Notes From Ollie Martin
Growing Up In The Flat Woods


I can remember back to around the age of 5 years and we lived in the house that was called the Stearn Place. That was right down there from Uncle Dick's. Dick Miller. The house is not there anymore, and sometimes we would move up and live with Uncle Dick and my mother would cook and take care of him. He was a bachelor and a doctor and studied to be a doctor under old Doctor Bradley from Lindside. My earliest recollections of him was that he was a kind person and always doing something for someone that needed help.

At that time they was a big store, a three story building at the forks of the road, and it had a telephone that people could use to call out. It didn't cost anything to make a phone call and the post office was in the same building. It was mainly a store building, but it had the post office in with it. It was located where Jeannette's house is today. It had a hitching rail for people to hitch their horses to when they came to buy groceries. A lot of the peope rode horseback or they could come in a buggy. Most of them I remember was horse riding. And it (the store) had the essentials such as flour, sugar and coffee. The store also had dishes and regular hardward things, pots and pans. They also was a dwelling house attached to the store that a family could live in that wanted to run the store. At the time I was, well Welch Comer is about, well I must have been about 7 when Carl Comer and his wife Georgia lived there and ran the store. There first child that was born when they lived there was Welch Comer and I used to go up there and help take care of him when Georgia was real busy. The good part about that that I remember was that they would give us a bag of candy and we would take that outside and eat it when the weather was nice. They gave it to us to keep him quiet! He had a lot of curiousity and it kept someone busy watching him.

Then later Leona came along which is Leona Dunn now. And I also helped with her especially in the evenings when Georgia had to do the outside work like taking care of the milk and things like that. I remember Leona had the cholic for a long time and I'd rock her and take care of her. To me that was one of the most interesting parts of my life at that time because I loved Georgia so well and she was real good to me.

On Saturdays people would gather there or if they had any kind of activity a lot of people would come in. I know things were awful cheap back then. A box of salt wasn't over 5 cents. You could buy a lot of stuff by the pound.

And then after I grew up to be about 12 or 13 we started having parties around in people's homes. My cousin and I Nellie Miller always went to these parties together. And of course my brothers always went. We had our brothers to do with. One thing that we loved to go to was the square dances that they had at different homes and one of the best places was at Aunt Mary Copeland's home which is Tom Hughes' home of the present day. She had a large kitchen and we'd have string music. All the young people in the neighborhood would come and some of the older people would come to hear the music and watch em dance. There was a lot of young people at that time.

Another one of our entertainments when we were all young was the parties that Addison Miller gave at his home which was out on the ridge. It was the Uncle Louis Miller farm house where the parties took place and Addison could play the organ which entertained us all. He was really good.

In the winter time we had a pretty rough time getting to these places. The roads were so muddy that we could hardly get through, but that didn't keep us from going.

We had no conveniences in our home then. We had to carry water and the men had to drag in wood and cut it to keep the fires a going. We would carry the water in buckets from the springs. We had to carry water for everything -- drinking, cooking, washing clothes. My mother didn't even have a wash board for a long long time. I got the first wash board that my mother ever had. I worked for a woman, Finn Schultz's wife up in the valley in Lindside, and she had 2 washboards. She gave me one for helping her.

We ate a lot of beans and potatoes and meat. We always had some kind of meat -- mostly hog meat. In the summer we canned a lot of fruit. Of course, there was lots of apple raised in this part of the county at that time. People would store them in their apple house and we could buy apples all winter long from people like Uncle Pres and Ann Riner's daddy. Potatoes, I don't know, some buried them like they did cabbages. The amazing part to me was that my Uncle Pres Miller owned the property rights below the father of Nellie, the one I was with so much -- my first cousin -- we always went to the parties together. As Uncle Pres grew older they sold that property to their son and from that it went into several people's hands until my brother Lee brought the property there and that I bought some of that property to live there in my later years. When I was young I never dreamed that I would do that. That's what amazes me so. The blacksmith's shop was where Cramer's store is now. Something else that I never dreamed would happen is that the property that Ab Campbell owned, where my mother and I used to visit so much, that that property would belong to my youngest and oldest daughters. It goes to show that lots of changes have been made in the last, well let's see, seventy years.