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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 251
song. We were big girls then. While we were there, sometimes we'd go down to the spring and get buckets of water for her.
The Store. Darphus Love had the only store (C-126B) in the area, and it had some of everything. The only time Emma went in the store was when she was at school??"the store was right next to the school, and she would go in the store to buy candy. Sometimes peddlers came through. She remembers the “rolling store,” which is what people first called the wagon and then the truck that a peddler would drive around the rural areas.
Emma said her father would go to town on weekends and sometimes during the week. Occasionally, the children got to go. Emma commented that the family grew their own vegetables, raised hogs and cows, and the men hunted squirrels, rabbits, possums, and coons, and fished, so not many groceries were store-bought. She said: “We went to T. T. Terry's, which had dry goods, groceries, farm stuff. It had everything. Fowler and Chaney was another store we went to, but it had dry goods, not food.”
Subsistence. Emma commented, “Everybody raised cotton and corn. Some people raised tobacco, but we didn't. Some of the bigger farms did. Aside from the crops, we grew the food we ate: green beans, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, collards, turnips, butterbeans, black-eyed-peas, and crowder peas. I remember we'd plant a field of peas. We'd pick the peas then cut it afterwards for livestock feed.”
Will Baker from Pond Beat. Emma's maternal uncle, brother of Laura Baker Lankford. Photo era 1920's.
Emma's father took the cotton to Huntsville to be ginned. He raised sugar cane also. She didn't know where he took it to be milled, but it wasn't as far as Huntsville. Thinking of Huntsville, Emma said:
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