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KEEP THOSE CALLS, E-MAILS, ARTICLES, EDITORIALS, AND DISCUSSIONS GOING TO SAVE THE HOMEPLACE 1850s AS IT IS!
I am a little late in wishing all of you a Happy New Year! It felt so good to say goodbye to 2020. When I look back on that year, the best part of it was the time I had with my family or my memories of Between the Rivers and the people and places that once existed there. I know that regardless of how long I live or where I live, Between the Rivers will always be the only place I can ever truly call home. I also know that I'm not the only one who feels that way. As David Nickell said long ago, “That land never belonged to us, but we belong to it.”
Speaking of the New Year, did you make any resolutions? I never make any wild ones, but I try to start the new year out right. I try to start every day with a Bible study and prayer and I always pray for the same thing. I asked God to guide me because I know on my own, I can get into more trouble in a few hours than most people could in a month of Sunday’s. I also asked Him to put feet on my prayers and show me where I can make a difference.
Long ago I realized I couldn't change the world, but that I was responsible for myself and then I could make a difference in the world immediately around me. I always told my students to think globally, but to act locally. In other words, make a difference where you're at this moment in time. It's that drive to make a difference and the love of Between the Rivers that makes me fight so hard to see to it that the promises made to the people who live there are kept.
David Nickell sometimes puts into a single phrase what it takes me paragraphs to say. In our last meeting with the US Forest Service, he said it was one thing for our families to sacrifice their homes, their communities, and their way of life in order for LBL to be created, but it's quite another to be sacrificed. That resonated with me and there has not been a day since the meeting with the Forest Service that I haven't thought of that phrase.
If the US Forest Service can change the Homeplace 1850s, the working farm and living history museum, to a museum without an adequate plan or adequate time to make such a plan, they are setting it up for failure. There's a part of me that feels some of them in the Golden Pond office want it to fail. I also feel there are those there who believe in the promises that were made to the people who once lived in Between the Rivers. I believe they who would love to speak out, but they can’t at this point in time without risking their jobs.
But we can speak out! It is within our grasp to draw a line in the sand and declare, “No more!”
No more broken promises! No more changes that take away from the education program that was supposed to undergo every program in BTR/LBL! No more talking out of both sides of your mouth!
No more standing back and allowing a government agency to scare us! The US Forest Service is no bigger or any tougher than TVA was. And just like TVA, the US Forest Service has an Achilles heel. That Achilles heel can be through the representatives who are responsible for the allocation of their yearly allotment. That Achilles heel can be negative publicity through newspaper editorials and articles which no organization likes. That Achilles heel can be e-mails, phone calls, and discussions with other groups and people about this Forest Service’s poor plan for the Homeplace 1850s. We just need to put our heads and hearts together and exploit those weaknesses.
And the Forest Service has a major weakness in the fact that former residents and their descendants have never truly given up on the promises we were given and that have been codified in the LBL Protection Act. There may be periods when we don't speak out. There may be periods where the US Forest Service think we're simply dying off, but they're counting their dead chickens before we’re buried. There are still many of us alive and well today who are willing to fight to make sure that our families and our friends were not sacrificed for nothing.
Yes, as a foot soldier in this battle, I'm just one of many who intend to hold that line. I'm one of many who intends to stand up to their attempt once again to move beyond the promises made to former residents. I'm one of many who's not going to sit back and let them get away with once again trying to eradicate the education programs in BTR/LBL. And so are you.
There is an element in the US Forest Service that thought 2020 and the disruptions caused by the Covid virus was the perfect cover for them to sneak this plan by us unnoticed. They were wrong, but I can’t prove to them how wrong they are alone. We have to do this together. I have always loved Kentucky’s motto: United we stand, divided we fall. United this is a winning battle!
But I am going to be honest. As much as I love Between the Rivers, I am in this for my mother who can no longer speak for herself. My mother Evelyne Lawrence Martin was a strong woman who reared me after my father’s death and helped my sister Louviena rear my four nephews and niece. Both my mother and sister were strong women.
When the end of the month arrived with more month that there was money, neither one wined nor threw their hands up. Momma would head to the woods and pick poke salad, dandelions, or other greens which she seasoned with bacon grease and combined with a pone of hot corn bread and butter. That was a meal fit for a king. Or for breakfast nothing was better than gravy over homemade biscuits. If Mom lacked enough flour, she would send one of us with a nickel to my Aunt Lucille’s to buy a loaf of bread. My Uncle Marvin bought loaves of day-old bread at the Bunny Bread Store in Paducah and kept it in the freezer, our own version of a country store when needed.
And no one could make me smile like my mother. She loved to dance and shared stories of the play parties my PaPaw Edd Lawrence hosted when she and her siblings were young. On Saturday my uncles Frank, Herbert, and Edd Noble moved the furniture out of the front room while Momma and Aunt Lucille scrubbed the house from top to bottom. Aunt Lucille usually spent the day before baking for the big event and Uncle Frank drew up plenty of cold, clean water from the cistern late in the afternoon before the play party.
Come Saturday night family and friends began gathering in the front yard before dark. Men and boys brought whatever instruments they had and soon music flowed fasted than the Cumberland River after spring rains, drifting off the front porch over the front yard and out over the hills and hollows beyond.
Aunt Lucille recalled, “Evelyne never missed a dance and if she couldn’t find a fella, she danced by herself or with one of our girlfriends. One time a local boy was swinging her round and round and let her go. Out the front door she went, onto the front porch, and into the yard without losing her balance or missing a dance step. Another local boy danced her right back into the front room, and they kept right on dancing.”
I loved watching my Momma dance at Willow Lodge, at square dances in Cadiz, or laughing as she and my first cousin James Barnett danced at Homer Ray’s garage during the time we were fighting TVA’s attempt to take our land. More than once she danced out of her shoes and tore her stockings up in the process, but it never slowed her down.
At home Momma and my sister would challenge each other to dance contest, especially the Charleston. As they kicked their heels back and forth faster than a speeding bullet or moved their hands back and forth across their knees, making them look as if they were switching their kneecaps, my nephews, niece, and I would clap in time and cheer them on.
My Momma liked to sing as well. She was not talented, but she gave it her all just the same. We would no more than be in the car before she turned the radio on and began to sing at the top of her voice. When the radio played out in Old Pinkie, she sang “Roll out the barrel and we’ll have a barrel of fun” or other ditties of which she was fond.
My sister lived in PaPaw Edd’s home for a while and every afternoon we would walk up the drive to the house and Momma and my sister would sit on the front porch just visiting while my nephews, niece, and I chased fireflies, played tag, or rolled in the yard with one of the dogs we always had. Even after my sister moved to Twin Lakes with her children, Momma often walked up to PaPaw’s home and relaxed on the front porch or swept the empty rooms out to make sure it remained clean until someone else in the family or the neighborhood needed a place to live.
And in the winter while we played marbles, jacks, or cards in the floor, Momma and my sister sat catty-corner from each other and turned scraps and old clothes into quilts like Flower Gardens, Wedding Rings, or crazy quilts.
Our winter mornings often began with hot chocolate and our nights usually ended with a big pan of popcorn shared by all of us. In the summer I fell asleep on my Momma’s nights off work to the sound of Aunt Georgie and Momma talking in the living room and the sweet song of the whip-or-wills in the woods that surrounded us. My mother was happy living on her little one-acre she inherited from PaPaw Edd in the new home she had built. Our life was simple, sweet, and safe and as Momma said often, “I’m home.”
But the individual happiness of a widow woman and her baby girl was of no concern to the government. After rejecting TVA’s offer three times, Momma finally accepted the pittance she received since TVA paid off her mortgage on our home before she saw a penny. She was forced to sell the rental house we owned in Paducah that was to provide her retirement income once its mortgage was paid, and she still had to borrow a thousand dollars to purchase a one-acre lot in Marshall County without a well like our home Between the Rivers had.
The day M.C. Ruggles pulled out of our drive with our home, Momma and Aunt Georgie stood in the driveway hugging each other and crying. They knew there would be no returning home again, at least not as they had known it.
Because people from the outside prowled and took things from homes, barns, and other buildings they found with no one around, Momma spent the night in our home which the housemoving company parked at Crossroads Baptist Church. When my cousin James Barnett arrived with the supper Aunt Lucille sent her that night after dark, Momma greeted him with the barrel of her rifle pointed out our back door until he identified himself. He said, “Aunt Evelyne, don’t shoot your favorite dance partner!”
My Momma worked until she was 80 to keep a roof over her heads, food on the table, and pay for essentials, but she never felt at home or made friends in Marshall County outside of family or old friends from Between the Rivers. She was a survivor, but when she died on July 3, 2000, 41 year to the day after my PaPaw Edd Lawrence died, I cried for my Momma who use to sing and dance and laugh so freely when I was young. Unfortunately, that Momma died in 1967 because I never saw her dance or heard her sing again after we left Between the Rivers.
So today when I fight to make sure the promises made to the former residents, I am not just fighting for myself. I am fighting for that laughing woman in red lipstick, her hair curled and wearing a freshly pressed homemade dress as she hurried me toward the car so we could pick up Aunt Georgia or one of my cousins and head to a Saturday night dance. I am fighting for that woman with a twinkle in her eye and smelling of Avon perfume who sung at the top of her voice as we went visiting. I am fighting for the woman in a plain work dress and a faded apron who walked to her father’s empty home just to visit with her past or sweep the cobwebs and dust out as a way to show respect for her “Dad” who reared her and her six surviving siblings alone after losing his first wife Lona Lady Lawrence and later losing my grandmother Fannie Ann Lawrence. I am fighting for my mother who was forced to sacrifice the only home she ever knew in order for LBL to exist.
And my bet is everyone reading this has someone like my mother in their life whose sacrifice means we can’t give up on the promises made to former residents. Think of those people or that person and do your part, not because you believe this battle can be won, but because you believe their sacrifice is still worth fighting for to make sure those original promises should be honored.
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