Joy English Anders

Partial Transcript: My name is Joy English Anders. My mother, Wanita Prior English, was born in Edneyville of Henderson County. I have very fond memories of coming with my parents to visit the grandparents, Guy and Ida Belle Prior. My parents, my mother married Craig English in Yancy County. So I grew up in Yancy County but feel very close to Henderson County.

My mother would have been a young toddler at the time of the flood in 1916 and in the 1980’s she wrote a paragraph about the flood and I would like to read that:
The 1916 flood moved their house from its foundation and chimney - she would have been referring to her parent’s home. Guy, Ida Belle and sister, Jenny Lee, carried Juanita - my mother - and Freeman - her younger brother - through the flood waters to safety under a rock cliff on the opposite side of Bearwallow creek.

Partial Transcript: The members of Tildon Freeman’s family were carried away in the waters and drowned. That would have been two members, one of which would have been a child who was buried at Liberty cemetery and whose grave marker I was saddened to find, but also pleased to have been able to take a photograph of during the summer past. That would be the kind of memory I would have of my mother talking about her childhood. Being a very young child at the time of the flood and being carried to a rock, she and her younger brother, by family members to safety.

I didn’t get a sense of a feeling of fear. I’m sure there would have been, but she was not very emotionally about it years later - especially having been as young as she was at the time

Partial Transcript: I’m going to believe just knowing the culture - knowing our parents, knowing the grandparents - that recovery would have been a natural, just begin to rebuild and redo. In the case of my family, they would have been relocating in the home of a grandparent, who is Clayburn Freeman, who is also buried at Liberty cemetery near the child. He would have been a grandparent to the child and was a grandparent to my mother. So children who perished, who drowned in the flood would have been cousins to my mother.

Partial Transcript: I think that people who would have experienced or had the memory or heard the accounts of the flood would have known that a respect for nature and that even with the best of predictions just how much more severe and treacherous nature can be and therefore our respect for what could be. We should use our best knowledge to prepare and look at the chance of situations that could be stronger than we could even imagine. I think as far as respect for nature and respect for the earth and being sensitive to the land would be what’s been learned.

I think that as we see one another coming and going and going through the fast food places, I’m afraid that if we learned it that we’re not taking note of it as we should be.

Partial Transcript: Our grandmother, Ida Belle, was a school teacher. Probably mostly trained at home. I don’t know of her having any formal training. She taught at schools here in Henderson County. I believe maybe as many as 8 different schools. Remember those would be one room schools. She would have been quite young. She taught at a school, Midwillow, and there had been newspaper articles about that school particularly. I believe a school at Bat Cave still stands and it's probably one of the schools at which she taught.

She met my grandfather when she was a teacher and I believe that would be in the Middlefork area of the county. And she was residing in the home of my grandfather and that’s where love must have blossomed because they were married. Then in due time my mother was born in 1913. It was a very special, close-knit family and everything always seemed - as I would visit as a child - very comfortable and though I now, looking back, know that the situation for early people of that period of time, my mother’s birthdate of 1913 toward the depression time and not too many years before that would have been the Civil War, it was a period of hardship, but as a child I never sensed anything that was hard. So, I think that talks about the endurance and the kind of self sufficiency of the people and life is what you make it. I didn’t ever sense that life is hard or that we didn’t have this or we didn’t have that. Evidently it was all there because they made it possible.

Partial Transcript: There were four children to my grandmother, my mother being the oldest. She was schooled at home, I guess we would say the beginning of homeschooling that is so popular now - because she wouldn’t have been able to walk to school which was later. And grandmamma would have helped my mom with the schooling - probably as well as some of the younger children - until they were all four ready to go to school. I think the grandmother was just one of those simple people who made every part of the day very useful.

As far as preservation of food, that would have been a period of time with using salt for preservation of the meat. Kraut, cabbage would have been done in a salt brine. There would have been a root cellar. I don’t think a lot of the canning kind of preservation that we would now know about - there could of been but I just don’t remember. The refrigeration was a spring house and I have very fond memories of knowing how to go and get the whatever container out of the cooling water flow in the spring house.

Partial Transcript: The inside of the house - you ask about food preservation, but I can tell you more about a weekend kind of visit - the house would have been considered a two-story with the main part being the kitchen and an additional room with a fireplace. Yes, I think my grandmother would have cooked some things over an open fireplace but that was not the exclusive method of cooking. There was a cook stove with a white enamel door on the baking oven and two warming spaces on top. I particularly remember that. I remember a large sink and yes, there was running water, because there was a spring higher up so the water was brought into the house into the kitchen only. There was not indoor plumbing otherwise. I remember a very comfortable kitchen table. Benches, I believe, rather than individual chairs. In the center of the table would have been a spoon container, which I have, it was given to me… I don’t know why spoons only… would have been placed in that.
Food always seemed to be wonderful. Vegetables, seasonally, whatever would have been the natural thing to have. My grandmother would make biscuits. I remember a dough tray that would hang on the wall near a flour bin. The way she could just make the flour work into the biscuit…. very impressionable memory of that. The kitchen was a comfortable place. Not all that large, but it had all the things it needed for proper cooking and meal serving.

There was not electricity in the house at that time. I fondly remember the lamps. But its not like a lamp in every room. You carried a lamp if you needed to go into a room deeper back than the kitchen and the sitting room.

Partial Transcript: Well, I already mentioned the biscuits. Then we would have had honey always. Well, there would have been any of the root vegetables… turnips, carrots, potatoes. Always, I’m sure every family would have had corn, green beans, corn bread as well as the biscuits. I don’t think that much about desserts. Maybe it would have just been the sweet things you would have naturally from the honey. I’m sure she was good cook as far as making the fun desserts. But I think it was all was important… not the….
My daughter has recently told me that her grandmother, my mom, would have talked about going to Hendersonville once a year on a wagon. I’m sure that’s when my daughter was wanting to go to the fast food places. My mom explained that they came to Hendersonville once a year and I’m sure that was for the real necessities for the household.

Partial Transcript: did they grow their own food? Oh yes, I think other than sharing with neighbors, I don't think anything other than typical… coffee, sugar, salt, flour…. worth of commodities would have been bought. One of the first stores I remember coming with my mom and my aunt… I don’t recall the grandmother particularly coming. But an Aunt and my mom, we would go to a store on main street and it was the Dixie store… now I have an idea that’s the predecessor of Wynn Dixie… I think I might have read that.

I believe a great-grandfather, Clay Freeman, would have built the original house.

Partial Transcript: A church in the Dana community when I was young, we would go to that church and then later a church in 1948 would have been Church of God of the Abrahamic Faith on Jack Street near the interstate. So the church was very important and I have a very fond picture of grandparents standing near the church.

I think a close knit family connection, as far as reaching out into the community - at this point the church was distant enough from the family that I don’t think it would have played that kind of role in the community.

I was growing up in a county further north so my visits were really weekend, holiday family gatherings… so to be able to really identify the activity on a regular basis… I really don’t know. But I think that any family or neighbor in need - clearly, the grandparent role would have been very active in helping others. Remember grandmother was a school teacher so she had that kind of beginning. The grandfather had been more into lumbering… with his dad. So they were engaged with community events, I’m sure. I think that would have been in the Middlefork section over by Bat Cave.

Partial Transcript: Events that I might remember were primarily close family events, holiday, family reunions seemed to be more summer time. Music would be at the church in addition to the service would have been the musical presentations. Either by a group or individuals.

I have fond memories of the grandfather and grandmother. I remember her as being very affectionate. She had always long hair. And she would allow me to… and I was the longest grandchild, so maybe I had that position of being the first one… but she would allow me to climb up in her lap and she would undo the knot on the back of her head and let her hair drape down. There was just something that I had the pleasure of handling, touching, feeling and enjoying her long hair. She dipped snuff and she had a little birch - it would be simply like a toothbrush - but she would have a stick and you could see the snuff on that stick from time to time. So I remember I would get a little stick and make some chocolate with cocoa and sugar and have my own little snuff… so I think the snuff feeling was very tender and something that we would know…. not the thing that would happen today but clearly happened in her life.

There was a little rhyme that grandmother would say and it’s something very old and traditional and it goes something like:

Briar, briar limber lock,
old - something - geese all in a flock

And I wish I knew the rest of it, but I’m sure I would have her say that. It may have had some finger actions, I feel sure there would have been finger actions. And having been with children and having been a teacher I think she would have been very in tune to a young female granddaughter who liked those kinds of things.

Partial Transcript: I think children need to be exposed, and through exposure taken to sites of interests that would portray how life could have been. And try to give a perception of what 100 years ago might have been like - through those exposures and experiences I would hope that it would instill the kind of integrity and sense of value that we, who lived some generation before, would have experience and hopefully are better citizens because of that hardship we might have seen others having.

And I do think - and I hope I said enough earlier - in regard to any memory I have of my grandparents, never did I feel they were showing any sense of “life is hard,” “we’re all down and out because it’s such a drudgery” I didn’t ever imagine that from them.

Partial Transcript: Because of the joy it brings, that alone is enough. Just the sense of what they stood for, their strength and certainly the grandparents, the two in this county as well as grandparents we have in Yancy County, I can see the value my parents had from that upbringing and certainly hope it’s carried for to me and my grandchild.

Partial Transcript: I’m afraid if they don’t have that deep seeded sense of memory, when some hand held device fails them, what are they going to be left with?