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The Good Old Daysby
Bob Bowman |
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The “old
days,” those years which seem to tug at our nostalgic senses, weren’t as good
as most of us like to believe. Even East Texans living in the 1940s considered
the past as being less complicated and somehow more pleasant.
But in 1948-49,
when eighty-year-old Andrew Allen Veatch of Sabine County sat down to write his
unpublished autobiography, “The Sage of Lone Vale,” he observed that he had lived
in those so-called “delightful times, and I should not like to go back to them.”
Veatch grew up in an East Texas that was sparsely settled and the Civil War had
left the region “perhaps more distressingly affected than any other section.”
Confederate money was worthless, “yet it was the only kind we had,” said Veatch.
To survive, Veatch said East Texans depended on home-grown vegetables
and meat from “razorback hogs, the meanest in the world.” He said the hogs were
never fed, but “found their own living in the woods,” and could outrun a deer.
“When other food in the woods gave out, the razorbacks would root up pine saplings,
chew the roots and go on living,” he said. The hogs were hunted down, using dogs,
a tradition which still exists in parts of East Texas.
His family, Veatch
said, had corn ground by a water mill six miles away and every housewife spun
and wove the cloth, turning it into garments. Women and young girls knew how to
knit and their knitting needles supplied the family with socks and stockings.
“Hats were made of palmetto, which had been cut and bleached...and shoes were
made (by shoemakers) from leather tanned at home,” he recalled.
One such
shoemaker was L.N. Morris, whose quality work earned him the nickname, “Leatherneck
Morris.”
Medicines were scare and the East Texans turned to nature for
remedies, using red pepper, watermelon seeds, corn husk tea, charcoal, pine rosin
and tar, sassafras, black haw and dogwood bark, roots from wild plants, and weeds
such as one he called “the devil’s shoe string.”
Veatch observed caustically:
“Some of these remedies may have been worthless, but at least they had the merit
of being harmless... the strongest curative power was our faith in its efficiency.”
Soap making was the most arduous task .... next
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