In 1862 the war later called the Civil War was just beginning. It hadn�t yet fully engulfed the region of South Central Kentucky, the County of Barren, near the Tennessee border.
The home of George Mauk was a busy one. He had moved his family, a little over twelve years before, to Barren County Kentucky, just northeast of the town of Slick Rock, from Hawkins County Tennessee, near the Virginia Border. George was a Blacksmith and was training sons, Benjamin at least, in the lucrative trade so necessary in any commnity. The household was a busy one, and full. George and his wife Elizabeth lived with their unmarried children: their eldest daughter Catherine, "Kate", widowed now and with her two daughters Martha, age twelve and Makinnia, age ten; George and Elizabeth's 22 year old daughter Martha, and sons George, 21, Benjamin, 20, Jessie, 16, Zachariah ,14, and William, 11. Two children had married and were no longer in the extended family home. Eldest son John had married Mildred Nichols and lived next door, and daughter Malinda also resided adjacent to the family of her parents with her husband William Yeary and her new family. George and Elizabeth�s son Lewis was gone by 1860, but no one knows now, to exactly where.
It is said, in later years, that George felt strongly about the rights enumerated by the Southern States, sentiments falling firmly with the Confederacy. Two sons at least, Benjamin and William, believed in the tenants espoused by the Northern States, and would leave to work for the Union cause. Benjamin used the trade learned from his father and was employed as a blacksmith for the Union Army. Benjamin and William would eventually change the spelling of their family name as a result of this split in family beliefs, calling themselves Mock. Whether this was yet a topic of hot contention within the family home in 1862 is not now known.
One evening in that year a company of Union solders came, and chose the Mauk home, by chance I suppose, from which to ask for an evening meal and a camping place. Elizabeth had long since fed her family, her daughters and granddaughters were busy scrubbing the large table, washing the pots and plates. Biscuits, it was decided, were all she had available to feed such a crew, and even then, the only water left in the home was the washing water, the water already soapy and full of scrubbing rags and dirty pots and plates. No one, so the story goes, could bring themselves to take the long walk to the somewhat distant spring to fetch fresh water, or perhaps George forbade the errand.
Elizabeth used what she had on hand, and prepared a meager feast for the soldiers, of biscuits made with flour and soda and soapy wash water. The soldiers were fed the meal, and slept the night then, their bellies full of flour and soapy water, grateful for the kindness. They were never told the ingredients of their meal.
George and Elizabeth�s grand daughter Martha, was only a girl of 12 on that night. More than half a century later, when she was a grown woman with grand daughters of her own, Martha would recount that evening, and the meal, with a chuckle. She told her grand daughter, Goldia, as she fed Goldia the fat, hot biscuits for which Martha was then locally known. It was biscuits like these, large and golden brown, served to the soldiers then, on that night in 1862, only Martha never again used that "secret ingredient" with which they prepared the biscuits for those soldiers. She decided she liked better to prepare her biscuits without the soapy water.
Goldia told this story to me, a great great grand daughter of Martha, 136 years after the evening, some 60 years after she had been told the story herself. The echo of Martha�s chuckle could still be heard as Goldia recounted the delight Martha felt at the prank that was played on the soldiers that night when all they had with which to make biscuits was flour and soda and soapy water.
(Martha Elizabeth Richards married John Tyler Deweese and bore eight children to him, six living to
adulthood. Goldia is the daughter of John Tyler and Martha's son John Shaffer Deweese. Martha and
John Tyler's eldest child, Tabitha, married John McCoy. Their youngest daughter Lois' youngest
daughter is my Mom)
- Lois Cordova 2002 -
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