Holston, Lottie (1896-1992) 1988 Interview |
Worcester County Library: Local History and Genealogy Collection, Snow Hill Branch, Snow Hill, MD
Interviewee: |
Lottie Holston (1896-1992) |
Interviewer: |
Louise Ashe |
Date of interview: |
1988 July 25 |
Length of interview: |
18 minutes |
Transcribed by: |
David Nedrow |
Preferred Citation: |
“Name, Oral History Collection, Date of Interview, Worcester County Library, Snow Hill Branch, Snow Hill, Maryland.” |
Topical Terms:
Church
Domestic Life
Education
Worcester County (Md.)—History
Worcester County (Md.)—Social life and customs
Worcester County (Md.)—Women’s History
Location Terms:
Cedartown (Md.)
Greenbackville (Va.)
Snow Hill (Md.)
Stockton (Md.)
Interview begin
INTERVIEWER: Today is July 25, 1988 and we are here at the Methodist Manor house in Seaford, Delaware. This is Louise Ash speaking, and I’m speaking to Miss Lottie Holston. Miss Lottie would you tell us, a, what Lottie is short for? Is that Lotisha? Is your real name Lotisha?
LOTTIE: No my real name is Lottie. (laughter) It was Lottie and, ah, the middle name was Fooks. And that was for some neighbor that my mother and father had. No relation whatever,(unintelligible), Lottie Fooks. I was born in Snow Hill, January 9, 1896. And somewhere, maybe in the beginning of the 1900s, (unintelligible) to Greenbackville, Virginia. My sister was born in 1899 and she was just a baby when we moved, but I have no recollection of the move. But, ah, my mother taught me how to read and write. Now do you want me to tell you how she did it?
INTERVIEWER: Sure, go ahead.
LOTTIE: In Snow Hill, there was what they called a bundling mill. A bundling mill or splinter mill. And what that was, they took the short pieces of leftover, where they’ve been sawing timber, sawing lumber, they took those short pieces and tied them all up in bundles. And they were sent to the city for kindling wood for the people who burn coal in the cities. And if they were sold in Snow Hill, ah, for people burning wood in their cook stoves. And my mother made the ABCs on those pieces of wood, that we had in the wood pile, and in that way taught me to read. So I, I, just don’t remember when I ever couldn’t read. And I remember one time, my father said, “come on Lottie and read ah, the livery stable advertisement”. And in this county paper, The Messenger, a there was an advertisement for an Asher Danville, they call, ah, that had a livery stable in Snow Hill. And I remember his calling me to read this. Now what I had an idea that I knew that from memory. (laughter) So I have an idea that I did. (laughter) But um, so far, um, I do know how to read and write. And my mother taught me the multiplication tables up through the tens before I ever started to read.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us your, your parent’s names and where they were from?
LOTTIE: My mother’s name was Ida Gravenor, her maiden name was Ida Gravenor and my father was Irving S. Holston. And they, are, well just from that, (unintelligible) my mother was born in, um, Wicomico county. My father was born in Worcester County.
INTERVIEWER: What did your father do for a living?
LOTTIE: My father, the first time I knew him he, was working on what they called a, when I was born he was working on what they called a Section Gang. That is keeping the railroad in order for the train. And then when we moved to Greenbackville, he worked in what they called the Engine House. That was the end of the railroad, Franklin city was. Greenbackville and Franklin city were just, almost, one (unintelligible) town. And then he just helped take care of the engines. He helped keep them clean. There were three of them that worked down in the Engine House. And then after he came to Worcester County to live, he was a farmer.
INTERVIEWER: When the railroad came to Franklin city, did it turn around in Franklin city? Do you remember?
LOTTIE: There was, what they called a “Y”. And the engine would back, ah, up and ah, usually the engine was the only thing that turned around. It would back into that “Y” one way and back, come out facing the other. That’s the way it turned around. And that was at Greenbackville, then in Franklin city. They’d just go and come back. (chuckle)
INTERVIEWER: And you went to school in Greenbackville until the sixth grade?
LOTTIE: Yes, I went to school in sixth gra, ah, until I was in the sixth grade, and then they had me repeat the sixth grade when I went to Stockton. Usually, they only had about six months school, in Greenbackville at that time. And, uh there was a lot of trouble with teachers. The people were always finding fault and all that sort of thing. So teachers didn’t stay very long. Only the first, second, third and fourth grades and so on like that. I think they stayed quite a while but I don’t remember much about that. I remember how I was promoted upstairs. As far as grades are concerned, I don’t know. But, anyway the teachers was named Miss Ethel Trebillion. I always thought she had the prettiest name. Ethel Trebillion. And we were promoted to go upstairs when we knew how to divide by two figures in the divisor. And when I went upstairs, promoted with the rest of my group, I could not do it and they sent me back downstairs. Well when I went home and told my mother she was very much disturbed. So she sat with me and taught me how to do division with two figures in the divisor. She wrote a note to Miss Ethel Tribillon, and I could imagine how she felt at that time. So she sent me to the board that morning, and I stayed at, at that board all morning doing two figures, dividing with two figures in the divisor. Now the boards were not slate. They were these, just rough plaster, and, painted. And I stayed at that board all morning. And she said, “Now you go back upstairs and tell your teacher that if you can’t do division with two figures to give you some with one figure.”
(laughter)
INTERVIEWER: Can, can you tell me how you spent your, your free time, your after school hours? Did you have a lot of chores to do, or did you, um, play any certain games? What sorts of things do you remember from your early childhood?
LOTTIE: I suppose we played games and then there were several children in the neighborhood. But the one thing that I remember about it. We lived not too far from the railroad. There was just a few yards difference between our house and the rail road or in between our house and where we are. And every summer, every night, we played croquet. And, ah, half of the....children of the neighborhood and other children from another parts of the town came over there and that was a meeting place. And we played croquet every night in the summertime. And now um, most of them, all of them are gone now, that I can remember. But I would see each other later on in life and they’d say, well, do you remember how we used to play croquet so much? And we played croquet every night in the summertime.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go swimming much?
LOTTIE: No. My father was one of these people wouldn’t let you do things. He wouldn’t let you ride a Bicycle. He wouldn’t let you do the, he was afraid you’d get hurt. But there’s one thing that happened in Cedartown, I mean, in the Greenbackville, that I’ve often thought about. (clears throat) There were no libraries. The school had no library. Very few people had books. Now we had the Bible, and we took The Messenger and maybe another um, magazine, I don’t recall. But there were two boys that were old enough to work in the bay. And they were great readers and they used to buy books, more interesting for boys than they were for girls. But anyway, one of them had a sister. Her name was (unintelligible) Jones and uh, she, these two boys, her brother and the other one was named Milton Brown. She would read those books and they were kind enough to lend them to me. And they were the first books that I had came in contact with. Now would you like to know how I made money enough to buy my first book? (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: Sure. Okay, do you, tell us about your first books and how you came to, own them.
LOTTIE: Well, in that day and time, we had a wood cook stove, as everybody else did. And my father and mother had bought a, a horse cart load of slab wood. Now the slab wood is the first that’s cut off the, ah…tree trunk. It has the bark on it. And I asked my mother, would she pay me if I cut up that load of wood and sawed it up in the lengths that she could put it in the woodstove to burn it? And she said she would. So I sawed up all that horse, horse cart load of that slab wood in lengths that she could, ah, burn it, and she paid me. And I bought two books. Well now you had to send away for them. I don’t know where I sent. And one of them I remember was Polly, A New Fashion Girl or Polly, An Old Fashion Girl. I don’t know which it was. Well, I was so glad that I had two books and that I could lend them to somebody. (Unintelligible) and one… those books got away from me. And several, many, many years afterwards, when I went back to Frank, to Greenbackville to teach, one of those books showed up in the classroom. I knew it was mine the minute I saw it, but it didn’t have my name in it. But I knew it was mine. That was many years afterwards. (chuckle)
INTERVIEWER: Tell us when you decided to become a teacher. How did that come about?
LOTTIE: I wanted to become a nurse. That was my first idea. But my father was bitterly opposed to it. He didn’t like the idea of lay, er, young girls being nurses. So there wasn’t much else you could do but to teach. But I liked to study. It wasn’t hard for me. And I went out teaching when I was seventeen. Poor children, they survived. But how little I knew about teaching. (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: What grade did you teach at first?
LOTTIE: At first I taught a rural school. And there were all seven grades. Now in the rural schools, you didn’t have too many to come in the fall, in the fall and late spring, because most of the boys were working in the fields and many of the older girls were, ah, home harvesting beans and preparing for the winter, so that you didn’t have too many until the winter. During the winter you’d have, I’ve had them as old as I was. (unintelligible)
INTERVIEWER: What school was it that you first taught at?
LOTTIE: At Cedartown. And in that day and time you did not have to go to......high school, I mean to......,to state teachers, you took an examination. Mr. Hill gave those examinations. And then, ah, if you passed, you went to the trustees, of that school, to get an appointment. You didn’t go to the Board of Education. And now each school had three trustees. And then, if you wen, if they approved you, those three trustees (unintelligible) the school board would automatically install you as a teacher. And the first year I taught, the first three years, my salary was $300 a year. And that was the first year that they ever paid teachers by the month. Ah, ah, before that, it was every quarter, which was about 10 weeks.
INTERVIEWER: What year was that?
LOTTIE: That was 1913. And, um, I, my, board was $10 a month. I went home, back to Greenbackville, every two weeks. And the fair wasn’t very much. I don’t know how much. But anyway, in those three years I saved $300.
INTERVIEWER: Did you take the train back home to Cedartown, from Cedartown to Greenbackville?
LOTTIE: It was a little stop at what they called (unintelligible) station. You flag the train down and, um, that’s where I went. And I went home at night on the night train, went there, And came back early the nex, on Monday morning. Then when the days were short I… didn’t go home till sometime in the daytime and I’d come back on Sunday so I didn’t have to go to the station at night. And in the dark. Huh.
INTERVIEWER: Do you, ah, remember the first automobile that you saw and who owned it and what kind it was?
LOTTIE: The first one I saw belonged to a Dr. Benin in Girdletree. And it was more like a carriage, ah, when they used horses and carriages, it was more like a carriage. That was the first one I saw. The first one I ever rode in belonged to a Dr. Dickerson at Stockton. Ah, there was a lady at Stockton at whose home my sister and I were staying at that time. And when he was going down to Greenbackville on his rounds, this lady asked him to take her and wha, we children. And that was Dr. Dickerson. That was the first one I ever rode in. And I don’t know when that was. Huh.
INTERVIEWER: How about electricity, do you remember did, did you always have lights in the home when you were little?
INTERVIEWER: Electricity didn’t come into Greenbackville , until, somewhere about, 19fff16. Somewhere around 1916 and it came from Stockton. They had an electric light plant in Stockton. And for a while, it only came at night, just, not in the daytime. And they decided it was one day in the week when the ladies could use their vacuum cleaners, and so on. They just had one day in the week that had electricity. But, otherwise it was only at night. Nobody had an electric stove. It wasn’t long before people began to have electric refrigerators. And it was in Greenbackville that, the, ah, that, when I, I went to teach in Greenbackville, after three years in Cedartown, I went back to Greenbackville to teach, and I taught there were three years. And then is when I bought my first Victrola. It was a big one. And you had to buy three records. And I can remember that one of them was ah, somebody, an Italian that sang, ah, had a beautiful voice, and then it was a lady. But I can’t recall their names, but I remember they were two of the records that I bought. And I bought it on installment plan. And I had said then, never hereafter, will I ever buy anything on an installment plan. (laughter) I was so tired of, buying on that I don’t know what to do.
INTERVIEWER: Have you bought things on the installment plan since then?
LOTTIE: Yes, I think I bought just one. And that was a radio. I thought that, that’s the only thing. I’ve never bought a car but what could pay for it at the time. That’s one thing I said I’d never do and I stuck to it. (chuckle)
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us what church you belong to and something about the services and how often you went?
LOTTIE: Well in Greenbackville, there were two churches. Ah, one was a Methodist and one was a Methodist protestant. You see this was long before the unification. Now, ah, one would have preaching service in the morning and then the other one at night. And the next Sunday would be reversed. And everybody has Sunday school in the afternoon. Both churches. And we went to Sunday school after the noons. Now and the young peoples work was (unintelligible) in the Methodist church, Methodist Episcopal, Episcopal, and it was, um, Christian Endeavor, in the Methodist Protestant. And I remember belonging to both of them. But I remember there was one thing that the minister in the Methodist Protestant church told us. And, ah, there was three things, and two of them I remember. One, never close your book and put it in the receptacle on the next pew until after the benediction was said and everything was all over. And when you repeated the Apostles Creed, to stand with your head up and your eyes open to the world, because you were declaring something you believed and that was not the time to bow your heads. And I’ve always remember that.
Interview end