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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 26
so tired that they sleep where they pass out. There isn't much recreation time for the Neal brothers. They go to Farley School, but their Grandpa Turner gives them a list every day of what they have to do, and if they don't do it, they get switched. They plant, cultivate, and follow the mules. They hand-pick the cotton. Their grandfather shares the profit with them. The only recreation for the Neal brothers is occasionally being allowed to go in the truck to town with their grandfather when he buys supplies. However, A.C. Turner does have a battery-operated radio, and they listen to it some times. A.C. Turner always keeps busy. Aside from the store and the farm, he walks down to the river regularly, all through the winter and the summer, and writes down how much the river rises and falls. He reports the figures to the TVA office in Knoxville. The Tolberts live on the south side of the road across from Turner. Like the Turner family, they are white people. Stella Tolbert married a McWhorter, so it will probably be called McWhorter property eventually. They have a dogtrot style house, with two rooms on either side of the central hall. It is the only house on their property; they farm their own land. There is a little cemetery on their land. Most of the graves are not marked; there is one tombstone that you can see. Since we can look ahead into the future, we know that the lone tombstone will be removed and no one will know the cemetery existed. While A.C. Turner's parcel of land is small, only 40 acres, it is bordered to the north by a much larger parcel that is owned by David Barley Sr. Some people call him “Old Dave” Barley, because he has a handsome son whose name is Dave. Dave Barley is described as so light he looks like a white man. He is known and highly regarded throughout the Pond Beat and Mullins Flat area. Like Frank Jacobs and Yancy Horton, he is another pillar of the Pond Beat community. Everyone seems to have a good word to say about Dave Barley. Dave Barley broke with tradition when he let a white sharecropper live on his land, and somebody, anonymously of course, put a letter in his mailbox about that. Dave thought on the matter some, thinking about who might have written the letter, and then he got on his horse and rode around and talked to a few people. Not another word was said about the white sharecropper. People, both black and white, take their cane to Dave Barley to get it crushed. The Barley home is about 200 yards from the road, and the crusher is near the back of the house. The crusher is muledrawn and fed by hand. The juice goes into the barrel and then drains out through a pipe into the copper pan where it's cooked down. Dave has a rock furnace that is about eight feet long and four feet wide, with a smokestack on one end. He uses a long copper pan with divisions in it. As the juice cooks down, he moves it with a paddle to the front of the pan. He cooks it until the steam quits coming off of it, and then he opens the tap on the end of the pan so it will run out. 26 - (4059)