Quick Remembrances from Fountain Creek
Yesterday I was driving my 95 year-old daddy Brother Jack White to Sonny Willis’s kennel in Lewisburg. Sonny has a training ground on his place and I was taking my dad for the sole purpose of showing off my German Shorthaired Pointer, Zula the Dog. It was an hour round trip so I had plenty of opportunity to hear my dad’s old stories about Maury County in the 20s and 30s. Most all of them I’d heard before about 127...
The Ways of Country Justice
My grandfather Bob White worked a farm at Scribner Mill, technically owned by his brother Willis, a Columbia policeman. Bob and Willis had a gentleman’s agreement about splitting the profits and Bob’s growing ownership in the farm. This was during a time when a handshake meant something. By the way, lawmen in the White family probably dates back to Willis’s father and my great-grandfather James Lewis White who had...
Neighbors and Kin
Lauriston “Laurice” Mayberry was an old man who lived on Silver Creek and rode a little black Walking Horse to Galbreath’s Store. He was the grandson of Revolutionary War soldier Henry Mayberry who came to Tennessee from Virginia in the late 1790s. Both Laurice and his son Hardin took a great liking to my dad’s cousin and best friend Douglas White. In 1934, Doug was a goodlooking cotton-headed boy of 11, with a...
Three Mules and a Jack
From the age of ten, my dad worked a brace of mules named Matt and Dinah. “My dad would stay in the field and watch me to make sure I was safe but he turned me loose with them by the time I was twelve or thirteen.” My grandfather Bob White bought them in 1933 at the jockey yard off the courthouse square in Columbia. This is the lot at the corner of East 7th and Woodland Street, behind what are now the offices of the Maury County Clerk...
Good Dogs and Hard Times
Growing up on a Tennessee farm in the 1920s and ‘30s was a stark life. My dad, Jack White, had a fyce pup, part rat terrier and part something else, called Tip. “He had a little tip of white hair on his tail that stuck out.” Tip was a small dog, nearly solid white except for a liver spot over his left eye. “I really liked Tip,” said dad. “He was my pal. He was a first rate squirrel dog. He’d trot through the woods as quiet as an...
Reunion
A picture hangs on my living-room wall in Columbia, Tennessee, magnificently framed, of which I am especially proud. It is an original 1902 photograph of Confederate veterans gathered for a reunion — friends, relatives, and comrades-in-arms of my great-grandfather James Lewis White, a private in Company F of the 48th Tennessee Infantry, who later enlisted in Company F of the 1st Tennessee Cavalry. The picture is probably taken...