Narrative of remembrances by “Grammy” (Fern Augusta Frain Whitehead, typed by Janet Whitehead). Written to her great-granddaughter in December 2014.
Dear Grace,
I was born January 28, 1914. I was so glad to receive your letter asking questions about my life. It was nice of you to be interested. I’ve heard you are very good at reading & writing, just like your Mother. Mostly, though, I was just happy to hear from my great-granddaughter, because I love you very much. I was a very good student like you, but now that I’m past 100, it’s getting harder to think about things long ago. But Poppy & Grammy & Aunt Nan will try to remember things I’ve told them over the years to help me out on answering your questions.
I was a big baby (10#) when I was born, just like you were. Only instead of the hospital, I was born in my grandma’s house. It was a cracker house (looks very different due to remodeling now) on the east side of Trout Lake, formerly Hooker Lake named after my grandparents, behind what is now Milwee Middle School (it was Lyman). Some of my family are buried nearby in Concord Cemetery, including my great grandpa Stephen J. L. Hooker.
My mother was only 17 & quite short (not even 5 feet tall), with bright blue eyes and the prettiest smile. She loved to go fishing, baby cakes, and take the lilies she grew to church so she could share a pretty bouquet on Sunday. She always loved to go to church on Sundays and taught me to do the same.
I loved my parents. My mom was like a big sister/friend to me, because my dad was much older, and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to play with. She taught me many things, especially to like cooking & gardening.
We didn’t have electricity and machines to help us with all our work. It was a lot of hard work to do the laundry, and my dad would help my mom every Monday to do the wash and hang the sheets and clothes out to dry on the clothesline in the sun.
Since they were so busy on Mondays, they let me make dinner for the 3 of us. I felt very proud that they trusted me to cook, so I did my best. In fact, when great grandpa Clyde and I were dating, he was very impressed that I had become such a good cook. He thought he was a very lucky man, and I used to tease him about falling in love with me because of my famous 1-2-3-4 cake! Clyde and I were 2 of the students who graduated from Lyman High School’s very first graduating class in 1932 and we married in 1934.
We went to Longwood’s Baptist Church, where our pastor helped us say our vows, then we sat on the front row during the church service. Afterwards, we headed home to love and help each other every day for a lifetime. That’s how long we believed you should keep loving someone you promised.
Since we had no electric, we used oil lamps and did some home canning of vegetables. Sometimes we used salt and smoke to preserve meat. There were no TVs, telephones, or air conditioners. Dad had mules to plow and work the field.
Some days Mom and I would make a nice picnic lunch and Dad would hitch the wagon to the mule. Then he would lift us up to ride in the wagon and head to Shepherd Springs about 5 miles away for a fun day to enjoy picnicking and splashing around in the cool water.
We all worked hard, so it was a treat to get a break. Of course, we rested on Sundays, most everyone did. Dad cleared the pasture and built the little farm house we lived in. That’s the house the vert owns now by the pasture on Highway 434, only the vet changed a lot of things, so it looks different than when I grew up.
After I married my sweetheart Clyde and had children of my own (Poppy Spence and Aunt Nan), I was allowed to live there for about 20 more years and raise my children in the same house and on the same farm where I had grown up! We lived there until about 1962, when we built the concrete house on Maine Avenue that you came to visit me. It’s our 50 year old “new” house, to me.
My dad tended orange groves, and he was great at figuring out how to fix things. We pretty much had to grow a lot of our food. Cows for milk, eggs for chickens, vegetables from our garden, fruit from the grove. Mama cooked on an oil stove kind of like a camping stove but bigger.
We always had a nice garden to grow vegetables. My dad, your grant-great grandpa Frain, loved potatoes. In fact, he liked them so much he could eat them 3 meals a day! Mama and I liked to eat grits sometimes, so she would cook us grits and Dad more potatoes. He was from Michigan and wasn’t fond of grits, just potatoes. My dad, O. H. Frain, was on Longwood’s first city council in the early 1900s. He was in charge of streets.
The only heat in winter was a fire place, so on cold mornings Dad gathered wood and made us a warm fire. So when I crawled out of the warm covers, I dressed as fast as I could by the fire. Only problem was, the part of me away from the fire felt really cold and the part facing the fire felt really hot.
Our first car was a Model T roadster. I was 6 or 8 years old. It had a rumble seat. The bathroom was outside a ways from the house. It was scary to go out after dark to use it.
2 – You asked about pets. I always loved cats. We always seemed to have at least one. Food was very important and we worked hard for it. you couldn’t just go to the store and buy everything you wanted. We had potatoes and other food we grew, as well as sacks of grains we called “feed” for the cows, chickens, and mule. Cats worked for their food, too. They didn’t just lay around in the house and expect their food to magically appear. They were very useful to catch mice in the barn. My last cat was Bitsy who lived to be 18 years old. That is older than I am in cat years.
A lady gave us a parakeet that we would let out of the cage (in the house of course). One day she was flying around and landed in the frying pan of grease on the stove. It was NOT hot… good luck for the bird! We cleaned it up and she was fine.
My uncle Frank gave me an adorable guinea pig when I was a little girl. The little guy had a favorite cubby under our back porch where he lived. Whenever he was hungry, he let me know by coming out of his little cubby and squealing “wee, wee wee!”
Dogs were helpful too. We didn’t have a doorbell, but they would bark and let us know someone was coming to see us. Uncle Frank also raised fox terriers. After great grandpa Clyde and I were married, he gave us one, which we named Bob.
3 – I’m not sure where my ancestors came from. I think Dad was German and his parents immigrated to New York. Dad grew up in Michigan. My mama was born here in Florida, as was her dad and grandfather.
4 – Whitehead is most likely English and may have been from some Englishmen wearing white wigs.
5 – Diseases – I could have gotten any of these: diphtheria, small pox, polio, chicken pox, mumps, pneumonia, ague, measles, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, whooping cough. I had chicken pox and measles. We were very afraid of polio. It would leave you paralyzed–unable to walk, or even breathe sometimes without the help of what they called an “iron lung.” And scarlet fever was bad. Great grandpa Clyde Whitehead (Poppy’s father) talked about carrimorbis which It think was like the ache all over flu with a sick tummy.
6 – We grew a plant called feverfew in the yard. You could use the leaves to reduce fever (make your own medicine). Gargle with warm salty water for a sore throat. Warm a little bag with salt in it to comfort an aching ear. A tea bag for a toothache, a cool cloth on a fevered forehead, a little honey and lemon juice stirred together to ease a bad cough. Lots of people took a spoonful of castor oil each spring for good health and clean insides as a tonic, or any other time they felt sick. Also a very warn damp towel over Vick’s Vaporub on your chest when you had a chest cold. Or if your nose was all stopped up, you draped a towel over your head like a tent and leaned over a hot pan of water with eucalyptus oil in it, so you could breathe the soothing vapors.
7 – When I was a little girl Dad would hook the mule to the wagon to pull us as I mentioned earlier. This was before we had a car. When I was in high school we rode to Michigan, where dad was from, to visit his family. That was the longest trip we ever took. Sometimes we would drive to the beach in the model T to swim and fish and visit friends. The road was not paved and very bumpy.
8 – At Christmas we would go to the woods and cut a small tree, bring it home and decorate it. Nobody sold trees like they do today. Thanksgiving was with family around a table filled with simple food. Turkeys roamed wild and the men would hunt for one we could all enjoy around the table. Mama started making fruit cakes about Thanksgiving time. Some for us, but mostly to sell. This was another way she made some money. She and I made pound cakes out of our eggs to sell to customers also. And we skimmed the cream off our milk to churn and made our own butter. Yum! We even made clabber and didn’t waste anything.
I hope this answers your questions pretty much. And I hope you will write me about YOUR life! Lots of love from your oldest living relative, Grandma Fern.
Editor’s Note
Fern Augusta Frain Whitehead died about seven months after writing this. She lived to be 101 (January 28, 1914 – July 29, 2015), all of those years as a resident of the Longwood area. The old farmhouse was 434 Animal Hospital. In recent years, the garden and pasture were torn down for the new apartment complex there, along with the family’s “new” block homes on Maine Avenue.
The old house where she was born, on the opposite side of the lake from Milwee Middle School, still exists in the same vicinity but was moved from its original location and drastically altered.