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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 25
the store. Aside from there being a store on the property, it is also a 40-acre farm with a house and barn. The store is right along the road. The house is set back from the road, about 200 feet west of the store. The barn is west of the house. The store has one room with a partitioned storage area on the east side, about midway to the back. It is about 20 feet wide by about 50 feet long. It is built up on stilts because when the river comes up, the area floods. Steps go up to the front door. It seems like the house is built on a slope because the front steps are higher up than the back ones. Among the items A.C. Turner sells are bologna, cheese, canned foods, dried beans, overalls, and denim shirts. He buys his produce from Lee Woodward. Turner drives to Huntsville in his Model T Ford truck to buy groceries from the Ragland brothers, grocery wholesalers, in Huntsville. In front of the store, a gas pump is under a tin canopy. Kerosene is sold also. The gas pump is a two-way pump, a backwards and forwards pump. A glass globe is on the top. It holds at least five gallons of gas. The globe fills, and the gas flows down into the automobile. A driveway is between the house and the store, and a garage is at the end of it. The outhouse is over closer to the house. The store shares the outhouse with the house. Lucinda (Luci) Turner helps in the store so she needs help at home. Mae King, a black woman, cooks for the family. She rules the kitchen. A.C. Turner has his divorced daughter Ida Neal and her sons living in his household. One of his grandsons warns about Mae King. He says not to go in the kitchen between meals, or she'll tear you up. She's really more than a cook to the family, as that same grandson of Turner's says when he was younger, she would sit and rock him or she would beat his butt??"which ever came in handy. Mae King's husband is James King. Luci Turner has a gasoline-operated washing machine. It has a one-cylinder engine. After the clothes wash, she rinses them in a tub. She has two rinse tubs. The washer is out in the garage. Luci is always busy. She cans fruits and vegetables, and after the hogs are butchered, she cans sausages and also puts some up in bags. She has a big iron pot outside that she uses for rendering the fat when the hogs are butchered. She makes lye soap in the same pot. A.C. Turner is raising his grandsons to know how to work. Aside from the 40 acres there at the store, he rents bottomland down by the river for the boys to work. It is on the right side of the road as you go south toward the River (down McAlpine). There's a pond along the road, and the boys back the wagon off in the pond to let the wheels swell up. The wheels are wood, so they shrink when they dry up. The tracks come off if you don't keep the wheels swelled up. When the Neal boys work the bottomland, they sometimes camp out down there. Sometimes they cook something over a fire and sometimes somebody from home brings them food. They sleep on the ground sometimes, and sometimes in the wagon. They get 25 - (4058)