The Seed and the Story for January 25, 2012: Visiting with Bud Rector

Bud Rector and J.L. Martin Chickalah, Arkansas, 2012

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

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Before I get into this week’s column, I want to thank all those who called or wrote in response to the previous column about the history of Chickalah.  It’s such an honor to hear from readers with memories and stories to share, and I’m thankful to all of you who took the time to tell me about the places you call home.  I learned from Carolyn Garner that back in the 1940s people would gather to watch outdoor movies on the back wall of Neil Cowger’s Chickalah store.  And I had several people tell me about the rural baseball league from the area, including the days when the Dean brothers lived on Chickalah Mountain.  So this week’s column is a continuation of the recent Chickalah research and will highlight just few stories I learned from a man many of you know and love: Bud Rector.

My father and I recently had the opportunity to visit with Bud in his home on Harkey’s Valley road in Chickalah where we were greeted by his friendly dog who got up from her cozy front porch chair to come say hello.  Bud Rector was born in 1914 and has lived in the Harkey’s Valley area all of his life.  He’s hauled logs in the timber woods, raised chickens and cows, worked for the WPA, driven the rural bus route for Dardanelle Schools for decades, and traveled throughout the area singing in a gospel quartet.  He’s also an excellent storyteller and a joy to be around.  I can’t begin to do justice to all his stories in this short column, so I’ll just highlight a few.

For decades the Chickalah area was home to a thriving timber economy, and Bud recalled many of the early logging operations and sawmills that dotted the mountains.  He and my father swapped memories of those days when, as Bud recalled, “everybody was going around with the chopping ax and cross cut saw.”  While my father recalled skidding logs, Bud and his brother Buford found work hauling the lumber to town.  He mentioned his short stint with the WPA where men were given shovels to help dig out the bluff and told of the well known store in Sulpher Springs operated by a man with, quite possibly, one of the best names I’ve ever come across: Bonaparte Rutledge.  Come to find out, my own grandparents were married in front of Mr. Rutledge store.

Thanks your suggestions, I was sure to ask him about the rural baseball leagues that were so popular in the area during the 1930s and 1940s.  He recalled teams from Spring Creek, Chickalah Mountain, Chicklalah Village, Slo Fork, Pisgah, Casa, Sulpher Springs, Ard, and Harkey’s Valley, the team for which he played.  While he never had the chance to play with Dizzy, he did play with Paul and their younger brother, often known as “Poodle.” The teams played at places like the old Gatley ball field near Sulphar Springs and in numerous cow pastures all around the county.  Readers might recall the team’s manager Pete McMullan and some of well-known players like Burt Tucker, Roger Harkey, Grover Martin, John Martin, and Ame Bates.

In the near future I’ll have some of the audio of Bud up online so you can listen to Bud telling these and other stories in his own words.   Do you remember the ball teams, the logging woods, or Bonepart’s store?  I’d love to hear from you!  A very special thank you to Mr. Bud Rector for allowing me to visit and share some of his stories here.

The Seed and the Story for January 11, 2012: Chickalah Academy

Chickalah Methodist Cemetery. Click on photo to see full listing of graves in cemetery.

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend! And thanks for reading!

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I recently began doing some research on the history of Chickalah and have been reading two books which provide a great deal of information about this and other rural communities in the area.  Both Wayne Banks’ 1959 publication, A History of Yell County Arkansas, and Catherine Eikleberry Roger’s Readin’, ‘Ritin, and ‘Rithmetic, published in 1981, are filled with oral histories from community members who have long since passed away.  In addition to many of the stories I’ve heard over the years from family and friends, these books help shed light on this community which once boasted eight businesses and two hundred and fifty residents.

Today Chickalah is a small, rural community with a few churches, a community center, and a rural fire department.  In the late 1800s, however, Chickalah, often referred to as Chickalah Village, was located about a mile north of its present location and was home to the Chickalah Academy, a two story building which provided the first non-denominational educational opportunities in the area.  Prior to the Academy, all schools in the village were subscription based and conducted by the Methodist church on Harkey’s Valley road across from Little Chickalah Creek.  The Chickalah Academy, located near where the fire station stands today, was a two story building with four separate entrances.  The school boasted three departments: “Primary,” “Grammar” and “Academic,” and in addition to these regular classes students also had access to classes in vocal instruction, piano, organ, guitar, and violin. 

The Chickalah Academy burned sometime during the early 1900s, and although another two story building was constructed, the subsequent school appears to have only hired two teachers.  Eventually that building was torn down and replaced by the one-story, two room building that still operates today as the Chickalah Community Center.  As many readers may remember, beginning in the 1930s, the Chickalah School began a gradual process of consolidation with Dardanelle Public Schools.

To my knowledge there is no one living today who attended the Chickalah Academy, but some of you have probably heard stories about the school, and no doubt there are many readers who remember attending the later school before consolidation.  In my quest to understand more about Chickalah, I’m especially curious to learn more about the coming of Highway 27 and how this shifted the population from what is often referred to as Chicklaha Village to the Chicklah we know today.   I’m also curious to learn more about a shoe factory that may have once been located in the area.  Operated by the McCray family, the factory would have existed sometime in the mid 1800s.  I’d also love to learn as much as possible about the sawmills in the area and the role they played in the larger timber industry. Do you know anything about these topics?  I’d love to include this and any other information in our ongoing research at the community center I’m working to open, the McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.   As always, I’d love to hear your stories.  You can visit me online at www.boileddownjuice.com.  If you want to know more about the McElroy House and our goals, you can check us out online at www.mcelroyhouse.wordpress.com. Of course, I always love handwritten letters or phone calls as well!  Thanks so much for reading and sharing your stories.  I feel very thankful to be learning from you all.   

The Seed and the Story for November 2, 2011: Rest in Peace Exhibit on Death and Dying in the Ozarks

From the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History

The Seed and the Story column is published every other week in the Post Dispatch and syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper!

      Rituals to honor the dead are a fundamental part of the human experience.  Here in the Yell County and River Valley, funerals, visitations, and Decoration Days are just a few of the traditions we observe that pay homage to the deceased and acknowledge a family’s loss.  A photo exhibit currently on display at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale examines the history of regional funeral and death rituals in the Ozark Mountains through the lens of a lesser-discussed tradition: mortuary photographs.  Entitled “Rest in Peace,” the exhibit features black and white photos of burials and grave side services, still born infants surrounded by flowers, shots of decorated graves mounded with flowers, and portraits of family members in mourning clothing.  The images are tender and moving in their depictions of human fragility.

      The images might appear unusual to some in this age where our sick often die in hospitals and professionals take care of everything from post mortem care to grave digging.  While our medical advancements have certainly not saved us from the loss of family and friends, we have been able, to some degree, to remove ourselves from much of the physical process surrounding death and dying.  This exhibit features a time when death was less hidden.  The introduction to the exhibit explains it this way: “In some ways, our ancestors were closer to the realities of death a century ago than we are today. Because many of them lived with their extended family in small communities, without access to hospitals and funeral homes, they saw all phases of dying and death. They took care of the ill and prepared the deceased’s body. They made funeral clothes and sat with the corpse before burial. They built the coffin and dug the grave. They grieved with family and friends and memorialized their loved ones.”  While many of us sit with the dying, seldom do we help dig the grave or dress the body of a loved one or friend. 

One of the most striking photos shows a group of family members in Kingston, Arkansas lovingly placing the lid on the coffin of their loved one after the visitation had ended.  Abby Burnett, a historian who helped with research for the exhibit, believes that in an age where few people had cameras it’s telling that they were often used to photograph the dead.  Mourning was, to a large degree, a communal activity, she explains, not something to be hidden.  “What I learned as I researched is how much we’ve gotten away from a practice that, at one time, involved everyone. Even small children played a part,” she explained. One of the more touching photos from the exhibit shows four young girls posing beside a flower-mounded grave.  The caption explains that young children would often walk in procession behind the coffin, even serve as pallbearers.   This is certainly different from our modern response of increasingly shielding the younger generation from concepts of death, often excluding them from our communal rituals for saying goodbye.  

      The exhibit “Rest In Peace” will be on display the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History through December  17^th.  The Shiloh Museum is home to an extensive photo collection depicting of life in the Ozarks and features regularly rotating exhibits.  They can be found online at www.shilohmuseum.org. 

I’d love to hear your memories of such topics here in the Yell County area.  Do you have a story to share?  Email me at the contact link above or leave a comment below.  Thanks so much for reading.   

Thoughts on a Landscape of Faith. By NElda Ault.

Fayette Cemetery facing west. Photo by NElda Ault.

I received an email the other day from good friend and fellow folklorist NElda Ault, which contained three beautiful photos of Decoration Days near her home in rural, central Utah.

Throughout our graduate school days, NElda and I spent a great deal of time talking about the nuances in the drastically different landscapes we call home.  I remember one afternoon as we were driving through rural Kentucky, a landscape that is much like my native Arkansas,  she mentioned how she missed the wide, expanse of the desert.  The hills and thick groves of trees in the southern mountains, she explained, felt cramped in comparison to the openness she was used to back home in Utah.

That comment stayed with me.  Although I had never been to Utah, I suspect the openness would overwhelm me and leave me longing for thick clusters of vegetation.  We went on to have many subsequent conversations, ruminating on how the landscapes we internalize in our childhood years often frames our adult perceptions of the world—past, present, even future. I love the way NElda helped me to understand more about what it means to call a place home.  Whenever I see a photo of the western deserts or those huge mountains, I think of NElda and her love for open spaces.

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What’s In the Works ~ The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research

After much thought and time spent wondering where to go from here, I have decided to begin the process of creating a small oral history and folklife research center in my hometown. I have included my plans and ideas for the Center listed at the bottom of this post. I welcome any feedback! Continue reading »

Native Seeds/S*E*A*R*C*H

Just the other day my friend Dr. Kristin Dowell, an anthropologist who works with Native American communities, suggested I look into a project called Native Seeds, a seed bank and cultural memory bank based in the southwest. It am so excited about the information that I had to post about it.
Native Seeds

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”
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The oral history and folklore of Climate Change and an extension of what we mean by PLACE.

In working with a few different oral history programs, I have always been intrigued by how much information these interviews about rural life in North Carolina, Arkansas, or central Kentucky contain about climate change. When men and women in their 80s and 90s discuss their childhoods, they often recall extended winters, greater amounts of snow, creeks running so deep they would flood their banks, and trees so filled with robins that robin soup was a popular dish.
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