I like the add for ferrets. 12,000 rat killers. Just a name, town and state. Much simpler times when a letter sent across country would find the right person without gps and computers.
My grandfather was a rural mail carrier back in the 1920s and 1930s. He would get a letter with a cryptic address like; the old colored man living next to the spring in Costen Station. No name, no address just a vague description of who and where. From that he could figure it out and deliver it to the man. Then he recounted how the man could not read and he'd stop and read the letter to the fellow.
Illiterate former slaves were common in those days most in their 70's or 80's. We had a small area of shacks about a dozen families lived out their days after they were set free on a farm we bought when I was a very little boy Those little shacks were long abandoned. Most were single room shacks about ten by ten with a small wood stove, pump outside and privey out back or single pump for them all. It's been almost 60 years and little boys don't notice details, just snakes and turtles which lived in those old shacks.
I remember those days so well. There were at least 12-14 tenant houses on our place like that, filled with happy families who meant so much to me and my family. They were built of heart pine, by a man who is the grandfather of a lady I go to church with. The first time I ran away from home I went to one of those houses and "holed up" with Lou, a sweet lady who could cook like nobody's business and scrubbed those heart pine floors with lye 'til they were almost white. I have torn down all of those tenant houses on the farm but one ........... the one Lou lived in. I salvaged that heart pine, pulled the nails, re-planed it and built my dining room using it. The old longleaf "lives on" here in the house my Grandaddy bought in 1919, and that was built in 1875.
I may tear down Lou's house this winter. But, if I do, I will save every heart pine board that is worth saving and use them someday in the future to build something that will "live on".
Merry CHRISTmas to all.
SRH
