Wealthy in Heart: An Oral History of Life Before Fort A. P. Hill

[Linda Anderson]

I like reading about the food they ate.

ALBERTA BUMBREY HENDERSON
"My mother, I remember when we had to peel all these apples, and she’d dry them, put them on a newspaper and put them up on top of the shed, let the sun dry them. Then she’d have them to make pies during the winter. That was something, too. And we used to say, “Please, no flies come around.” But the flies didn’t bother it at that time. She let them lay out for three or four days, dry out. Then she’d put them in a bag in the wintertime."

LILLIAN PHILLIPS MILLS
"But there again, we had cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, oranges at Christmastime only, and raisins and hard candies, they were Christmastime things. But we had the regular food, nourishing food and hot bread, hot bread every meal, you know, biscuits or rolls. Oh, I can see my mother’s rolls now, they were up there like that, and she’d put them down, that’d be about the first thing she’d do after she got breakfast was put those rolls down, and they’d be ready. They were so big. When I was a child I could eat two of them. And we had cornbread and fish."

RACHEL BRUCE FARMER
"My aunt, she had eight kids, would come up to our house, and Mama and she would make fruitcake together all day long, and the kids would be out in the yard playing, and that was a ritual every year. They would make it on a wood stove, put about one piece of wood in the stove so the oven would get so hot, you know. And I remember that, and to me, that means a lot to me to remember that today. And as I said, but I could go back to the old time. Life was easy and laid back—people knew each other, people were friendly—today, they weren’t grabbing at everything, and it was easy living even though you didn’t have anything.

WILLARD JASPER FARMER
"We used to store them [vegetables] down in that dirt basement. Well, if we put them out in the field, we’d dig a hole, you know, and lined it with pine tags, and put the potatoes or cabbage or whatever it was in it, put pine tags over the top of it, and make a mound like with dirt. Then in the wintertime when you needed something, go out there and scratch a hole in there and get out what you wanted."

LELIA HOLLOWAY LEWIS
"Another thing we would use—getting away from the animals—we would make snow cream in the winter. We’d do that a lot. Sugar and—brown sugar and vanilla and—the clabber reminded me about it. They would take the snow—we did that as kids—and put cream in it, and we put vanilla seasoning, and it was really good, but it didn’t last long. It soon melted. We had such deep snows then, we did make a lot of snow cream."