My houses

When I was born I was born at a very nice, new house. My dad and a carpenter had built the house. My brother Lester was a baby when the family moved there so Jim and I were born there. The home had 4 fireplaces downstairs and 2 upstairs, so it was a warm house. It had tile floors and the mantle in the main area had a mirror over it. This was the nicest house my mother ever had. When I was 6 my dad bought a bigger farm. The new farm was actually closer to town, while still adjacent to the old farm that he sold to his brother. However, the house on this farm was big and old. It was built in the 1800's and looked like the homes in the movies, like Gone With the Wind. (I lived here probably until I was finished with High School. I think that is about right- leah's note) This old house actually had slave quarters, which we used as a smoke house. The floors were big, wide planks. This house was always cold and its where I have most of my childhood memories. There was a big tree where we had a swing. There was a grove of trees, and somewhere in that we had a basketball court. We also had a croquet set. Once a man visited our house and challenged me to a game of croquet. I was still young then, and I don't think he expected it, but I beat him. At this farm we had a big big barn. It was probably the biggest barn around the area. It burned down. At the time, John and Forest were married and Lester was in the Army. Jim was working for TVA on bridges. I was the only one of the children home at the time. Dad used to let men passing through sleep in the barn. Not that they had permission, just that Dad did not stop them. He wondered if one of them was careless with smoking or if the barn just went up in flames. The next house we had was one Dad and Lester built. When Lester was in the Army he was in Morocco and he built a church and did other carpentry work. This house was smaller and was just fine. I lived here when I was teaching school. Actually, I lived there when the weather was nice. In the winter I boarded with someone closer to where I taught school. That was where I lived when I got married. In the 1940's my dad and brothers left Roane County and moved to Bledsoe and Sequatchie Counties. John and Margaret moved first and lived in the house that would be my mother and dad's. When my mother moved there was no place to put her things except on the porches, so a lot of her things were ruined because John and Margaret could not get into their house just yet. This was an old house and the only house Leah ever visited. It had 4 rooms and 2 fireplaces. Later a kitchen and bathroom were added. John had his own farm. Lester and my dad farmed together. They did 2/3, 1/3. My dad got 2/3 of the profit, but bought the machinery, animals etc. and paid the bills. Lester got 1/3. John had the farm adjacent to theirs. Forest was closer to Dunlap. He had an old house that had no indoor bathroom until about 1964 when they built a new house on the spot where the old one was. When Jim retired from the Army he bought a farm closer to Pikeville. He seemed to have more trouble- rattlesnakes, and the land was somewhat closer to the mountain and not as nice as river bottoms like Forest's or in the valley like John's and my dad's.