 |
| Lotta Mae Wolfe-Millsaps |
(Present during the interview: Ed Wetterman, Lotta Mae Millsaps, and Louise Wetterman)
...Jane Wolfe was married to David Parks and her sister married Hiram Parks and they are the half-sisters of John Peeler Wolfe.
...The name [Wolfe]. Grandpa Wolfe, dad's grandfather added the "e" to it, and I don't know who took the "o"s off. It's supposed to be spelled Woolf. We're Dutch, and the Hulls came from Pennsylvania....They came down through Kentucky and Virginia from Pennsylvania. They went into Pennsylvania when they came into the States. Then they went down in covered wagons into Tennessee, but they might have gone into North Carolina before they went into Tennessee, I don't know for sure.
...Grandmother Ramsey's mother was a Dye or a Monger.
...The records show that Grandpa Wolfe and Joseph Wolfe were newcomers [to Monroe County, Tenn.] in 1820.
...John Ramsey and wife...lived right there in Hiawatha County District, and my Grandpa Ramsey, he was a Union man and he was going to Knoxville to join the Union Army[during the Civil War], when he had taken a cold and got sick and had to come back home. You see in them days from Monroe County to Knoxville was quite a distance if you went on foot or on a horse or something. I don't know how many horses he had. I know he had a homestead place there, only a little peek from where Grandpa Wolfe lived, where my great-grandfather lived, and where the Wolfe's are still living. I know he had a place down there, and we called it the Knobs, it's what they call a low mountainous district. Anyway, he was a Union man, and he went off, but came home and died and they buried him at Fowler's Mill. Jimmy Hitch, who is my first cousin, tried everything he knew to do to find out where he was buried there, but they hadn't put any headstone up, or if they had, it had fallen and rotted and they couldn't find it. But Jimmy told me he was buried at Fowler's Mill-that's right between Vonore and Loudon really. And Grandma [Ramsey], well they had a big battle in Loudon, just the other side of Philadelphia, Tennessee, and Grandma said she remembered hearing the guns. They could hear the guns from where they lived, huge guns. Well, people just went through the country just getting everything they could get and somebody come-a-running and told her. She didn't let her oldest son go. He should have went into the service, Uncle Hiram should have, but she didn't let him go. She sent him away up in the hills to hide him form the soldiers, scavengers, whatever they were. They wanted to get every kind of meat and every thing that was loose.
Grandma had just killed a hog and she had just put it way like she was supposed to, and then she said she didn't know what to do [because the army was coming to take her food], and then she remembered she had some salve-something-or-other made out of willow bark, and it looked and smelled awful. But she went and got it and she smeared all that meat with that willow bark and throwed it out in the yard, because if they found it, they would have carried it off. So when they came, she said she was crying and she said somebody had already come through there and had ruined everything she had. Well, she was a crying and taking on something awful, and so they picked it [the meat] up-smelled it, and threw it back down and went on. That's the way she saved her meat. She took it into the house and washed it off and it was just as good as it ever was....I thought that was very ingenious of her.
...Your Grandma Wolfe [Martha Iredell] was a Moore and her daddy was a Corporal in the Civil War, in the Confederate Army. He's buried in Mississippi....They came to Texas when momma was seven years old....Grandpa Moore went back to visit Mississippi, you see he had some daughters that lived out there and that he had two daughters by his first wife, Aunt Dottie and Aunt Lou. Both of them married Crums, but they weren't close Crum's, they were cousins, and they lived right outside of Corinth, Mississippi in what they call Walnut Spring. He went back there, took white fever and died. They buried him there. In later years, when they were going through war records, some ladies of Mississippi found where he had been a Corporal and they erected a tombstone at his grave, and momma said that Uncle Jeff was married at that time and they were living out here around Gatesville [Texas] at the time. Uncle Bob, Momma's oldest brother raised them. It was only Momma, Aunt Minda, and Aunt Sally. He raised them, so Momma thought Uncle Bob hung the moon, and you couldn't hardly blame her because he took good care of them. They lived on a farm a long time and I guess they then moved to Waco. but Daddy and Momma met, Daddy was a streetcar motorman here in Waco, and Momma worked at Goldstein-McGills and they met on the streetcar, and later they got married. I don't know how long they went together before they got married, but it was quite a while I think. They got married on the 4th day of May. Momma was twenty-five and Daddy was twenty-six when they got married and they had eight children. They went back to Tennessee when I was about five. I should remember it, I was almost six, but I don't remember a thing about it.
....A thing I do remember is that Momma had never been raised in the country, especially country like in Tennessee-where there was red hills, and red gullys, and red-dirty roads....They went from Sweetwater to Grandma's house in a surrey. An old-fashioned surrey, it had a cover over the top, pulled by two horses, it had fringe around the top, like a buggy, but it had two seats in it, a front and a back, and Momma promised herself then that she would never again go to another town until she could go back to Texas. She lived fourteen years in Tennessee and only went to town once during that time and that was to keep Daddy out of the army. Se he was needed as a soldier...[Louise interrupted here]
Louise: But they took our wheat and wouldn't give us but so much flour. Momma had to make cornbread for breakfast [this was World War I and rationing was the law].
[Lotta continued]: We had to eat cornbread all the time and, oh she made good cornbread, but she hated to feed us kids cornbread. I know Daddy was terribly frustrated by trying to raise a family on nothing....Well I'll tell you right now that on the night Albert was born on the 8th of December, 1917, we went to Mrs. Kurks across a creek and we crossed on stepping stones going over there. When we came back it had frozen over. It began to snow and it never let up until March. Daddy had some corn in the field and he never got the corn from the fields until March. It was terrible, and we had to go out and get the eggs tow or three times a day because they would freeze....and that was when Louise got lice in her head....Anyway they had a lady staying with Momma to take care of her and the kids, and that's where she [Louise] got it. Momma was so mad at that woman she could have killed her.
Summer 1991 Interview with Lotta Mae Millsaps
People present: Ed Wetterman, Lotta Mae Millsaps, and Louise Wetterman.
...The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was one hundred years old in 1968, and that's where all the family is buried....Hopewell Springs is where I think my Grandmother Wolfe was buried, but Bat Creek is where my Grandpa Wolfe [John Peeler Wolfe] lived.
...back in them days [late 1800s] in Mississippi malaria was terrible and mosquitoes was awful, and babies, unless they were really stout didn't live very long.
Louise: I can remember her [Grandma Ramsey-Wolfe] because I turned a tub of hot water over her feet one time....Momma remembered it after I told her I remembered it. We were in the kitchen or something, and they had these washtubs- great big old things, and I remember she walked out of that room and went into another room and laid down on the day bed.
Lotta: You know what I remember about Texas before I went to Tennessee? I remember they had a flood--a great flood, and we lived down on South Third street [Waco, Texas] and the water was way up high next to the houses, and the river was very high. There were two boys, I can't remember their names, but they had a canoe. I wanted to go in that canoe so bad, but Momma wouldn't let me.
...I remember when my little brother died. I remember Daddy picked me up and let me see the baby. I can't remember what it looked like, but I remember the little white gown [Louise interrupted]
Louise: It was between 1911 and 1913 that the baby died.
Lotta: Daddy liked to have had a fit. It was a little boy. I don't know, but I think Momma must have fallen....She almost lost her life I think.
End of Transcript.
I interviewed Lotta Mae to get genealogical information about the Wolfe family. However, it is not often a great-nephew develops a special relationship with a great aunt. Over the next few years, Lotta and I became good friends and I truly grew to love her dearly. She is missed.
She told me a lot more during my visits with her. I transcribed the above directly from the tapes I made during the interviews, so the words and the sentence structures are all hers.
Lotta loved genealogy and because she had gathered so much data and had remembered the stories she had heard, we are blessed with some of our own family traditions and legends. I think she would be proud to know that she has passed these gifts on to the next generations of our good family.
Here is a letter she sent me c1989:
No comments:
Post a Comment