This is my grandfather William Henry Hill (called Henry) and his wife Annie Prater Hill. Henry was born April 23 1893 in Delaney, Arkansas in Madison County to Lafayette and Nancy LeMaster Hill. He was a sharecropper and grew tobacco, corn and sorghum. He farmed with mules and a plow and he loved his mules. He would get a house to live in of course this house would have not running water but did have an outhouse. He would get a percentage of the crop to sell or eat. Most of the corn he grew he would turn into moonshine and this helped greatly in providing cash for his family. Making moonshine was a skill he learned from his father. It was also a very common way for people to earn money during this era. I remember my dad telling me he use to run moonshine when he was younger. Henry also worked in the sawmills from time to time. Henry would also coon hunt and he loved his coon dogs.
During the depression my grandfather worked on the WPA program. He help build Lake Weddington located in Washington County. It is a small fishing and swimming and fishing lake with log cabins that can be rented. The lake was not very far from my home and my mother would take us to the lake every Sunday after church. I did not know until I was older that the lake I had so much fun at as a child my grandfather help build.
When my dad was very young they moved from Madison County to Washington County in a covered wagon. In 1999 I had an interview with Oscar Smith, Oscar was abt. 99 years old during this interview but very sharp. He told me he remembered very well the day that my dad�s family moved to Madison County. He and his dad had stopped by the Hill house on the day they moved. They were in need of a cover for their wagon and the Smiths helped them out with that. Oscar was impressed because the house they were moving out of was barn red. It was the only red house in the county the only red house Oscar had ever seen. He remembers my dad in the wagon and my dad�s older brother Hugh, nicknamed Bunk, on a mule trying to keep the cows and goats in line.
When my grandparents were older and no longer able to work my father built them a small house on some land my parents owned just a short distance from our house. When they moved into the home my grandmother insisted that my father not install a gas furnace she wanted wood heat only. She did not want one of those new �electric cook stoves�. She wanted her old wood cook stove installed. So that is what my dad did. My grandmother could cook one of the greatest meals on that thing. As she got older she did have to give up her wood cook stove because of safety reasons. She was really mad at first because she kept burning everything on her new electric range but after she got the hang of it she loved it. I remember visiting my grandparents a lot during this time and can still see them sitting next to the old heat stove in the living room. Each had a rocker on the sides of the stove and they would rest their feet on a metal rail on the side of the stove and just rock away. They also had a pan under the front door of the stove that collected aches and as they rocked they would use that pan as a spittoon. Yes�they both dipped snuff. My grandfather�s tobacco was a square plug. He would cut him off a slice of tobacco with his pocketknife and �get him a chaw�, as he would say. Grandma�s tobacco was in a powder and she would go to the cabinet and get her glass of snuff and a spoon and get her �a dip�. My mother had a collection of these snuff glasses that we would drink our orange juice in at breakfast. My grandmother was a very very nice lady. She was a quiet women she hardly said anything but when she did it was kind. My father was very close to his mother as were all of her sons and they all took her death very hard. |
