Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 18. PAPA AND THE FARM (Pp 30-31) Papa was a mighty good farmer and we always
had plenty to eat. We might not have had many other things we wanted but we had plenty of good food. There was always meat in the smokehouse, potatoes in the bank, cane syrup on the shelf, vegetables from the garden and all the milk, cream and butter we could use. Mama (actually my stepmother, Elizabeth Lee Gibson) was one of the best cooks in the county. My very favorite dish that she made was egg custard and I always wanted to have the chance to eat a whole custard all by myself, but that
never happened. There were too many of us. Papa really did know how to grow sweet potatoes. He planted them in the spring, gathered them in the fall and banked them by putting a layer of straw on top and than a later of dirt over that to keep them from freezing. Later someone in the community would come and spread the news that a buyer would be in Folkston on a certain day to purchase loads of potatoes. Many of the farmers, including Papa, dug the potatoes out of the bank,
put them in croaker sacks and took them to Folkston. Papa would take a wagonload at a time and the buyer would bargain with the farmers for train carloads at a time. Some years Papa would sell as many as four hundred bushels of sweet potatoes. He got paid the market price for them...sometimes thirty cents a bushel and sometimes sixty cents. Another crop that Papa grew was just plain old field peas. He let them dry in the field and then they were picked, brought to the
barn and shelled. We had a big pea sheller as high as my shoulder with a hopper on top and a big wheel on the side. One person would crank the wheel and a blower would send the dry hulls out the side and the peas would fall into a basket underneath the sheller. Papa sold dried peas by the bushel and many of his customers came from the ads he put in the Georgia Market Bulletin. He shipped bushels of peas all over Georgia. As I was growing up in the early part of this century,
I helped Papa with the farming but there were times when the children got together and played games. We liked "Drop the Handkerchief," when we would ring up and chase the one who put the handkerchief on the ground. If he was caught, he was put in the soup pot in the center. We also played "Stealing Wood" which was a game when two teams piled wood at the foot of a tree and one team tried to get the wood back to their side before the other team overtook them. That was a
rough game. | 
