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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 290
Jim Turner, a Neighbor. Walter said “Old man Jim Turner” lived on part of the Timmons place. [His name was not on the Army Real Estate Map at the time of sale, so he must have been a tenant.] Instead of chopping cotton, he had big white geese. He would turn them out, and at a certain time they would come back to roost. Daily Life Farmers and Farming. Walter said that about three miles south from their house, where the Army has a recreation area now, they rented the land to use for growing corn. (They also grew hay.) They had a corral there to leave the working stock. His mother would take hot food to the people who worked for his daddy before he died. One of the men lived in his grandfather's house and another lived in a little house on his Uncle Buster's (Percy Joiner) place. Walter said they worked the land three or four years after his daddy died. [What was the difference between sharecroppers and tenant farmers?] Sharecroppers and tenant farmers were about the same thing. Some people were day hands. They got paid by the day. The sharecroppers gave a part of their crops. Some people rented the land and had their own equipment and horses, but they also gave a share of the crops to the owners. If a man didn't have a large family, he couldn't really get a place. They [the landowners] wanted families to be able to do everything. [What would you do if you were just a man and wife?] You'd do the best you could, by just doing day labor, or wherever you could get a job. Walter said, “Some tenants who didn't have a family got on, living in one of the small row houses. There was a row of them down on the old Timmons place. They were the old slave quarters.” He said there was a row of these shanty type houses “down by Lee's corner” (The Lee Plantation). The landowners would go to the company store, where you would get shoes and overalls for the tenants. They would then charge the tenant farmers for that. At the end of the year they would look and see if the tenants owed them any money, and if they did, that would come out of their crops. The problem was that if the tenants would want to go and get their stuff from a different store, they would still have to pay for the goods the landowner bought for them. They would also mark everything up at the company store, so it was more expensive. They would also mark up the groceries. They would charge 25 cents on the dollar, wouldn't use the money for six months, and then get charged 50 cents on the dollar. 290 - (4323)