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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 24
Ruby is ready to wash clothes, Lee builds a fire under the pot. The clothesline is right there, handy for hanging the clothes to dry. Of course, the clothes are carried back up to the house for ironing. The flat irons have to be heated on the stove. Mandy, who lives in a log tenant house on the property, but not close to the big house, comes to help on washing and ironing days. Ruby works in the vegetable garden, and raises chickens, and always helps with salting down the hog after one is butchered. She cans sausages and also puts some sausages in hand-sewn bags to hang in the smoke house. Lee raises cotton and corn, but no tobacco. He has a tractor and a mule. Lee takes his cotton to the gin in Triana. The Woodwards have always grown lots of vegetables. During the Depression they did fairly well because they had so much land for growing vegetables. They didn't get much for cotton and corn, but they took vegetables to Huntsville to cafes and small grocery stores. If they didn't sell them all that way, they went into the villages and did door-to-door selling. Lee Woodward raises a small patch of cane, too. He takes that to Dave Barley to crush. It's about time we started back up the road from the river (McAlpine) and returned to the Farley-Triana Road. I'll show you the store and point out to you where Dave Barley lives when we get back on the main road, but we'll see the Methodist church on the way. Well, here we are, approaching the intersection with the Farley-Triana Road, but first, over on the left, just south of the main road, is the Methodist Church. It's for white people. The church sanctuary isn't very big, but then churches generally aren't very big. The Sunday school rooms are off to one side in the back, and in the front are about fifteen pews. The pews aren't solid wood; they are constructed with wooden slats. To the side of the pulpit is a choir loft with five or six rows of benches. There is no regular preacher now. The one who does come is an evangelist. Back when there was a regular preacher on Sunday nights, Juanita White Lassiter and her brothers always came walking up the road. As they walked up the road to church, they stopped to gather their friends, who tagged along with them. Juanita lives on Farley Triana Road, about a mile to the west of here. The Harris family members came here. It was Sam Harris, J.B.'s son, who milled the lumber for the church, and he and other men of the community built it. Blacks don't come to this church. The white folks say that blacks are friendly, but they know not to cross the line. Some of the white people are going to church in Farley now, because there aren't enough people attending to, as one fellow said, make it interesting, and there's no regular preacher. Well, here we are at the intersection. Right in front of us, on the north side of the road, is A.C. Turner's store. A.C. Turner is a hefty-built man who is bald except for a ring of hair around his head. Looking forward in time, the location of Turner's store is where “Little Vietnam” will be on the arsenal before the area becomes part of McKinley Range. However, right now, we are looking at 24 - (4057)