Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 6. OUR LOG HOME (Pp 3-4) The first place we lived in Charlton County after we
moved there from Ware County when I was a small boy was a farm on the Paxton Road, not very far from Bethel Methodist Church. We had moved from Jamestown where Papa was in the dairy business, hut he wanted to move back to his home county, and came looking, in 1905, for a place to live. He brought me with him and we looked over the old Jim Baker place which had about four hundred acres and a log house. We were happy when we found five great big fig trees, each about eight
or ten inches around, in the back yard. Those trees meant that we would have plenty of fig preserves, which we all liked. The big field had not been tended in several years and was full of gophers and rattlesnakes. We later raised turkeys there and could always tell when a rattler was near for the turkeys would gather in a cluster in the grass and stare at it. Papa had lots of friends in Ware County and every fall he would engage turkeys by sending postal cards. He wrote
his friends telling them when he would be in Waycross with the turkeys and they sent cards back telling him how many to bring. During the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas we loaded the truck with live turkeys and delivered them all over Ware County. There was a small cemetery in the field which contained the graves of the Heck Petty family. Five of the graves were for children who had died. That part of the cemetery had been kept up nicely but the rest was overgrown in
big and little oak trees. There were about a dozen graves altogether and one hole that had been dug for another one. The owner of the property at that time refused to let anyone else be buried there and the hole never was covered up. Later when we were hoeing peanuts in the field, Papa let us rest in the shade of the big oaks of the cemetery and we played in the hole that had been dug. Wide thick boards that were carved with names were used as tombstones and some were rotten, but a few were
still standing. Our home was a story and a half log house with a big front porch. The kitchen was not built onto the house but was connected by an eight foot covered walkway. We cooked and ate in the kitchen which had a big wood stove. Mama was the only one in the family that liked coffee and she ground the coffee beans each morning. She liked the Arbuckle brand of coffee. Papa bought a pump organ before we moved to Charlton County and brought it in the
wagon all the way from Jamestown, but no one in the family learned to play it very well. When Anna Dean was teaching at the little one room school, she stayed with us for several weeks at a time, and she could play the organ nicely, Papa would get her to play and sing every night after supper until we all went to bed. I think Jim Jacobs may have that organ now. We had to keep the yards just as clean as the floors in the house. Brooms for the yard were made of gallberry
bushes, which we whipped over stumps in order to remove the leaves. We kept the yard swept all the time and if blades of grass came up, someone would come with a hoe pretty quick and take care of them. | 
