Transcribed For Online by Geraldine [email protected]
Records Contributed by Vicki Bell-Reynolds [email protected]

When we were small I can remember only one whipping that our father gave us. when we done anything wrong he would call us in the house and set us down in a chair and give us a good talking, that would hurt us worse than a good whipping. This one whipping that I remember of, one time he had an old house that was about to fall down and he had cotton seed stored in it and he was afraid for us to be around it let alone in it. One day Ben and I were in this house throwing cotton seed at one other and he had come out and put us out of it one time but, we soon got back into the house again and he heard us out there, he started out after us we saw him coming I ran up to him and told that I had his hatchet and there it was he told me that he didn't want the hatchat that he wanted us boys so he got us and gave us good whipping and we went to the house and mamma was out in the garden gathering vegetables for our noon meel we told her what had happened and he saw us through the window and he came out there and got us and gave a good whipping. We remembered the cotton seed house and also telling thing on other people and we stayed away from the cotton seed house from than on.

One time Ben and I went to horse lot and in the lot there was a tree that slanted almost to the ground we took a rope tied one end of the rope around my neck and the other end we tied it to the tree I was the horse our dog or had a running worm fit, mamma begin to hollow for us boys and when he heard her Ben ran off to the house leaving me tied up there in the lot I would run up this tree just as far as I could go and than jump out just as far as I could trying to brake the rope or get loose from the rope to go to the house mamma and saw me out there and she bigan to run to the lot to get loose and she said that she thought that I would brake my neck before she could get to me and get me loose from the rope and tree.

While we were there on the farm the first time my father took the Arizona and he had a hired hand there helping him with his crop and he bought a new wagon and he sent this man on ahead of us to go to Arizona and our father changed his mind on going decided not to go, he tried to head this man off or over take him somewhere on the way but, he never did find him the man went on somewhere and never was heard of any more, my father just gave this man a good team of horses and a new wagon.

When I was a real small boy I was awful bad to cry. One night I held mamma up until 3 Oclock in the morning wanting her to climb the trees and get me the moon. Our house there on the farm just had two rooms to it one big room and then a side room with dirt floors and there was two steps down from the main room to the side room I would get on the top step and place my elbows on my knees and feet on the middle step and than I would start to cry. My father would take his hay baler out on the prairie and bale hay, he had been out baling hay all one week and got in late at night he had a negro working for him. I had started my nightly cry and mamma hollowed for this negro to come and get me. She didn't know that my father and this negro had got home and about the time that she hollowed this negro stuck his head in the window and told mamma that he was there to take me home, I saw him and I quit crying and straightened up and stop crying and I never did cry any more from then on. That broke me of the crying.

On the old home place as it was called by us. There were two barns that burned there the old barn that my grandfather had built, burned in the fall of 1906. My grandmother built another one in a different place and after she died and we moved on the place we moved the barn that she built back on about the same place as the first barn was and in about two years after we moved it, it burned so we built another barn on the same ground as the barn was that my grand mother barn was. It seems that there was something there on that particular space of ground that wouldn't let a barn stand.

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