~Memories~

I do not live in Floyd County VA today, but was born and spent my young years there. Like some, I'm not ashamed of my ancestors. I was raised in a house that had no electricity, every room except the kitchen had one or more beds. We had straw tics to sleep on, not a mattress. Water for drinking
and cooking came from a spring that had lizards and crayfish in it and was at the foot of the hill. Was kind of hard to carry the water bucket and water back to the house in summertime without getting the bloom from timothy seed grass in the water. The spring had a springhouse a few feet away that the spring water ran into a race made of wide boards and this is where we kept our milk in crocks as well as watermelons and the like. Also it served as a place to keep milk or other item from freezing in cold weather. The quail was like so many other natural sounds with their bobwhite tune. Whipperwills, hawks, owls and the many songbirds was a lot better entertainment than radio and t.v.  And they were God given entertainment, as was the barking of squirrels, foxes and there was always great excitement when we found where a bear had passed through a laid down in plowed ground or a cornfield with corn 3 or 4 inches tall. There was the honeybees with their honey in hives or in a bee tree found in the woods for sweets. Molasses after cutting the cane stalks and squeezing the juice out by running the stalks through the cane mill. The the cane juice had to be cooked in a big vat for hours to get it thicken. The sugar maple trees in spring when th sap began to rise. Cut a V shape notch in the tree and dad used a table knife to drive in the cut for the sap to run into a pail. This sap also had to be boiled to make syrup. Always had to have a space cleared each year called new ground to raise the marglobe tomatoes that we raised and canned and was sold to Virginia Foods in Dublin VA.
Also cut large chesnut oak trees in springtime and peeled the bark, stacked it to dry and sold it to the tannery in Salem VA. Also cut cord wood from the chesnut trees and it was sold like the tan bark to tannery in Salem. Raised green beans and battled it out with the ground hogs to get them  raised and
picked to take to market in Roanoke and or/house as well as grocery stores in Roanoke and Salem area. Another thing that reminds me of some of the whimpers on email today. We were on the old crank telephone party line (Locust Grove) exchange.Everyone talked about so and so was one of the biggest eavesdroppers in the neighborhood. As each place had a distinct ring, like a short and a long or two longs and a short ring. The one long ring was always for the operator at the exchange. Well when the phone would ring you could hear all the other phones being picked up and there was such a drain on the two batteries each phone had that in just a short time the person you called was unable to hear you or you was unable to hear them. If you ask a question to the person before they could answer it a lot of times a eavesdropper or two would answer the question you ask.

So yes I'M PROUD of MY ANCESTRY of FLOYD COUNTY VA. Some of my kin did move on and some continued to return for visits in following years.

Edgar L. Vest