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This file was contributed and copyrighted by: Leah Greeley ================================================================================= September 2001 These are the memoirs of Beulah Floyd Folmar (1893-1970) about her family, who were from Crenshaw County, Alabama. Her father was John William Floyd (1870-1930) and her mother was Martha Ann Irene Jordan (1872-1930). Beulah was my great-aunt, sister of my grandmother, Julia Irene Floyd Price, who is buried in Darien Cemetery along with her parents, sister Lillie Bell and brother Leon. Submitted by: Leah Greeley ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I Remember When by Beulah Floyd Folmar The following information is taken from Beulah Floyd Folmar's memoirs, which she put on paper around 1954, at the age of 71. In about the year of 1896, John William Floyd decided to move his family to Texas from their home near Luverne, the county seat of Crenshaw County, Alabama. And this is where Beulah's story begins. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MOVING FROM ALABAMA TO TEXAS When I was three years old, my parents decided to move to Texas from their home near Luverne, Alabama with our family: the oldest son, Leon, about age six; a daughter, Julia, just seventeen months older than I, Beulah Mae, a little brother aged two named Frank, and a baby boy about three months old, whose name was Hartwell, but we called him Hart. As we prepared to leave, my parents, John and Martha Floyd, disposed of their household belongings and we all went to our grandparents' house to say our goodbyes. While waiting for someone to take us to the train, Leon, Julia and I announced that we were not going -- we wanted to stay with Grandma! We tried hiding behind a big trunk behind the door. We lost that battle, and soon my father and mother, my brothers Leon, Frank and Hart, my older sister Julia and I were on the train to Texas. I think the trip must have taken three or four days. During the trip, Pa bought candy and chewing gum for us from the "Butch." I lost my gum behind the cushion of my seat and thought to myself that if I ever rode the train again, I was going to find my chewing gum, not realizing that there was more than one train. TEXAS We had relatives living in Falls County, Texas, near Marlin, about half way between Dallas and Houston. We were very close to a little town called Reagan. Two of our grandmother's sisters, their families and another family of cousins were all living there. We took up residence in the country near our relatives. One day as we walked across a field to our Aunt Bettie's, I encountered grass burrs! My, how those burrs hurt, for we children were barefoot. One day when I was taking a nap, my mother woke me and said Grandpa and Grandma had come and were at our Aunt Emily Harland's house. Our Uncle Gus Harland's mother lived with Aunt Emily and we children called her Grandma, as their children did. I wondered if it really was my Grandma Floyd from Alabama, or my "Grandma" Harland. As it turned out, it was my Grandma and Grandpa Floyd, and it was almost unbelievable to me that they had come all the way from Alabama for a visit. Some time later one of my father's brothers came out and worked with Uncle Gus for a year. By this time Leon, my oldest brother, was old enough to go to school. My first introduction to ice cream was at an ice cream supper at Leon's school. Once at the end of the school year, he had to learn a speech that he was to recite, and I learned it too. I think that it was a speech that my father wrote for him. I was about four years old then, and even now, when I am 71 and my memory is faulty, I still remember that speech: "If older boys can make a speech, We little boys can too. And though we do not say so much, Yet we have a word for you. The world is large and full of room, There is a place for all, The rich, the poor, the wise, the good, The large, as well as small. So give us little boys a chance To show off what we know, And shun us not because we're small, For little boys will grow." MOVE WITHIN TEXAS By the time we had lived in Texas for a year, our Aunt Bettie had married Uncle Billy Harland, Uncle Gus's brother. Aunt Bettie's son, two uncles and my father's brother all went by wagon over to Liberty County and made a down payment on a section of land between Liberty and Dayton. And so it was that our family and Uncle Gus's moved to a little house on the edge of the prairie, next to a river swamp. My father planted a crop, and it rained so much the cotton rotted in the field. When my father had to go to town on business, there was no road on which to travel. He drove across the prairie to get to town and if darkness fell before he got home, our mother would light a lantern and hang it outside the door so that he could find his way back. We always called my mother Ma and my father Pa. Ma always had flowers in her yard. She would gather the seeds from the flowers and mail them back to our kinfolks in Alabama. Around 1897 my brother, Jack, was born. All of the family came down with malaria and chills while in Texas, due to so much rain. Usually two or three in the family had chills on the same day. Our medication was quinine in cold coffee. It was awful! We saw a lot of wild horses out there. Sometimes we looked out over the prairie and saw big herds of cattle being driven by cowboys. Their approach always appeared first as a large cloud, due the size of the herd. Once our father took Leon, Julia and me to watch a cattle branding. We got to sit on the corral fence and watch, fascinated. HARD TIMES One day Pa went to town and even though Ma had put the lantern outside the door to light his way after dark, he didn't come home that night. Ma worried about him all night. The next morning Uncle Gus arrived on a wagon with a mattress on the back. He was coming to take us back to his house and the mattress was for those of us who were sick with malaria to lie on. Pa had gotten to their house the night before and was too ill to come home. Gus took the entire family to his little house nearby. Like us, they lived on the prairie, and we all moved into a small house near theirs while we recovered. GOING BACK TO ALABAMA By that time, Pa and Ma were very homesick for Alabama and began to make plans to return. Pa fixed up two covered wagons and bought four horses for each wagon. We put everything we had in those two wagons. Our only chairs were some that Pa had made out of hickory, with frames and seats of long, thin, inch-wide strips woven together. We took two of the chairs back to Alabama and they lasted for years. With the wagons loaded, we spent our last night at Aunt Emily and Uncle Gus's. We were entertained by Emily and Gus's grown daughter and her friends, who played the organ and sang for us. Aunt Emily and Uncle Gus also had a teen-aged son, a twelve-year-old daughter (Vera Harland Sitton, who was still alive when Beulah wrote her memoirs and was living in Idalou, Texas near Lubbock) and a girl about Julia's age. They later let the land go. Aunt Bettie's son redeemed his land several years later, in time to get some money out of it. The land was situated on top of an oil field. We started our return trip to Alabama when I was five years old and Julia was seven. Pa drove the first wagon and Ma the second, leading a mare with a young colt tied to Ma's wagon. After a while the mare refused to lead and lay down while the team of horses dragged her behind the wagon. I had to run ahead and catch my father's wagon to tell him to stop. Pa sent my brother Leon back and he tried to make the mare get up, but she wouldn't move. Finally Leon took the bridle off and hit her with it and the mare and the colt went back to Uncle Gus's. When we stopped that first night on the road, our parents put pallets under the wagons for us to sleep on. Pa and Ma were a little wary of coyotes, but none bothered us. Another family named Nelson traveled with us part of the way, but after a few days they went their separate ways. I am sure my parents had mapped the route on which we were to travel. There were no paved roads along the way. Sometimes they would stop and ask directions. Sometimes we would go for miles before finding someone to ask where we were, only to find out we were on the wrong road and would have to turn back. We always tried to camp near a stream, river or creek so that the horses could get water. My father would hobble one or two of the horses and turn the others loose with a rope dragging and let them eat grass at night. One night we were camped by a river. My mother had cooked our dinner over the campfire, and while we were eating we heard a big splash. Pa took the lantern and found that one of the horses had slipped into the river, but the end of the rope was still on the bank. Ma had to hold the lantern while Pa tried to get the horse out of the river. The banks of the river were very steep. We children were full of curiosity and stood watching. All we could see of the horse was his nose sticking out of the water. Pa pulled on the rope and the horse struggled, trying to get out of the river, to no avail. Then Pa let him rest for a while, holding the rope to keep his nose out of the water. It seemed as if the horse wasn't going to make it, but finally with Pa pulling he made a big lunge and out he came! When the weather was good, we slept on pallets under the wagons, but if it was bad, we had to sleep inside the wagons. We had a large trunk with a rounded lid and a big "wash pot" in the back of one wagon. The pot was used to boil clothes in suds to clean and sterilize them. One night Julia and I went to sleep on the trunk, leaning against the back of the wagon. The next morning we both woke up in the wash pot with our heads and feet sticking out. Neither one of us knew how we got there. MEMORIES OF THE TRIP I wish that I had written this while my parents were living so that I could have gotten the facts from them about the different happenings. I can only write from the viewpoint and memory of a five-year-old girl. My father was sick a lot of the time, probably because of the Malaria, but we kept plodding along. We often camped near people's homes and folks were always kind to us. I especially remembered one woman visiting us with her children and bringing us vegetables from her garden. We always stopped a little before nightfall to prepare the food and take care of the horses. One late afternoon we stopped by a little patch of woods. We could see a cloud off in the distance to the northwest of us. A man from a nearby house came running out to us and told us they had some bad storms there and it looked liked one was coming. He hurriedly invited us to come stay in his home to ride out the storm. My mother took some food and cooked it on their stove. Their family didn't have much, so the boys from both families slept on cotton they had picked and put on their porch. Julia and I slept on a pallet. My mother and father slept on a bed, which I'm sure they enjoyed. It was probably the first they'd slept on since we'd left Texas. The woman of the house was in bed with a little baby. Their daughter, who was probably twelve or thirteen years old, took care of the little baby. I couldn't wait to get big enough to hold a baby the way she did. They were good people to take in a strange family who was passing through. I think there must have been quite a bit of that in those days. One evening we stopped by a church which was behind a fence with steps going up and over the fence. We children had fun playing on those steps. The church was a Negro church, as churches were segregated in those days. Next to the church, the river was rising. We could see where flood waters had risen and left marks on the houses. My father went to a house nearby and asked a Negro man if we might stay in the church. We were told that we could but we were warned, "Just be careful not to get grease on the floor." Just as we started to go into the church, some Negro men on the other side of the river began to yell, "Don't you go in that church house," so we went back to our camp site. I could hear our parents talking long into the night around the campfire. I knew they were uneasy and kept watching the river. There were not many bridges in those days and we usually crossed the rivers we came to by ferry. Sometimes the ferryman was on the other side of the river and when that happened, Pa would whoop and holler for him to come and take us across. Occasionally the ferry was so small that we had to make several trips, taking one wagon and part of the family, then the other wagon, then the horses. My father and my brother stayed with the horses and held onto them on the ferry, which was sometimes just a float with no sides. We children all enjoyed those rides and never felt fear. We liked to sit on the floor of the float and play in the water. Once we crossed a bridge and camped nearby. Later our parents found Leon, Julia and me walking on the outside of the banister of the bridge. It must have been the Mississippi River that we had crossed on a steam boat. The wagons went on first, then the horses were unhitched from the wagons. We children always got out of the wagon, and I remember hopping from one bare foot to the other because the floor of the steam boat was so hot. I remember crossing a river on another steam boat. There were young French men and women talking and I thought I never heard such chattering or a language such as that before. One night some folks let us stay in an old house near theirs. The chimney had fallen down and there was a hole in back of the fireplace. While Ma was cooking on the fire, some hogs came up and looked in through the hole, grunting and snorting. I guess they liked the smell of Ma's cooking. The owners of the house brought us a large pan of clabbered milk and we enjoyed that immensely. Another night during the trip we were allowed to camp near a house and the owners let us have water from their well. My father was sick and the weather was bad. My mother asked them if my father could sleep on their porch and they said no. I can understand that now, although I'm not so sure I could understand it then, for I thought they were mean. They were an elderly couple who had a little Negro girl with them and we played with her. The next morning the man went to his sweet potato patch, dug up and washed some sweet potatoes and gave them to our family. I guess they weren't so mean after all. That was the same night some black men showed up at the camp with sugar cane and asked my mother if she would tell them their fortunes in exchange for the sugar cane. The strangers thought we were gypsies! My mother told them she didn't know how to tell their fortunes. We wished that Ma had told their fortunes anyway because we loved chewing sugar cane and swallowing the juice. KINFOLKS My mother's aunt (her father's sister) and her family lived somewhere in Louisiana and we stopped by their place for a couple of days. Her sister's family name was Miller and included a man, two young women (Augusta and Jessie) and a young man named Charlie, who fixed pomegranates for us. We'd never seen pomegranates and we ate so much that we were all sick that night. Charlie gave us bicarbonate of soda in water and that made us feel better. My mother washed all of our dirty clothes. Augusta and Jessie churned the butter. I know it was the fall of the year because the picked cotton was on the porch and the sweet potatoes were fresh. One afternoon we stopped early because Pa was too sick to go on. We were probably somewhere in Mississippi and had stopped at a very pretty place along a river with large trees and no underbrush. Two men and a young lady passed along the road riding bicycles. It seemed as though they hadn't paid any attention to us, but later, just as it was getting dark, the young lady came back with her father, a doctor. The doctor examined our father and gave him some medicine. We had our first salmon on that trip. My father bought some and my mother cooked it in the skillet in a little shortening. We put pepper sauce on it and thought it was delicious. Ma made biscuits. She used what was called a "spider" -- a covered pot similar to a Dutch oven with legs. She put the spider over the coals, put the bread or biscuits in with the lid on and put the coals on top of the lid. It cooked very well that way. We had sorghum syrup quite often, which I never did like, but we had to eat something. Once we saw a frying-sized chicken. It was nowhere near a house so we decided it must be wild. We tried and tried to catch it, leaping for it as it flew up into the air, but it wasn't meant for the frying pan that night. THE TRIP GROWS LONG The trip took thirty-eight days and nights. We crossed a big river, red with mud. It might have been the Red River. There were little houses being moved around on the water, probably lived in by fishermen. We saw a woman inside one of the floating houses, sweeping the floor. I thought it might be fun to live in one of those. We saw similar "houseboats" on other rivers. One river we crossed, we were told, was a half-mile wide. It must have been the Mississippi. One day when we stopped to rest, everyone got out of the wagon except for baby Jack. He was at the stage where he was crawling and pulling himself up to things. Every time we stopped, my father and brothers unhitched one trace on each horse so that they couldn't start off with the wagons. Jack crawled to the front end of the wagon, pulled himself up and fell right under the feet of the horses. The horses just stood still while we held our breaths and my mother and my father scrambled to get the baby out from under their hooves. I remember that one of the harnesses tore and my father patched it with wire. One day when we were stopped, the horse on the right got restless and fidgety and got his head up against the other horse and got caught in the end of that wire, tearing a gash next to his eye. My father took a needle and thread, twisted the horse's nose to hold him, and with my mother holding the horse, my father sewed up the gash. When we got to Greenville, Alabama it seemed like we still had a long way to go to our destination. It is only thirty-five miles now from there to Luverne. My father went into a store and I went with him. The store owner gave me a cookie. Julia was sick that day so I only took a bite of the cookie and took the rest to Julia. HOMECOMING The day we finally got home we found a very pretty place to stop and eat lunch and rest, but the only thing we had left to eat was a small piece of cornbread each, and Pa had to go without. When we reached Luverne, we were five miles from home. It was late afternoon and the news traveled fast. My mother's family lived a short way off down the road and a neighbor hurried to let them know that we were nearby while we rested at a neighbor's house. During the wait, the woman at whose house we were resting discovered that we hadn't had any dinner. She had fixed some cornbread and she gave us some, but we couldn't have been very hungry, because we didn't like her cornbread. It was cooked in thick oval-shaped "pones" that didn't have any salt in them. It wasn't long before we saw my mother's family coming across a field. Someone had rushed ahead to tell my father's family that we had arrived. My Floyd grandparents were visiting Grandma Floyd's brother, who lived four or five miles further down the road. Instead of going home as they were getting ready to do, our grandparents came to meet us as soon as they learned of our arrival. By the time we got to Grandpa Floyd's house, the rest of the family and the neighbors were out in the road waiting to greet us. After kisses and hugs, the adults busied themselves killing and dressing chickens. Soon we were all seated around a table piled with chicken and dumplings. It was so good! I don't remember what other dishes they had, but the chicken and dumplings were good enough. After supper we found little Frank, who was about three or four years old, out by the wagons, looking for his pallet. He was told to come in the house and sleep on a bed and he said, "I don't want to mash Grandma's bed." When we finally got to our home, our father had eight worn-out horses, two wagons and fifty cents. The next day my parents had a sale and sold all but two of the horses and one of the wagons. One of our uncles and his wife had been living in our house during our absence, so it was in good condition. We were happy to move back in. Our neighbors brought us meat and lard, potatoes and corn meal. In those days in the country, everyone butchered their own hogs and cured their own meat and most shared with those in need. My father was so sick he was bed ridden for six weeks. He thought he wouldn't live and made Ma promise not to buy a new suit for him to be buried in, even though his only suit was patched. Somewhere along the road, Frank had lost his hat. We had a great-uncle Ben who was a teaser. He taught Frank a little sermon, which wasn't really a sermon but sounded like one from the tone of voice which Frank used. Frank always ended his little sermon by saying, "Some of you brethren pass around the hat." Every time there were a few men around, Uncle Ben had Frank preach his sermon and the men gave him pennies, nickels and dimes, until he got enough money to buy a new hat. After six weeks of illness, my father was back on his feet and able to do things. The year was 1898. They had married on October 27, 1888. Another son, Pruett, was born. My father made a cradle for our new brother and it was my job to rock him. I would lie on the floor and rock the cradle with my foot and sing to him. AT HOME All the farmers in our area grew sugar cane, so our father bought a sugar cane mill. The farmers hauled the cane to the mill and our father made syrup with it. Julia and I always fed the cane to the mill. Two large rollers were set up as high as our heads with a big, long lever connected to the top, one end longer than the other. Pa would hitch a mule to the long end and the mule would circle around and around, turning the rollers. We fed the stalks of cane two at a time into the rollers. The juice was mashed out of the cane and flowed into a barrel. A pipe from the barrel ran under the ground to a furnace with an evaporator on it, where Pa cooked the juice and made the syrup. It was a long furnace, twelve or more feet long, with a chimney at one end. The evaporator had partitions placed every six inches, with a space left open at the alternate end of each partition, first at one end and then at the other. He had to monitor it constantly to keep it moving, adding fresh juice until the evaporator was full enough. It smelled delicious and we couldn't resist taking a dipper and catching some of the juice and drinking it. When the syrup was cooked, it was strained through wool flannel into a container. We loved to put the syrup on hot biscuits. We had to get out to the cane mill early in the morning, and some mornings were so cold that the cane had frost on it. Pa used a lot of wood for the fire and consequently had a lot of burning coals. Pa would always wash the evaporator while others raked the hot coals out of the furnace. We children loved to sit around those hot coals at night and chew sugar cane. We would forget about the cold at night, but next morning it would start again. We helped in other ways too, picking cotton, gathering corn, and sometimes even helping to build rail fences. When there was no work for us to do, we went to school. Our family grew as the years went by. The next child was Sabra, named for a beautiful young lady Ma knew in Texas, then Mollie, and finally Dixie. By that time Pa had a sawmill and cotton gin. GROWING UP Finally the time came when Julia and I began to grow up and have boy friends. We didn't go steady as young people do now, but boys and girls would come to see us. My father had added another room to our house, but the only place we had to entertain our beaus was on the front porch. My father had timber cut and hauled to the sawmill for lumber which he used to build a big new house for us. We all helped to build that house. My father had hired two men to build it, but when they covered the roof, we children were up on top of the house carrying shingles. My father and grandfather made the banisters to go around the porch and Pa made gates at the steps to keep out the dogs. I'll never forget the day we moved into our new home. It had a hall all through the house to an ell, formed by the dining room and kitchen, with a porch around all of the house except at the end of the kitchen and one side of the kitchen and dining room. I was so tired that night that when I started down the hall, it seemed I would never get to the other end of it. Pa soon bought us an organ, a violin, a guitar and an accordion. Julia and I played the organ and I picked the guitar a little. Some of the boys played the violin and all of us played the accordion. Soon another brother was added to our family named Young, and later a little sister named Lillie Belle. In 1908, our brother Leon was killed while working at the cotton gin. The cotton gins were not modern then, and after the cotton was ginned it had to be carried by hand a few steps to the press, where a man tramped it down. Leon was the fireman and when the whole bale was put into the gin, it was his job to change a large belt from one wheel to another. One fateful day Leon gave the belt a kick and his foot got caught in it. He was thrown around the shaft. One leg was broken so badly that the doctors had to remove it. They were going to take his arm off too, but he was hurt internally and the doctors saw no hope for him. He was only nineteen years old. It was a great shock to all of us and our parents were crushed to lose their oldest child, especially in such a tragic way. Three months later Lillie Belle came down with pneumonia and passed away. She was eleven months old. In 1909, our last brother, Pettus, was born. He was the thirteenth child. Julia was married on December 31, 1911 to Ocie John Price and I married Benjamin Herbert Folmar on April 7, 1912. The woman who became my mother-in-law had made my mother's wedding dress when my parents were married. We lived in a small world. Pa sold his sawmill and cotton gin a short time after Leon was killed. He had continued farming during the time he had these other enterprises. He started another cane mill and bought a peanut thrasher. Later he had a portable sawmill and he would move it around from place to place to cut timber. He moved it onto my husband's farm in 1927 and sawed our timber. RETURN TO TEXAS My husband and I and our four children, two girls and two boys, moved to the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas in September of 1928. Of course, our parents were sorry to see us leave. They were afraid our move would turn out to be like the one we had made as a family, but we moved much further than they had. We were homesick at first, but we soon learned to love our new home. We went back to Alabama for a visit almost every year for thirty-four years. During the depression we didn't go for three and one-half years. One year we went back three times; that year my mother-in-law was seriously ill and passed away on Christmas Day in 1947. MEMORIES Once when I was small, I can remember seeing my parents baptized in a creek. I still remember the sound of the birds singing in the trees. My parents would gather us all around the light at night while one or the other of them would read the bible to us. Afterwards, we would all kneel and Pa would pray. On summer nights, Pa would gather the children around him on the front porch, where we could smell Ma's flowers blooming. He would tell us about how God made the world and everything in it and how he gave his Son for us. After we moved into our new house and there were so many of us, somehow there wasn't time to do that anymore, but they did take us to church. My parents worked hard all their lives, but they were happy. I still remember the song Pa taught us when we were small: "While beauty and youth are in their full prime, And folly and fashion affect our whole time, Oh, let not the phantoms our wishes engage, Let us live so in youth that we'll but blush with age." NOW THERE ARE ONLY FOUR All of my sisters and brothers lived to marry and raise families with the exception of Leon, Lillie Belle and Pettus. He was lost in action in the opening days of World War II on a naval ship in the South Pacific. Julia died after five years of marriage and left three small children: Alvin, Ruby and Ethel. Frank, the one just younger than I, had a stroke and died in the spring of 1929 at the age of thirty-five. Hart was killed a few years later in an automobile accident. Jack died with a heart attack after being in bad health for several years with tuberculosis and heart trouble. Young had a stroke but lived several years afterward and died with a heart attack. Pruett had a stroke and died in 1959, just before he was sixty. That left four girls out of thirteen children. Ma and Pa both died in January of 1930. Ma passed away on the twelth day of January and Pa fell dead on the twenty-second of January. She was only fifty-eight and he was almost sixty. They had married when he was eighteen and she was sixteen, and they were very much in love. They always wanted to go together, and their deaths occurred within ten days of each other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTES I found the following information in the Crenshaw County Cemetery Book: Floyd, Lillie Bell - Darien Cemetery - Feb 20 1908 * Jan 07 1909 - d/o J.W.& Rena Floyd Floyd, J. W. - Darien Cemetery - Jun 13 1870 * Jan 22 1930 - Floyd, Rena Darien Cemetery Dec 06 1872 * Jan 12 1930 - w/o J.W.Floyd Floyd, William Leon - Darien Cemetery - Aug 09 1889 * Oct 06 1908 - s/o J.W. & Rena Floyd It appears from these cemetery records that J. W. Floyd and Rena Floyd are the parents of Lillie Bell and William Leon Floyd. Their death dates coincide exactly with the death dates mentioned by Beulah for John and Martha, and their birth dates also coincide exactly, figuring backwards from the age of 58 for Martha and the age of 60 for John. I was wondering why Martha would have been called Rena in the cemetery records, but it might have been a nickname for Irene. I found out from a cousin that my great-aunt Sabra Floyd (Martha's daughter) has a daughter named Rena Alice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------