In last week’s article we visited with Ruby Stone Hughes, who was born and raised in the Cedar Bluff community of Trousdale County in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Ruby sat down one day, towards the end of her life, and wrote down her recollections of her life ... something we at the archives wish more people had done and perhaps will do.
Frances Ward Waller, a neighbor of Ruby’s, gave the archives a copy of her privately printed book and this month we are sharing it with Vidette readers!
When the family home burned down, Ruby’s father built a new home using lumber cut from their farm! Back then a ‘two by four’ was actually two inches by four and was cut from hard woods, not the cheaper pine soft wood used today.
Another bit from the way we do things today, when there was a death in the family, the burial took place in the ‘family cemetery’ a short distance behind the home. This was common until Hartsville established a public cemetery in town.
Ruby still remembered seeing a black hearse, pulled by a pair of matching white horses.
Because the Cedar Bluff community adjoined the Providence community, she and her family attended church at the Providence Cumberland Presbyterian Church ... before the days of air conditioners and every one used a paper fan to keep cool on summer Sundays.
When Ruby joined her older brothers at school, it was at the Bluff Springs schoolhouse ... a one-room school with one teacher riding herd on students from grade one to grade eight.
A large spring gushed out of a limestone bluff close to the school, giving the school its name.
If Ruby was well behaved at school, the teacher would let her and another student go to the spring to fill the school’s wooden water bucket.
As Ruby remembered it, “Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sanford lived right by the spring. They kept their crocks of sweet milk with thick cream, butter-flecked buttermilk, golden yellow butter and many other foods they wanted to keep fresh back under the rocks in the cold spring water. Most of the time, when we girls went for water, we visited them. Mrs. Sanford would give us ginger cakes, tea cakes or something to eat. Then we would have to hurry to get back with the water.â€
Don’t think that the humble one room school didn’t both educate and inspire its students. Ruby’s older brother Robert, went on to finish college and returned to Hartsville to teach and later was principal of our high school!
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