nothing undone that human ingenuity could devise or tricky politicians could muster up. As soon as I could get an inkling of their respective political histories, I made it lively for the gentlemen, and it was an unequal but vivacious struggle, with one woman versus some dozens of north Georgia politicians.

“When convict lease politicians attacked Dr. Felton, I searched the records and made the lease and the lessees step around lively. A legislative report, made in 1879 and printed in the proceedings of that year's General Assembly, gave forth the astounding fact that twenty-five little children, under three years of age, were then in camp, along with their convict mothers, little helpless innocents, born in the chain gang, in the lowest depths of degraded humanity.

Rebecca Latimer Felton, age 75. From frontispiece of "Country Life."

“These children, according to the report mentioned, were born from convict mothers, were also the offspring of the guards, (employed by the Lessees to punish all offenders,) who had basely used their authority to compel these women to submit to their carnal desires. This state of things was so plainly horrible that I wrote it up in the newspapers at the time this legislative report was published.

“When the state road lessees entered our politics, I posted myself and flung hand grenades until the whole thing got in a blaze.

“The corruption of the judiciary in Georgia has been more than once exposed in legislative investigations, but it is well understood that the "dominant faction" elected the judges at the time when a negro could be sent to the chain-gang for ten years for stealing three eggs or for stealing a bowl of milk, and a negro girl fifteen years old in Atlanta was sent to the penitentiary for five years for snatching fifty cents from the hand of a smaller negro. The dominant faction made a half million annually out of a convict lease, and the judge who could send able-bodied negroes to the pen was well worth electing!

“Whenever the dominant faction showed heads above the ramparts, this sharp shooter in woman's form deliberately picked them off for public amusement and feminine revenge.

“Did they attack me?

“Yes! Times without number, but I have always been careful to know I was correct in my statements, and then I had nothing to fear. About a dozen years ago I joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. I introduced a resolution pledging the union to a reformatory for youthful criminals and a separate prison for women convicts in April, 1886.

“The organization authorized me to memorialize the legislature on these two reforms that summer. When my petition was read before the legislature the ball opened. Dr. Felton, as a member, championed the reforms, and the whole pack, 'Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart,' opened on us both. I heard myself denominated as the political 'She' of Georgia.

“I was sneered at as a reformer and vials of wrath were poured out on my spouse, who was helping me in my work as I had so long helped him in his political work.

Chain gang from Fulton County, GA working in Atlanta in 1895.

“I sat in the same hall five days later and listened to Dr. Felton's reply that will never be surpassed for strength and powerful invective so long as the English language exists. I forgot myself in admiration of my defender and his marvelous defense. I saw that audience also forget itself and rise as one man to cheer and shout in praise of the speaker. Such a day as that marks a milestone as big as the Washington monument.

“The reformatory for juvenile convicts had a small beginning and only a woman to start it, but such as it was, I had the responsibility and the honor of agitating and launching the craft into sailing waters. More than six years later I was gratified to find that the convict women were quietly separated into other camps and I felt certain that had Senator Joseph E. Brown lived a few years longer he would have made a reformatory system for the juvenile criminals under his control.”


from “Country Life in Georgia 
in the Days of My Youth,” by Rebecca Latimer Felton, 1919, Index Printing Company, 
Atlanta
Online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/felton/felton.html


Until late in her life, Rebecca Latimer Felton saw her career as tied completely to her husband's. William Felton served three terms (1875-81) in the U.S. Congress. From 1884 to 1890 he served another three terms in Georgia’s state legislature. “Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth” is primarily a record of Rebecca Latimer Felton’s middle years and her husband's political campaigns.

Parcel post was one year old. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran six crack trains daily, right through the middle of town, headed for St. Louis or New York, not counting a dozen locals to Pittsburgh or Columbus. You stood under the shed of the station, enviously peering into the Pullman diners as supercilious patrons dipped into their soup and stared at you out there in the dark. Some day, you promised yourself, you’d sit in a diner too and stare too.

A nickel bought a shoe shine, a hamburger with onions, a box of Uneeda Biscuit, and a pound of soup beans. A pair of steel-rimmed spectacles from Doc Bougher cost a five dollar bill. Coal was 10 cents a bushel, dug out under the town itself by the High Shaft Coal Company. The best ice cream you’d ever taste, no matter if you lived to be a hundred, cost 25 cents a quart.

The people in 1914 took their politics, religion and their patriotism seriously. The Elks, K. of P.’s, the Masons, and the K. of C.’s were Very Big socially. So was the G.A.R. and Women’s Relief Corps, although their ranks grew thinner and thinner on Decoration Day.

331 South Seventh Street, Steubenville, OH, several blocks over from where this piece's author George A. Mosel grew up, typifies the look of the neighborhood he describes.

Thousands, young & old, thought nothing of toiling up Market Street hill to Union Cemetery on foot to hear some windbag froth at the mouth over the bravery of the boys at Gettysburg or San Juan Hill.

Automobiles were still pretty risky things to some people. They hadn’t learned to trust them much. Babies were conceived at home and not on a vacation trip to Niagara Falls or in a Tourist Cottage on the Lincoln Highway. Old folks died home-style. The shades were pulled down in the front parlor and services were held there and not in an antiseptic Funeral Home ten squares away.

The phonograph was coming of age. The little square boxes with the cornucopia horn and revolving disks were going out and “His Master’s Voice” was coming in. At Erwin & Robinson’s, you could squander your hard-earned money on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which had come out back in 1911, or on “It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary”(1912); “Peg ‘o My Heart”(1913). If you wanted to be strictly up-to-date you’d go for the very latest songs, “The Missouri Waltz” or “When You Wore a Tulilp.” The really ‘hot’ record was “The St. Louis Blues.” Harry Lauder’s “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” was a prime favorite on records.

Home was more than a place where they had to take you in, no matter what you did. Families did things together. They played games, sang songs; they went to church en masse; they fought and argues with one another and they entertained their friends under the family roof tree instead of the country club.

Not much spectacular ever happened on North Fifth. The people just wouldn’t allow it. No big fires, or robberies, juicy divorce cases or scandals that I can recall.

That is not to say life was one soft bed of roses. There were many a heartache back of those austere front doors. Babies died too young and old folks turned into vegetables. A favorite diagnosis of sudden death was “acute indigestion,” known now as a coronary thrombosis. The people were beset by the fears and desperations of a long lingering illness, unemployment, and a poverty-stricken old age, without the modern blessings of Social Security, Relief Checks and free nursing for the aged. Many lived low on the hog.

But they put on a brave face to the world. They “made do,” bearing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with the quiet courage of their forefathers.


from Through a Rear-View Mirror, by an ex-child of the city of Steubenville, Ohio. George A. Mosel, publ. by Hamilton I. Newell, Inc., Amherst, MA, 1963

"Well, we used to go to the neighbors and play cards, various different kind of games, and we popped corn. No pizzas, but we popped corn and made popcorn balls. And we made those with sorghum molasses. We didn't waste any sugar. And we made our own sorghum molasses. I never cared all that much for it as molasses but some of the rest of the family used to like that sticky, runny stuff on their bread. Not me, it was too sticky. But I loved it on popcorn balls or something like that.

"Then we used to make apple butter and we'd have apple peelings when a whole neighborhood group would go together and peel those bushels and bushels of apples and cut them up. Then the day you made it? That was an all-day job. You stirred and you stirred and you stirred. You kept building the fire. The same way with the molasses. I dare say, you have no idea how we did that.

"As I said, we visited and we did things together neighbors did, even to the men, and then when they threshed that wheat? Somebody came in with a threshing machine. He made a business of traveling around to all the farms. And they threshed the wheat. And if you were the lucky family that got those men when it was mealtime, why then you prepared a meal for a whole group of men.

"That was quite a day. And the neighbor women would go together and they'd cook up a awful mess of stuff. Those men would eat like hungry men do eat, you know. And we kids always had to wait until the threshers were through eating and sometimes the stuff they fixed for the threshers - there wouldn't be any left that we were looking forward to. But we liked to watch them do it.

"And let's see: they used to take the wheat, now this you'll find hard to believe too – I find it hard myself now that I look back – take the wheat to a flour mill and have that wheat ground into flour. And that is the flour we used. And in our kitchen, we had a flour barrel, can you imagine, I remember just exactly where it sat. It had a wood lid over the top of it.

"And we kept the flour in that barrel and when my mother baked bread she got the flour out of that barrel and she had a big board she kneaded the dough on, on the kitchen table. And I remember, my mother set a sponge which nobody does now if they bake, but she did. Did you ever see bread sponge? I don’t imagine you have.

Pomeroy Bend on the Ohio River, Pomeroy, Meigs County, Ohio, ca. 1940-1949

"She had a jar she had it in. It had yeast in it. It was a foamy looking mess of stuff. But you had to keep it warm because cold will kill yeast no matter whether you make a sponge or just bake as people do now. Well, whether anybody else was warm or not, that sponge had to be. Because if it wasn't you didn't have any bread. She would wrap an old blanket all around that at bedtime and that sat right by the only warmth in the house. All wrapped up in a blanket. I will say the bread was really better in the summer than it was in the winter because our house was cold. If I had to live in a house like that, I don't think I'd lived as long as I have. It was cold.

"I remember the kitchen, of course, was colder than the living room. The kitchen was long. And the stove was in one end and you had to have those old coal ranges hot in order to cook on them or use the oven. But it didn't penetrate to the table on the other end of the kitchen. Used to wear our coats when we ate breakfast and sit there and shiver, I remember. On cold days, that is. I remember on more times than one, grabbing something that I wanted to eat and taking it in to the living room where it was a little warmer."


Christina Grueser
Pomeroy, OH
(1909-2005)
1997 interview with Sarah Grueser

Oral History from the Countdown To Millennium Project, a partnership between Ohio University, Rural Action, the School Districts of Trimble, Federal Hocking, Meigs Local, and Vinton County and the communities, of Glouster, Amesville, Kilvert, McArthur, Trimble and Pomeroy.
online at http://home.frognet.net/~cntdown/OralHistoryPages/ChristinaGrueser.htm