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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 378
front room and cooked in the back one. If they didn't have enough beds, they put down pallets on the floor wherever they could. James Long's mother told him about Dr. Russell who was once in the big house on the Harris land. His Mama said Dr. Russell kept his medicine in a cabinet. That cabinet was still in the kitchen part (midsection) of the house. Dr. Russell made rounds from house to house on his horse. James said, “He was an old man when I was a little boy. Daddy was born in 1896, and the doctor was an old man then. He doctored Black people and White people. He had Blacks in one place and Whites in another in Huntsville Hospital.” Long remembered J.B. Harris' granddaughter Imogene Moon living in the Big house. He said she was strict with the children. She said, “Live right and do right.” He remembered Sam Sr. “carried on a lot of joking.” Another memory of Long was stacking hay. He said he and his daddy, all the men, were stacking hay. It was after he and his wife Nell got married. He said it “like to broke me in two” (over backward). That was the first time he ever heard it called “stacking” hay. Walter Cooney Penland Reminisces Writer Ed Peters accompanied Walter Cooney Penland in 1983 when he visited the area on Redstone Arsenal that was his “old neighborhood.” Penland was born in 1902. The newspaper article Peters wrote about this visit was published in the November 2, 1983 edition of The Redstone Rocket and titled “Former arsenal resident visits old home place.” Penland's reminiscences about his own former homeplace and community are presented in the next section of this manuscript. However, the paragraphs Ed Peters wrote about Penland's stop at the “old Lee home” are presented here: The Penlands' visit to the arsenal also included a stop at the site of the old Lee home, which stood on Buxton Road until about 1975. That home belonged to Walter Cooney Penland's great aunt, and his father, “D.A.”, had been born there. The Lee home was one mile west of the Penland place and Walter Cooney remembers going there many times in his younger years to see his relatives. “The house,” he said, had 8 rooms and was built in “slave times.” His great aunt owned more than 1,000 acres, and prior to the Civil War owned many slaves. Penland said. After the war many blacks remained in the area and lived and worked on the Penland farm and other farms. There were numerous black land owners in the area, some of whom amassed large farms. 378 - (4411)