| Summary: | (5:34) Mrs. Barton describes growing up in the Shoals area. This inteview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Martha Barton
May 14, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 2 of 10
Clint Alley: Well did you have any chores or anything, growing up, that you did?
Martha Barton: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I had to draw the water out of about a eighty to a ninety foot hand-dug well that’s still there. Chickens to feed, eggs to gather. Uh, I was not going to milk the cow. No way.
(laughter)
CA: Were you scared of the cow?
MB: I don’t know. I think that cow knew that, well, every time we’d get a different one, I think they knew that I didn’t want to be around it. For some reason that thing intimidated me.
(laughter)
MB: But we always had a large garden, vegetable garden, canning. We always had plenty of meat. Chickens, pork that was cured, and then we had beef, and we canned a lot of beef.
CA: So did y’all have beef cattle?
MB: Only one at a time.
CA: One at a time.
MB: Just enough to slaughter and provide some food.
CA: Okay, okay, did y’all raise any cotton or anything like that?
MB: It was all row crops. Cotton, corn, and we had lespedeza hay, which you don’t hear of anymore. And, ah, that was—we didn’t have soybeans, that came later after they started allotting the cotton. I think the worst I ever saw my father upset was when he had to plow up cotton. He had more than he should have had. But that was the first year I think they put an allotment on what you could plant.
CA: Oh. Was that during the Great Depression?
MB: Yeah. Um-hm. And we always had open fields, and that’s the fields now that some of it is between my house and the road; I’m a quarter of a mile off the road and about three-quarters of a mile from Highway 20, at the back of the house. And, so, I don’t do anything behind the house, though. That’s just woods.
(laughter)
CA: Ah, what did y’all do for fun when you were little, growing up?
MB: Well, at school, we played hopscotch in the dirt, we had these spinning tops, the boys played marbles, and somebody would always have some kind of a string ball that we could play ball with. We didn’t have necessarily have a bat, sometime’s it’d be just a board. Whatever we could pick up to swing at it. But I went to the county schools from the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. I went to Kilby first because my mother was going to school and I was living with my grandmother during the fall because I would have had to walk quite a distance and I, they thought I was too little to walk that way.
CA: So your grandparents lived in town?
MB: They lived in town. My grandfather Brown was a engineer with the railroad.
CA: Okay, an engineer with the railroad. So they lived, they lived pretty close to the downtown area then?
MB: They lived on Pine Street where UNA now has a parking lot. It wa—, the house was there one day and gone the next.
CA: Wow.
MB: I was upset cause I wanted a picture of that house. But, anyway. I have a younger brother. He is retired from NASA, I guess I could say, he worked with laser missiles after he got his degree from the University of Alabama. But he also spent, ah, he was in the Air Force, and spent time in Korea. He was a mechanic on one of the big planes. The big planes took a mechanic with them and he went with one of the planes.
CA: So it was just you and he growing up?
MB: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
MB: But we had plenty of neighbors that we occasionally got to play with.
(laughter)
CA: Now did y’all have any bicycles or anything like that?
MB: Ah, yes. I have ridden my bicycle about a mile, on some occasions, to the store. It had a basket on the front of it, and I would be sent after some item that we had to have, like the sugar and the coffee, and the salt, and things like that that you didn’t have on your own. And there was a creek nearby, Burcham Creek and Cypress Creek.
CA: Okay.
MB: And we could, in the summertime, go to either one of them. Most of the kids went to Cypress Creek, though.
CA: Did y’all do a lot of swimming and fishing?
(laughter)
MB: Ah, no, it was mostly throwing water at each other and splashing.
(laughter)
CA: Well that’s more fun sometimes anyway.
MB: Yeah. Getting dirty!
(laughter)
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