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PAGE 5. James Thomas Watts was an industrious man. He was a school teacher early on, on the School Board as well as the Board at the Bank, was a farmer and became a miller. After their marriage, he and Gillie lived in Perryville, KY with his aunt Mary Hart who was the widow of Dr. John Hart. (Mary Williams Hart was the sister of Zerilda Williams Watts, the mother of James Thomas Watts). I believe at that time he taught school. Their son Emery Willis was born in Boyle County on 27 February 1886 while they were living with Aunt Mary Hart. The couple then moved to Washington County KY near Jenkinsville. James had a mill there and probably farmed also. The couple had the following children: 1. Emery Willis Watts born 27 February 1886 died February 28 1976 age 90. Note the name Schooling given to the daughter Margie Schooling Watts, a surname that reappears after three generations. Also we can see that all of the children lived to adulthood and many lived to an advanced age. After the move to Washington County where they lived for some time, James Thomas and Gillie moved with their family back to Boyle County just outside of Perryville. They bought the “Old Duggan Place”. This farm which originally had 500 acres is located at what is now 3945 Webster Road. The home is a beautiful two story white home and has been lovingly restored by the current owners Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cook. James Thomas Watts farmed and owned a mill in the outskirts of Perryville. The farm had a creek, large barn, a large vegetable garden, an apple orchard, pastures and fields for growing grain etc. My mother has many fond memories of her life in this home where she was born. She and I have spent many hours talking about her family and their lives. Mother was born here on 22 July 1908. That evening several of her sisters had dates and mother was dressed in a long dress and brought out on a pillow for her sister’s boyfriends to see. Her grandmother Emily Shackelford Huff was living with them at this time and had apparently been doing so since they had lived in Washington Co as she was in their home in a 1900 Federal Census there. Emma and Benny were a married African American couple who worked for the Watts family. Every afternoon, when mother walked home from school in Perryville, she would stop by Emma and Benny’s home and Emma would give her teacakes that she had baked. Mother loved Emma like a third mother. Her second mother was her sister Lillie, the identical twin to Gillie. When the twins were small, my grandfather would take them to his mill, put them on the table, tell the men who was who. Then he would ask the men to close their eyes and perhaps have the twins change places. He would then ask the men to open their eyes and tell him which twin was which. They were frequently wrong. When they lived in Perryville, Emery and Zerilda were in college. My grandfather took Aunt Rilda to Berea College, where she didn’t want to go, so she got on the train and beat him home. He finally took her to Bowling Green to college with her brother Emery (Bowling Green is where their Sweeney-Williams greatgrandmother was from). They both became school teachers. There is a story that Uncle Emery went to Eastern Kentucky to teach in a one room schoolhouse. There were some rather large boys in the school and they had run off about 3 or 4 schoolteachers already. Uncle Emery took his pistol with him, shot some glass bottles off the fence, laid his loaded pistol on the desk and said “Now boys, we’re going to have school”. He had no more trouble after that. Mother remembers the gathering of the crops, making sausage etc. in the fall, gathering apples and making cider, dried apples and applesauce, and helping to can the vegetables from the garden. They canned everything they ate with the exception of coffee, tea, sugar and a few other things. Grandmother made the breads, pies and cakes but the girls took care of the other chores in the kitchen. Mother washed dishes when she got big enough to stand on a stool. My grandfather evidently believed the old adage that idol hands are the devil’s workshop and so he kept everyone busy. My mother remembers also that all the canned fruits and vegetables were out in the cellar which had a trapdoor from the porch. That way an even temperature was kept all year long. She told me about the sauerkraut that was made in pottery jars with weights on top. She listed the kinds of dishes they had for meals, meat was one of them but not a big part of meals, all kinds of vegetables such as green beans, potatoes, peas and in the summer fresh tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and cabbage. She also said that grandmother made wonderful jam cakes, green tomato pies, stack pies and vinegar pies (which taste like lemon pies). She also made elderberry wine. There seems to have been a great variety of food with no modern preservatives. To add to their diet, she gathered fresh wild greens, such as dandelion greens, in the spring and early summer. Gillie’s mother Emily Shackelford Huff, born in Casey County KY, gathered herbs with which she made medicine to treat her family, including all her grandchildren. Twenty three of her twenty four grandchildren survived to adulthood-Pauline Huff died of typhoid fever at age 10. She was my mother’s close friend and playmate as well as cousin. In 1914, while the James T. Watts family was living in Perryville, his mother Zerilda Williams Watts became ill. He rode his horse from Perryville to his parents home near Cornishville and would stay for days. He would come home for a while to tend to the farm and other business and would return to his parent’s home. His mother died 27 March 1914. My grandfather was said to have loved his mother dearly. Emily Shackelford Huff continued to live with the James Watts family and in 1909 a family picture was made in front of the home in Perryvile which included her, her daughter and son-in-law and all twelve children. It is a delightful and precious photograph because it does show the whole family. My mother told me that her grandfather William Russell Watts Jr. was blind when she was a child and when he came to visit he would ask her to come to him so he could see how tall she had grown. She said he reminded her of Santa Claus with his gray beard. After the death of his wife, he and his son Pleasant William lived together in a settlement or town called Bushtown near where they had lived. They had a store there. When the house and store burned, the men took William Russell Watts outside with all the furniture and sat him on a sofa. Later he laughed when they said how bad the fire was and said “Yes, but it’s hell on those rats”. In January of 1918, Emily Shackelford Huff went to visit her son Tilford Marion Huff and his family in Mercer Co. KY and caught a cold which rapidly developed into pneumonia. She died on 02 January 1915 and was buried in the Huff plot in Springhill Cemetery in Harrodsburg, KY. It was after this that Gillie told her husband that she was now ready to move anywhere he wanted to go. By this time he was ready to move to Mississippi instead if Missouri. Several of the children had married and did not go to Mississippi. At this point I will list all the children and their marriages as well as their children. 1. Emery Willis married Vests Campbell who lived in Perryville, KY. They had 2. Zerilda Emily married Minor Varner Lester Harrodsburg, KY They had 3. Gillie Thomas Watts married Jordan Carpenter from Perryville, KY. They had 4. Lillie Leon Watts married Charles Leonard-no children. 5. James William Watts married Nevada Green. They had 6. John Charles Watts married Willie Mae Smith They had 7. Tilford Marion Watts married Sallie Foster. They had 8. Fay Watts married Rupert Harmon they had 9. Marie Watts married Jefferson Davis Jordan They had 10. Reid Beckham Watts married Russell Marksberry -no children 11. Margie Schooling Watts married Sidney Dade Cox. They had 12. Sarah Beatrice Watts married High Lewis Vance. They had There were thirty one grandchildren born to Gillie Thomas Huff Watts and James Thomas Watts. Twenty eight of them survived to adulthood. Of the twelve families, two remained in Kentucky-the Lester and Leonard families. The James William Watts family moved to Louisiana for awhile but returned to Kentucky to live. The Emery Watts family moved from Kentucky to Ohio. Marie and Margie married men from Mississippi and remained there, while the rest of the family eventually moved to Louisiana. John, Tilford and Reid as well as Gillie married and remained there. Beatrice married a man from Louisiana and moved to Chicago, Illinois where Marilyn was born. Shortly thereafter they moved to Atlanta, Georgia where six years later Virginia was born. We will now resume the story of the James Watts family as they moved to West Point, Mississippi. My grandfather bought a place in Westpoint, MS and moved the family there in 1918. They left behind Emery, Zerilda, Lillie and their families. Not long after this the family moved to Columbus MS in Lowndes Co which is in Eastern Mississippi on the Tombigbee River. It is in the blackbelt of Mississippi which consists of fertile black soil and is excellent for farming. Aunt Marie went to Columbus and got a job as well as a room with a family. Grandfather Watts went after her and said no daughter of his was going to work in a store, and brought her home. After that she spent a great deal of time on the front porch in good weather crocheting and tatting. She and Margie married while the family lived in Columbus-Marie to Jeff Jordan and Margie to Sidney Cox-cousins. They had families and remained there the rest of their lives. The two families were very close and on Sundays after church had dinner together, alternating homes. My mother attended a one room schoolhouse there and her father hired the schoolteacher who stayed with the family and drove a horse and buggy to school. My mother was not overly fond of school and so she would ride her horse up under the bridge and when she heard the teacher’s buggy go over the bridge, she would come out and ride her horse around the countryside all day until time to go home. I don’t imagine that lasted too long. The family lived a fairly long distance from other families and my grandfather had a lot of African Americans working for him. The countryside, climate and living conditions were quite different from the Kentucky they had left, and when ever the family heard the song My Old Kentucky Home played, the women would cry and the men would fuss-all except my grandfather. I think he almost had a rebellion on his hands. After a few years my grandmother, mother and several uncles went back to Kentucky for a while. After my grandfather moved to Louisiana to his other place near Tallulah, LA across the river from Vicksburg, MS the family was reunited again. The land owned by the family was next to land that had once been owned by Jefferson Davis. My grandfather raised cotton and cattle on his place and called it a cattle ranch. When the flood of 1927 came after the levee broke and water rose up to the house, my grandfather sent his cattle across the Mississippi River to Vicksburg and higher ground for safety. The family stayed in their home and the water rose up only to the top step of the porch. They were indeed lucky. My mother married Hugh Lewis Vance and moved to Chicago, ILL where I was born. When I was 18 months old we moved to Atlanta GA and when I was 6 years old my sister Virginia (Ginger) was born. We moved at that time about 6 blocks away and I went to a new school with new friends in the school and the neighborhood. It was at this time that both my grandparents died on 12 December 1938. My grandparents had still maintained their church membership in the Benton Baptist Church in Mercer Co. KY. Their funeral however was held in the Bruner’s Chapel Baptist Church on the Mackville Road and they were buried in the Springhill Cemetery in Harrodsburg KY. It was said to be one of the largest funerals in Mercer County. I remember my grandparents just on one visit when I must have been 5 years old. I remember my grandfather sitting on a bench in the backyard and in the breakfast room eating cornbread and drinking buttermilk. I remember my grandmother taking me out to feed the baby chickens in the chicken yard. Unfortunately I also remember I got into some stinging nettles or something and had to come back to the house. It was a fond memory anyway. My mother told me that shortly before his death, my grandfather was told by his doctor that he had “little tumors” on his retina and that he would eventually go blind. His father and grandfather before him had been blind so he knew what that could mean for his life. There are many causes of blindness as well as many conditions of the retina that could lead to blindness. I see a retina specialist once a year to check for any reappearance of damage from Sarcoidosis and asked him about what could have been meant by such a description. He said it was impossible to say now, that it could have been due to several conditions so I think we may never know what the condition was that was being described. After my grandparent’s death as well as before, my family visited my mother’s family every year. Most of my mother’s sibling’s lived on farms and so were not free to travel. This meant that we visited them for the most part. I always looked forward to seeing my relatives. I remember that Aunt Lillie, who lived at Rosehill outside of Harrodsburg, KY, had a dog her father had given her. His name was Frank and he was sable and white, and looked like a Collie but with a shorter face. I fell in love with Collies then. She also had another one later which was black and white. It was not until recently that I discovered that these dogs were American Farm Working Collies and were descended from sheepdogs found on the border lands of England and Scotland – Scottish sheep dogs, Cumberland sheep dogs as well as Welsh sheep dogs. They are a variable breed but are very good at herding, driving and guarding not only sheep but cattle as well as chickens and other poultry. Many years later my Uncle Emery told me that when he was farming in Kentucky that one day he took his sheepdog to another farm to get some cattle to take home. He and the dog were driving the cattle home when he met a friend and stopped to talk. Time passed and when Uncle Emery looked up the dog and the cattle were gone. When he got home, the dog had driven the cattle home, put them in the barnyard and was guarding them. What a wonderful and valuable canine companion. During one visit to Kentucky, I visited the Hungate School aka Rosehill School on the banks of the Chaplin River with some of my Lester cousins. Aunt Lillie and Uncle Charlie had a store at Rosehill that included everything from food to clothing and farm implements as well as a post office, a place for candling eggs, and a separate voting building. Uncle Charlie had a lot of pretty cats at the store outside and some particularly pretty gray ones he said were Maltese cats. After closing on Saturday night, the family and friends would gather at the store to visit. What fun! I used to enjoy listening to my aunt’s conversations when we were visiting, but I would often sneak off and listen to my uncle’s conversations. It was usually much more interesting and full of family stories. As I worked on the material for this book, it brought back many memories – funny, happy, poignant and sad but I am thankful for a wonderful family that gave me each and every one of these treasured memories. go to Richard Watts Family of Virginia and Kentucky, pg. 6 back to Watts Hays Letters Home Page (NOTE: If you have stories to contribute from your branch of one of these families, please email Marian Franklin. mfranklin@wattshaysletters.com.)
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