Holy Ground
Haynes Cemetery always has been hallowed ground to me. Mostly because I remember, from when I was a small boy, the Saturday before Mother’s Day, my hard-working dad Jack White would load up his push mower, hand-operated grass clippers, and other yard supplies and head out in his ’55 Ford to the country, to Scribner’s Mill, where he’d join other men and women who would help spruce up Haynes prior to Decoration....
Miss Lizzie Porter
When I was a boy, there was a mysterious elderly lady who lived in an old decrepit house on the corner of West 6th and North High. Sadly, she was the subject of a lot of jokes and wild stories, mainly because she sat on her porch in all kinds of weather, surrounded by chickens, and occasionally with a side by side shotgun across her lap. Nobody, especially a kid of twelve years old, considered that she had an especially rich past tied...
The Pinkstons of Bryant Station
If your family lineage traces a long way back in Maury County history, you’d do well to study the names chiseled in rock at Haynes Cemetery, a fine old resting place high on a hill in Scribner’s Mill. Ancient red cedars border a plush, rolling green adorned by 400 headstones and sprinkled with spontaneous patches of purple irises, the Tennessee flower. Carved into the native rock, names encountered represent Duck River...
Two Jacks
Mr. Kinnie Polk “Sam” Freeland and Miss Ida had a boy born to them more than a dozen years after their last one, Tom (named after the bachelor uncle who lived with them in the big old house in Scribner Mill). Jack was the blessed infant’s name and, from the beginning, he was doted on and seldom corrected by Miss Ida. His uncle Thomas who lived in one end of the big old house was particularly amused by the boy and...
The Class Trip
Bryant Station School held classes for first through eighth grades in a two-room schoolhouse. There were two teachers presiding, one also serving as principal. When Mrs. Willie Hight was principal in the 1950s, she drove the school bus, in addition. The Bryant Station School in the 1950s with Mrs. Willie Hight and Mrs. Angeline Brown. In 1936, when my dad Jack White graduated from the 8th grade, the principal was twenty-five-year-old...
Homers
My dad was the Railway Express agent in Columbia and his office was in the old depot. In his long career, he shipped all kinds of livestock, everything from rattlesnakes to elephants – literally – without use of a forklift. It was all done with brawn, brain, and nerve. Jack White in a Railway Express office in Cookeville, Tennessee. A regular cargo was homing pigeons, usually shipped in custom woven basket crates from Evansville,...