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MEMORIES OF EARL COUNCILMAN
This is a living document in that a person's memory of events may allow the information below to be updated or expanded over time. If updated, the revision number will change. This is revision 1, dated September 20, 1999. Also see related pictures: The Brenda Ray Shell Collection
By Earl Councilman, Virginia Beach, VA
I wasn’t born in Glencoe, but I called Glencoe home for most of my growing-up years. When I was born on February 23, 1916, my parents lived in Carolina, a small mill village just a mile or two down the river from Glencoe. My father was Alvis Worth Councilman and my mother was Lizzy Mae Caulder. She died when I was only about 18 months old. My father’s sister, Ada Councilman, lived in Glencoe with her husband, James Waddell, and their family. Although they had a house full of kids, my aunt and uncle offered to help out by letting me come to live with them for a while in Glencoe. I never left there until I went into the Army in 1932, at age 16.
There were nine Waddell children, 8 girls and 1 boy. The girls were Eula, Anna, Inez, Louise, Edith, Mary, Brock, and Ometa. The boy’s name was Hal Gordan Waddell. Anna went by the nickname "Tim" because she had rickets when she was younger and was much smaller than the others. To me, these were my sisters and brothers, and Mr. Waddell was my father.
THE BIG HOUSE
My father managed and operated the company store. We had probably the best house in the village other than the Holt’s home. It burned down in the 1950s, but was located near where the Holts, and later the Greens, lived. You can still see the driveway to the house now. As soon as you turn off highway 62 onto River Road, the driveway is immediately to the right. It went up the hill, turned to the left, and right up to the house. It was a circle driveway, so you could go around and go back down the hill. When you got to the bottom, you could turn left and go back to the bridge, or turn right and go over to the store in Glencoe.
It was a two story house with a real wide set of front steps, coming right up the middle to the front door. It wasn’t a typical mill house, but more of a colonial style with a porch that went about half way around each side. There were pillars all around the porch, I’d say the pillars were probably 8 foot tall, holding the porch roof up. The house had maybe 10 or 15 rooms, and a big basement, which was probably the only basement in the village other than the Holt home. There was a fireplace in every room.
When you walked in the front door, you entered the reception hall, complete with its own fireplace. I can remember it had a place where you could hang your raincoat and put your overshoes away.
To the right of the hall was what you’d say was the family room. Then if you went straight on back, through the family room, there was a bedroom. Off to the side, there was kind of a porch that was all glassed in and it was a small bedroom.
To the left of the hall was the dining room that had pocket doors that slid back into the wall. Further down the hall on the left was the butler’s pantry. Finally, at the end of the hall, on the left, was the kitchen.
The kitchen had a huge cast iron stove. The stove had a water tank in the end that was filled from the well outside. We would shut the well off with a valve and then pump the water until the wooden tank up in the air would run over, and when it ran over you knew it was full, so you would open the well valve back open and then you could get a bucket of water if you needed it for drinking. But the water in the wooden tank furnished water to the kitchen.
There was one spicket in the kitchen sink that was for cold water. Another spicket opened up into the tank on the end of the stove to let that tank fill up. As my mother cooked, she also heated that tank of water so that we had hot water for bathing and shaving and such.
The kitchen stove burned wood, but the rest of the house, all the fireplaces, burned coal. I remember my job was that I had to bring a bucket of coal for every one, every day. I can remember pulling my little red wagon, filled with coal, and coming around and bringing it to the back door and filling the buckets out of the wagon and then taking the coal into the house and putting a bucket next to each fireplace. The last spanking that I got was for telling my mother that I wasn’t going to do it - wasn’t going to bring the coal. So when my father came home, he laid it on me!
We had a path from the house down through a meadow where the cows were and across the creek, little step rocks across the creek, and up by the houses in the village.
THE OWNER’S HOUSE
The big house was right near several other houses. A little stretch of property and some bushes and woods, and then there was the mill owner’s house, the Holt place, and later the Greens. That house was an elite type of place, they had a butler and everything.
Also nearby, there was one mill type house and then right after that was another one, so I think there was two. Richard Duck, the butler to the Holt family, lived in one of those houses. Richard was near enough, and I think they had some kind of signal type thing that the Greens or the Holts, whichever one happened to live there at the time, could signal him to come over.
They threw these humongus parties. They had drinks and they had women and they really had a big time there all the time. They also had a parrot. That parrot used to repeat the things that he heard at night and during the parties and at other times and people used to want to come to our house and go up in the back yard and sit and wait to see if they could hear the parrot say anything, but they never did. I’ve heard the parrot talk and I used to go to the house when Richard was there, not when the owners were there, but when Richard was there. I could go through a fenced in place in the back and go over there and he used to have cakes and sweets and all and he used to give me something, whatever they had. That was always a very pretty house in those days.
Behind our house, there was this meadow, there was a little creek down from our house. There was a little meadow that went down through there and up and also the owners had to go through the same meadow, a different path, but the same meadow, to go to the office in the morning, and they always walked, they never drove the car. One of the younger brothers, either Walter or Robert would come later with a car in case they needed it during the day, but Mr. Green and the other son, the two of them would always walk to work, over to the office, in the morning.
THE COMPANY STORE AND OFFICE
My father ran the company store for most of the time from 1916 to the 1940s. He opened it about 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning and kept it open until 9 o’clock at night. He had a man, Mr. Mansfield, who used to help him in the store after his shift in the mill was over. Mr. Mansfield lived on the back street.
There is a partition and what looks like a pay window at the front of the company office, but that’s not what it was used for. If anybody with business to conduct went into the office (a mill worker, a salesman, or whatever), they talked to Mr. Tyson through that little opening that looks like a pay window. Mr. Tyson ran the company office and lived in the house right across from it.
The mill workers were paid out of the company store, not the office. Thursday was payday. The money arrived from the bank on Wednesday, went into the safe in the company office, and was paid out on Thursday.
To guard the money, my father would sleep at the office every Wednesday night with his gun. I remember his gun because I used to go and stay with him a lot. He slept in a bedroom at the rear of the office. There was a door between the store and the office. You could go into the office from the store or from the front porch of the store. The owner of the mill, Mr. Green, and Mr. Tyson, and all them used the door on the store porch to go into the office but my father went into the office through the door from the store. He would go through there and there was the main office where Mr. Tyson kept the books. Mr. Tyson was the only worker in the office other than his son, Tom, who came by after he finished school to help and to learn that part of the business.
We went through the second office, that was the owner’s office, Mr. Green’s office, and then we went back to the next big room and that was the bedroom. It had everything in there. It had a fireplace, a bed, and a dresser, and I think it had one of those big bowls and a water pitcher, sitting on a cabinet.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Tyson took the money out of the safe and gave it to my father. It was already in envelopes with everybody’s name on it and he took that in the store and there was one drawer there that had slotted places with initials on ‘em - A, B, C, D, and on up. Whoever the person’s name was, their envelope went in that slot.
The workers came into the store to get paid. The money had to be given to the worker; it couldn’t be given to a spouse unless a prior arrangement had been made. Mr. Waddell would ask the worker how much they wanted to pay on their account. In some case, he had orders from the office to open the envelope when he paid them and take out so much - one or two dollars or whatever.
Right in back of the store there was a window that looked back over the dye plant and freight section of the mill, and there was a desk build into the wall, a slanted affair with little cubby holes and he had a tall stool that he sat on when he had something to do there. The cash register was directly on a counter in front of that window and his stool was always in back of the cash register between there and the window.
Next to that was a huge icebox with a lid that you lifted up to open. It had a rope with a weight on it. I remember he kept meats in there and I don’t ever remember having spoiled meat or anything. That was right next to the cash register on one side, and on the other side was a little showcase with various things like pocket knifes.
My father handled the mail. The mail came to him in a bag and he sorted it and put it in the slots at the front of the store where it belonged. Workers would bring the outgoing mail to the store and give it to him and he had a place for it there.
Right there where that mail box and all was, at one time there was a nice marble-topped back counter with cabinets underneath and a mirror and everything right next to those mail slots. That used to be, at one time, a soda fountain. Underneath there, in those cabinets - I remember I used to look through everything - there were still containers of juices, of flavored coca cola and cherry and stuff like that still in jars and jugs. But the soda fountain itself, the front part of it, had been taken away and instead there were about 4 little seats, like theater seats, that had been installed there. If you needed to try on shoes or anything that’s where you sat down to try them on. They sold shoes, and overalls, and men’s work clothes, and hardware - it was a general store, they sold everything there.
My father had a counter that started there at the soda fountain, at the mail thing, and that counter went in a "U" shape around the whole store. You could walk from there the whole length of the store, back to the back, turn by the icebox, come by his desk, come around by the glass case, come up the other side, you passed the notions, the women’s things, the women’s underclothes and all that were in boxes were along that portion. Then the next portion was the dry goods counter, which was the cloth and all like they made in the mill. There was a long counter there where he used to lay the bolts of cloth to open it up when somebody wanted to buy 5 yards of red gingham or calico, or whatever. He’d lay it on that counter and unfold it and measure it and cut it. And then, you came to the shoes. The next place was shoes and there was another little glass showcase there that had some women’s items in it such as gloves and such as that. Then right there was a telephone, which was the only telephone in the village except in the office. If anybody wanted to use the phone they had to come to the store and ask to use that telephone. There was no charge to use it.
Now, when you came down from the mail box and the soda fountain, the first thing you came to was another showcase and in that showcase was candy - strictly candy. And in front of that showcase was baskets with potatoes, sweet potatoes, baking potatoes, whatever was in baskets in front of that showcase. And then there was a split in the counter which you could walk in and go in the back of the store, and that’s where the bagged flour was, and the corn meal, and there was some animal feed back there, like oats and all.
There was a pump back in the corner of that room that pumped kerosene. I remember when kerosene was 5 cents a gallon. Also back there were the nails, the plow parts, the hardware, anything that the farmers used that they could buy there was in that room. There was a big door at the back end of that room where trucks unloaded the merchandise when they came in. They unloaded it and brought it in through that back door, not through the store’s front door.
Right in the center of the store was the big potbelly stove. It sat in a squared off thing of sand. We had some stools in the store around the counter, on the side where the icebox was, and the cash register, and the other way where the canned good and the pay drawer was and the cigarettes were. Cigarettes were 10 cents a pack. I remember they had Chesterfields, Lucky Strikes, Camels, and Wings. There was no such thing as Pall Mall and all of them, they didn’t have those in those days.
I remember my father, even though he ran the store, if he wanted a cake or cookie or if he wanted a coca cola, you’d think after running a place 50 or 60 years he would just take it. It was almost like it belonged to him. But if I had a cake or a cookie or a coca cola, I remember him reaching in his back pocket, and getting his little, long wallet, it wasn’t a wallet, it had a little snap on it, it was a long leather bag. He would reach in there, and if I had a coca cola, he’d reach in there and get a nickel and ring it up. The same thing if I went to the cookie box that was right in the middle of the store, if I went to that cookie box and opened it and took out a johnny cake, he’d go in that little bag and get a penny and put it in the register.
In the winter time when it got dark and it was cold, people would come and sit in the store around the stove on those stools. Then, when my father closed the store at 9 o’clock, they would go outside and sit on the front steps. The mill provided power to the homes until 9 o’clock and then they turned it off. After that, the people in the village lit kerosene lamps for indoors and lanterns for outside.
The store porch was a meeting place and all the men met there at night to sit, chew tobacco, smoke and such. Dan Riggins, the night watchman for the company, made his rounds through the mill, turning his key at the various watchman stations. After that, he would come over and sit on the store porch and wait there until the last kids who was gone to town, or wherever, came back. He would always sit there and wait for me to come and we would sit and talk there for, sometimes, a couple hours after I came back from town, walking from Burlington. He would be sitting on the store porch with his lantern and his clock.
Mr. Tyson, who lived across the street, would sit over there on his porch and watch to see what was going on until 10 o’clock. That was his bedtime and he would go in to bed at 10 o’clock.
MOVE TO BURLINGTON
We later moved out of the big house and into a house in Burlington. I think one of the foremen they hired moved into that house after we move out. We stayed in Burlington for a few years, but my father continued to run the store. He also continued to sleep in the company office every Wednesday night to guard the payroll.
BACK TO GLENCOE
After a few years, we moved back to Glencoe and lived in the house next to the Tyson family (second house on the right of the front street). It was not nearly as big as the big house we lived in at first, but I have good memories of it.
When you walked in the front door, to the right was the living room. The living room, in our case, would have a piano. It would have a settee, as they called it in those times. We didn’t have what we call end tables now that go at the end of a couch. It would have a couple of straight-back chairs that would be upholstered type chairs, and maybe have one rocker. Mostly always that room would have curtains.
To the left of the front door was the sitting room, which most everybody made into a bedroom. My brother and his wife had that for their bedroom and that’s where the fireplace was. Normally, guests were entertained in the living room, but if they were relatives or somebody you knew real well, you took them to the sitting room. This is where the family sat in the evening until they got ready to go to bed. The kitchen, of course, was heated with the kerosene cooking stove that would put out right much heat, with the oven on and the burners on, and that was all fueled with kerosene. The fireplace in the sitting room was either wood or coal.
Mill houses were very drafty. When you went to bed, you really wrapped up real good. The only heat upstairs was the heat that rose from the fireplace downstairs. The chimney went up the north side of the house but they didn’t cut into it and put a fireplace on the second floor. There was no vents or anything cut in the ceiling to help the heat rise.
We had an oil stove that was about 3 foot tall and about 12 inches in diameter and I think it had a one gallon kerosene tank on the bottom and the wick was round, about four inches in diameter. That was what you would put in other rooms that you wanted to warm. It had a handle on it and you could pick it up and move it around.
Our house, being a little different from any other house in the village, you came out of the kitchen onto the back porch where the icebox was set on the back porch. This way, the ice man would come, whether you were home or not, and he knew how much ice to leave you. I think with us, he always went across the street before he left and got paid by my father. But most everybody had their money ready when the ice man came. From our back porch, you went down another set of steps, across a little wooden walkway, to another little building that had a fireplace in it, a big huge fireplace and that was my mother and father’s bedroom. They didn’t sleep in the main house, they slept down in that bedroom that was off from the house, by about 10 feet.
My father would come home every night, except that pay night, but he never came into the big house, unless he was home for a meal to eat. Even when I was 10 or 11 years old, he never liked to shave. I always shaved him. With a safety razor, not with a straight razor. He would tell me he wanted a shave tonight and he would come and sit in the kitchen and I had a mug with a brush, and soap was in the mug and I’d soap up his face real good. He had a big mustache and I used to shave all the area around except where the mustache was. Once in a while he would go to the barber shop and they would shave his mustache for him.
My room was upstairs right over the living room. I went up the stairs and the stairs came up into my room. But then you made an immediate right and went into the other room and that’s where the girls slept. But my room was the first room that you came to when you came up the stairs. I had a bed and a dresser, usually just two pieces, and maybe a chair. Three of the girls slept in the other bedroom. The other girls had married by then and moved out.
We didn’t have a wash bowl in the bedroom. In the summertime you went down on the back porch where the water buckets were. Some people had installed a sink which just had a drain going either down to the drain ditch underneath or something and they used to do things that you would need a sink for outside. But mostly in those days they had what they called wash pans. It was just a metal pan and you would take what we call today a sponge bath.
Of course, in the winter time, you used to get your hot water ready and you’d get a room ready with the big heater and you’d get that room warm and you’d get your big container of water and you’d take a complete sponge bath.
And then you had the outhouse. Ours was kinda deluxe, it was a two-seater, most of them being one. There was one per house.
Our water well was situated between our house and the Tysons and we both used it. But mostly, each house had its own well. And that was with a crank with a wooden bucket that went down and then you cranked it up.
There were 3 sisters living at home then, the others were married. The youngest was too little to work, but the other two worked in the city in a hosiery mill and they made a lot of money. Hosiery workers always made a lot of money. In fact I went to work there myself after awhile, and the only thing I had to do was clean the machines. I did that on a Saturday, and I could do about 3 or 4 machines and I got a dollar and a half a machine. That was good money in those days for someone my age, so I had lots of "friends."
Two of my married sisters, "Tim" and Inez, worked in the Glencoe mill. I think they were weavers. Inez and her husband had their own place up in the country. My sister "Tim" married one of the Allen boys and lived in their house. The other two sisters lived in Fayetteville.
But I was in the Glencoe mill all the time. Everyone knew me. I went in every department and I knew the bosses. I used to help everybody. I used to go in the mill and help them load the carts and push the carts, but not for pay. My father was probably making more than a mill hand was making, being responsible for the store and all.
THE MILL
When you walked in the front entrance of the mill, at the ground level, and looked in both directions, you’d see weaving machines. The weaving machines wove the thread into cloth. The machines were oriented left and right as you walked in. They were very noisy, and the reason they were so noisy - everything was belt driven - big wide belts. And the safety factor was awful, I mean those women, the way they wore the long skirts, easily one of those belts could have caught a skirt and yanked them into the wheel. It could have been very easy. But it didn’t happen, I guess they were extra careful.
The shuttle that they put the thread in that shot back and forth across the other threads to make the weaving complete, had a name and I used to remember the company that manufactured those, but I don’t remember anymore. Sometimes the shuttles would go out of control and go shooting across the room. I don’t remember anybody ever getting hurt with one of them, but it could happen. I know they went through windows sometimes. There were a lot of windows in that mill, in both front and back.
But I do remember a couple of times somebody got hurt at the mill. A hand caught in a belt, or whatever. Some of them got pretty good injuries, but nothing that didn’t cure, didn’t get well. There wasn’t any real emphasis on safety, safety just wasn’t a factor. As poor as the company was, I assume they operated on such a small budget, I remember 14 cents an hour. I assume if somebody got hurt on the job, they got paid right on.
The far right end of the first floor toward where the water wheel was that ran the mill, you could go down that way a portion, and you had to come outside and go a ways before you got back into the mill. That end up there was the dye plant and that’s where they carded the cotton and separated the cotton and washed it and pulled it apart. They had claws that just tore the cotton off in hunks and it was washed and carded.
There were stairs at the middle and at the tower, and at the right end there were stairs to go up to the 2nd floor. I don’t believe there were stairs at the left end because there was no reason to get into the mill at the left end.
The second floor is where they spun the cotton into thread. The whole floor was devoted to that or something to do with that portion of making the thread. That floor was not as noisy as the first floor.
The third floor, that was where a lot of the carding was done and the cotton was processed. The cotton was processed from the top down. It was carded on the third floor, moved down to the second floor for spinning, and down to the first floor for weaving.
The water turbine, or "wheel" for powering the mill was in a smaller building on the right side of the main mill building. Depending on weather conditions and time of year, the generator wheel got plugged up with eels. They would shut it down and men would get down in there and pull out the eels. They would call black folks across the river and they would come over and get the eels for cooking.
In a bad summer, when we had a real dry summer, people didn’t get to work because there was no water to run the mill. And then we had no lights at night or anything. People didn’t get paid when there was no work, but they had credit at the store.
I think they had hoses and pumping equipment in the mill in case there was a fire, but they didn’t have anything for the village houses.
Across from the mill, to the right of the water tower on the front street, there was a cotton warehouse (not the quonset hut). I remember seeing the truck parked there a lot - the truck with the solid rubber tires and the chain drive. I used to check it out a lot to see how they were driving a truck with a chain. That was a Packard truck. [PICTURE] They used it to haul cotton out from Burlington. Before that, they used horse and wagon, but that was before my time.
THE NEIGHBORS
The people in the village sometimes moved from house to house, so you need to consider the year a person is talking about to know where everybody was. A case in point is our own move from the big house, to Burlington, and finally back to the village to settle next to the Tyson house. As I describe the neighbors below, I’m talking about approximately 1930, although most of the folks lived in the houses long before that and/or continued to live in the same place long after that.
Mr. Tyson, the company bookkeeper, lived in the house on the corner, across from the company office and store. His wife’s name was Mary, I think. They had a son, Tom.
We lived in the second house, next to the Tyson family. Between our house and the next house, there was a path, like a walk path, from there down through the bushes, cross the creek, and up a little hill, and that went right to the owner’s house.
The Durham family lived in the third house. I didn’t know the father since he was dead. The head of the family was the oldest son, Charlie. He had a younger brother, Herbert, and a sister named Hazel.
I can’t remember the name of the family that lived in the fourth house, but I remember they had a pretty daughter. I think he was a Reverend at one time at the Baptist church. It wasn’t Rev. Hackney (pastor 1925-1928) or Wilson (pastor beginning in 1934).
The barber shop was next. The man who ran it opened it when he wanted to - he didn’t have regular hours like open in the morning and stay the day. I don’t remember his name. I don’t believe he was a village resident. The shop was one chair, a small little place.
Directly in back of the barber shop, oh maybe a hundred feet was the Masonic Hall. Children were told by their families to never go near that building. They had quite a grouping. Some members came from further out in the country. They didn’t just live there in the village, they came from other places. I’d see them when they came for the meetings. I used to ask questions and my father used to get kinda mad - "It’s none of your business!" Both my father and brother were 32nd degree masons. I’d say there was probably 10 or 12 in the village who were members. When they had the meetings there would be 15 or 20 people in all. There were some cars that came so they had to be from further away because anybody in the village would have walked to the Masonic Hall. The building was in the style of an A-type roof, long shed. There was a road from the front street up to the building and you could drive between the barber shop and the Allens.
The first house after the barber shop was the Allen family. They were involved with my family because two of the Allen boys, Mike and Lawrence, married two of my sisters. Lawrence was the one that ran the power plant up by the big country club, up in the country.
The second house after the barber shop was the Hurley family. Marshall Hurley was killed during the war; he was a tail gunner. He had a younger brother who was crazy about sports but I can’t think of his name. His father and mother, I don’t remember their names, but I remember they were very nice people.
The third house after the barber shop was the Faucette family. The father worked in the mill, as did one of his sons. The other son, Arthur, worked for the newspaper in Burlington as a linotype operator. He was crippled, having one leg shorter than the other.
The fourth house after the barber shop was the Murray family. Their daughter Kodell married my brother Hal. Her brother was Allie, and the father was a real tall man. His name could very well have been Walter, either Walter Allie, or Allie Walter, and Allie could have been a "Jr". But there was just one boy and the one girl. I remember the Murrays had a Dodge touring car.
I don’t remember who lived in the next two houses. The last house on the right side of the front street was the Wilson family. I think they were related to Ralph Wilson. I think his brother was married to Mrs. Wilson. Her son was Clay, who I understand later became a minister. Clay was the only son that she had that stayed, and they always lived together.
On the opposite side of the street, in the first house past the store, I think there was a couple of widows, or maybe one widow. It seems maybe her husband may have been a foreman in the mill and she was allowed to stay there, but there was no man there.
Ralph Wilson, who became the pastor of the Baptist church in 1934, lived in the second house.
Between the first house and the second house, near the street, there was the ice house, with a big tree next to it. It was a big hole, dug down 30 or 40 feet into the earth, with a little house built over it. When the river froze, they cut chunks of ice and stored it in the ice house. They used to have saw dust and they would pack the ice down in there, and it would still be ice there when the next summer came. Of course, us kids stayed away from that.
The third house after the store was a house that was always empty and it was like a storage place.
The next building was the Methodist church.
I can’t remember who lived in the first two houses past the church. I also can’t remember the name of the family that lived in the third house, but they had a daughter named Becky, I remember that. One time she came up to the river where we had a place where we went swimming. She came up the river and she caught us all with no clothes on, swimming, and she wouldn’t leave so we could get out. Everybody remembered Becky. I think her mother and father wore out her backside because she did that. She sat there for a long while and wouldn’t let us out of the water.
I can’t remember who lived in the next two houses either. There was a nice house that sit right close to the Baptist church, and that was Phillips, I believe Roy, but I’m not sure. The house was about 75 feet before the Baptist church. That was actually the end of everything on the left hand side going up on the front street. That’s after you pass the Wilsons on the right . The mill didn’t own the Phillips house, it was owned by the Baptist church. It seems the church pastor lived in one of the village homes, so he must have also worked in the mill.
I don’t remember many of the families who lived on the back street. It wasn’t clannish, but you just knew the families of the kids that you played with. Dan, the night watchman who waited on the porch till all the kids got in, lived in one of the houses on Millrace Road. Sammy Rice, who was a great baseball player for the Glencoe team, lived in one of the last houses on the right side of the back street.
THE TEXTILE LEAGUE
Most mills had a baseball team. The Glencoe team was good because of these one or two players, in particular Sammy Rice. I sure do wish I was a promoter in those days, because if the proper person would have gotta hold of him, he would have made the big league.
The Glencoe team was made up by the adults getting together and making up the team and they all got enthused enough about it to donate for uniforms, because they had uniforms. I don’t think the mill contributed to it. They played other mill teams, school teams, but mostly other mill teams. Glencoe was pretty good on account of Sammy, he could catch a ball - he could be laying on the ground and stick his hand up and the ball would go right in it. He was an outfielder I believe, and an excellent hitter too.
The field was across the street from the school, on the same side as the Baptist church. I don’t think there is anything left of the field now.
THE SCHOOL
The Glencoe school was way on up past the Baptist church. If you went on down the road where the school was, out in the country to Pleasant Grove, that was where the high school was.
The old school was made of wood and was replaced by a brick school in 1937. I never went to the brick school. The old wood school was just, I believe, two rooms. You walked in the front door and you could go right or left. There was one room to the right and one to the left. I don’t know how many grades exactly that it covered, I know I was there in the first and second grade. I don’t remember the third grade. And then, not too long after that, we moved to Burlington and I started going to school in Burlington.
THE CLUBHOUSE
Up in the country where the power plant was, there was what I would call the "clubhouse," or "lodge," or "hunting club". That’s where the Holts used to take everybody to stay when they came in groups from New York and where ever, and they used to hunt and so forth. The clubhouse was where the Holts entertained their out of town guests that came in to buy materials and drink and party - they used to have big parties.
WALKING TO TOWN
When we wanted to go to Burlington, we just walked - it was only 3 miles. I remember the depression, 1929, when all the banks went broke. I had a dollar in the bank in Burlington that I had saved from school stamps and the man who was a cashier at the bank, in my mind, he was responsible for my dollar because he was the one I would carry my book to and he would register it. His name was Carlos Pennington. Every time I would see him anywhere, I would ask him about my dollar. Finally, I guess I annoyed him so much it got to the point that he gave me my dollar back! I remember the depression when everybody was having a hard time getting even food or anything. I was living then up on the hill in the big house that burned in the 1950s.
When beer first came back on the market, when prohibition was repealed, they just put the beer in the box with the cokes and everything . If you were 12 or 14 or whatever and you went there and you had the 10 or 15 cents, whatever it was, to buy one, nobody asked you any questions. You’d just give them the money and take the beer. There was no law much attached to it. Of course, as time went on they got more strict about it.
Walking back home from Burlington, late at night, I was scared to death walking across the steel bridge on highway 62. To me, I thought it was moving. That was my worst fear coming home, walking across that bridge. Sometimes I could see, in the cooler weather when the greenery began dying out, I could see Dan sitting on the store porch with the lantern. I knew I was safe, even though I was still a mile away.
THE CHURCHES
We were Methodist, we were raised Methodist and went to the Methodist church there in Glencoe. I don’t remember much about it, I just went and it was a regular church. I remember the kids going and going outside and playing after church while the older people stayed inside for the service. They let the kids go and the kids would go outside and play and sometimes some adult would come out and tell us to quite down. I can’t remember who our minister was. I don’t think he lived in the village.
I’d say most everybody in the village went to church, especially the adults. Whoever didn’t go to the Methodist church went to the Baptist church. All of us young kids, for Sunday night service, we used to go to the Baptist church because that’s where all the girls went. The young teenage boys always got ready and went to church on Sunday night, but they went to the Baptist church, they didn’t go to the Methodist - though they were Methodist.
The Baptist church had more going on for the young people than did the Methodist church. They always had little picnics. Past the church there was a grove of trees, right near the church. They had the picnic tables out there and so forth. Even in the daytime, Sunday daytime, they used to have something going on, some kind of luncheon, or picnic, or something, and everybody was invited, it wasn’t anything that you had to give a special invitation.
THE GARDENS
Everybody tried to raise as much stuff as they could, and to raise as much stuff as they could put away for the winter. There was plenty of space between the houses and the woods. People raised chickens - that was as big as they could go over there. We had a couple of cows in the meadow between our house when we lived in the big house on the hill.
Everybody raised as much stuff as they could put away. Canning and all, that was a great thing in those days. Of course as many farms as there were near by if they didn’t raise enough stuff to put away, they bought it to put away. My father at the store, he traded staple goods for fresh stuff, for meats even. I’ve seen that big refrigerator have half a cow in it.
Most folks also hunted. My brother-in-laws, the Allens, they went possum hunting. Now my father thought there weren’t nothing any better than a possum, which is a scavenger. But you have to catch them and put them up and keep them for about 6 weeks, and feed them table scrapes, and fruits, and persimmons, and locusts, and such stuff at that, until they cleaned their system out and then you could kill them. I remember my mother baking a possum with a potato in his mouth - a whole possum. I tasted it one time but it was too fat for me - the meat was too fat, but my father he ate it, he thought it was a delicacy.
Folks also went shopping in Burlington. I think most of the shopping they did in Burlington was for the children’s school clothes maybe, and for the children’s toys at Christmas time. The women always wore clothes made from what they made at the mill because they weren’t fancy and they didn’t go anywhere. My family, we went away once a year. We went down to the old home place, which was near Southern Pines, off Carolina. The three brothers - I had an uncle in Burlington and one in Haw River and my father that I lived with. One of his brothers, Ed, had a meat market in Burlington and the other one, Bob, ran the water pumping station in Haw River.
CHRISTMAS
At Christmas time, every member of the community got a bag with oranges, apples, raisins, candy, and so forth. A big bag, like a big grocery bag. They were counted by numbers, I think it was up to my father to get that information. So, consequently, everybody that came in, he talked to them - "How many children do you have now…" and so forth and all this was written down by name, course it had to correspond with the mill roster.
Then on Christmas Eve, this was a big thing for everybody, because the men and all used to come gather at the store, and after they would close the store, they would start doing the bags. They would line them up and a man would take a box of oranges and go down, an orange in every one, or two or three, whatever they put, and the next one would come with raisins and the next one with cakes and cookies or whatever and it was quite a big thing. I remember year after year they did it.
There was no ceremony or anything to hand them out. I think they had to come to the store to pick them up. I’m not sure if there was a little card that went in them, or if their name just went on the bag.
Each family got their Christmas tree by going to the woods and cutting it down. There were plenty of trees up toward the old clubhouse. Of course, there no electric lights for the trees.
LEAVING GLENCOE
When I finally left Glencoe, I went to get in the service, and I decided I was gonna go in the Navy. I needed to go to Greensboro for the recruiting office, so my sister-in-law, Kodell, she drove me to Greensboro to take my test. I think we had a Nash automobile.
I took my test and passed everything. I did it under the name of Waddel. Not knowing any better, Kodell thought I would naturally have gone in and gone under my real name. Well, I didn’t realize I was supposed to do that so I filled out everything under the name of Waddel, not Councilman. She got tired of waiting and she came in to ask how long I would be. She asked for Earl Councilman and they said "we don’t have anybody by that name." "Yes you do, sitting right over there." They said, "oh wait a minute now, something’s wrong here" and so I had to explain that all to them. So they told me "you gotta have a birth certificate." So I thought "well that kinda knocks that out," because I wasn’t old enough to go in without family permission and they weren’t going to give permission.
So I went to Raleigh to get my birth certificate from the vital statistics bureau. In the meantime, I also changed my mind and decided to join the Army instead of the Navy. I hitchhiked to Raleigh and got the proper papers and they said "you can fill out however much you can fill out here and you can get your parents or whoever brought you down to do the rest of it." So I sat down there and filled out what I could fill out. I went outside and outside the building was like a park - benches and everything outside. So I went outside and I was reading the papers, sitting there, and this man sat down next to me and he was reading his paper. He was a man somewhere in his 40s or something like that. I explained to him what I was doing, and he said "I’ll sign ‘em for you." He filled out the rest of ‘em and he signed my father’s name, Alvis Worth Councilman, and the next day I was at Fort Bragg. So I was in the service and had a hitch in before I was old enough to join. I was 16.
LOOKING BACK
James Waddell died in 1946 and his wife Ada died in 1952. I will always remember them as Mom and Dad. Since I don’t live that far from Glencoe and I still have family in the area, I return to Glencoe from time to time to relive old memories. The time I spent in Glencoe will always be a special memory for me…