| Summary: | (4:36) Mrs. Barton discusses her family history. 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 5 of 10
Clint Alley: Ah, what was the oldest or who was the oldest relative you remember as a child?
Martha Barton: My grandparents Brown.
CA: Your grandparents? Your mother’s parents?
MB: My mother’s parents, uh-huh.
CA: Okay, do you remember anything in particular, special about them?
MB: Well, my grandfather had a real thick head of snow-white hair, and he would bring me to town from where they lived on Pine Street. The farmer’s market is where—the Shoals Theatre is where the farmer’s market was, about 1932, three, somewhere along then. And he would bring me with him and we’d come to the farmer’s market. He wanted a twist of tobacco. He couldn’t take it in the house, but he had his twist of tobacco.
CA: About what year was he born?
MB: My grandfather?
CA: Um-hm.
MB: Ah, 1856 I think.
CA: Okay, so did he remember the Civil War at all?
MB: Yes, he remembered the Civil War very plainly.
CA: Okay.
MB: And he told a lot of things that happened, because in Stevenson, if you know the history of the little town, the railroad intersected north, south, east, west, and there were a lot of battles fought there. And he remembered a lot of the things that went on, and he told a lot of those stories. And I think I’ve got some of them sorta mixed up, ah, I was small, but as a couple of my cousins would say, I knew more about the family, because I was closer to them than all the rest of the grandchildren. But my grandmother had this huge, big, round dining room table. She had five boys. And she taught school after school, around that dining room table.
CA: So she made sure they got their work done, huh?
MB: She made sure.
CA: Were any of your great-grandparents or anything, did they fight in the Civil War?
MB: Ah, I have great-uncles, but most of them were killed, I don’t know of a one that survived it. And one of them is supposed to have been—the record shows he died at two different, in two different battles.
CA: Wow.
MB: Now I don’t know, I can’t explain it, doesn’t make sense to me, but he was supposed to have been at Peachtree Creek, he was supposed to have been at a skirmish in, ah, Charleston, Tennessee, which is East Tennessee, and he’s supposed to have been killed at both those places. Now it ca— it’s not possible, but.
CA: That’s a mix-up, I guess, in the records.
MB: Some way, somehow, but his name was Isaac Donald Wimberly. And back then the “I” sat on top of the line when you wrote it, and the “J” sat on top of the line. So his records, a lot of them have “I.D. Wimberly,” a lot of them have “J.D. Wimberly.” So, it’s both—all of that is in the same military unit, so I know they’re talking about the same person.
CA: Ah, well what kind of world events affected your childhood the most while you were growing up?
MB: The Depression and World War II.
CA: And did y’all, how did you notice the Depression when it—?
MB: Well, at the time, we didn’t think too much about it. We just didn’t have any money, but we had the best food in the world. We didn’t have very many clothes, but what we had, we made do with it. And, ah—
CA: Do you remember, was it hard for people to find jobs? Was it a little bit harder?
MB: Yes, yes, yes. They called them hobos then, were quite frequent, come through and knock on your back door and ask for food or clothes, or some of them would ask to work to do something so they could get food. And there were plenty of them. And most of them seemed to be transients.
CA: Yeah.
MB: I don’t know whether they thought they could come here and get a job, but—
CA: Just lookin’ around, huh?
MB: Yeah.
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