Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 26. WHEN THE CAR GOT STUCK IN COONER BRANCH (Pp 48-49) When I was a young man,
square dancing was one of the most popular events for me and my friends and we spent many nights dancing to the fiddler's tunes. Guy Dean and I could b. found almost any Saturday evening at the closest square dance gathering. We would go to Kingsland, Hilliard or St. George and we also had some good times in Folkston. The section house by the railroad going to Homeland had a big room in it and we had dances there many weekends, I liked to call the sets. Jim Wainwright
would begin playing his fiddle and to get the folks to dancing, I would sing out "Hit the floor! Partners to their places like horses to their traces! Swing your partner and promenade!" We had some music makers for the dances that could play the violin nicely and some that couldn't play very well at all. When we knew a good fiddler was going to be at a particular dance, we went out of our way to go there, for lively, peppy music made the dancing lots more fun. A
group of us from Folkston went to Kingsland one winter night for we knew the fiddler, had danced -a his tunes and knew he would make good music for us. Sol Mills, my cousin Owen Gibson, Guy Dean, Bob Allen and I went to the dance in Kingsland when cars were beginning to be a common sight on our roads, but bridges weren't so common. We had enjoyed our dancing and were on the way home when we got stuck in Cooner Branch. There was no bridge there, just a ford with logs laid
cross-wise in the bottom of the creek so the tires wouldn't sink down in the mud. We had crossed easily on the way to Kingsland but somehow got stuck going back home. Each time we came to a creek we would stop before we got to the water and one of us would get out and hang a large piece of oilcloth over the radiator. This helped keep the water from getting on the fan which would have sprayed it on the spark plugs and drowned out the motor. The oilcloth didn't help in this
case and the car stopped in the middle of the stream. It then cranked up but wouldn't pull out as the wheels had settled in the sand between the logs. Hawley Wright was parked on the Folkston side of the water, having just gone through the branch without getting stuck. He had been peddling fish and was on his way home. Hawley said "I'll come get you, boys!" and started pulling his shoes off. Sol, Bob and Owen were in the back seat and they took their shoes, pants
and underwear off and got out in that water to help get the car onto dry land. Guy was driving and had to guide it and I was in the front seat pretending to have trouble undoing my shoelaces. I was just getting over a bad cold, and sure didn't want to get in that icy water. Hawley set a turpentine box afire at the edge of the hill so they could see what they were doing and those boys pulled, the car out of the branch. Guy and I never got wet. The boys stood around the fire
drying off before they put their clothes back on and they were a ridiculous sight, all dressed up in white shirts and nice jackets, naked as jaybirds from the waist down. It was so cold it didn't take them long to get dry enough to get their clothes back on. Sol played a trick on us one time. If the fiddler was an especially good musician, someone in the crowd would go around and collect money for him. At one dance Sol got a fifty-cent piece from me and from each of my
friends, to pay the fiddler, Jim Wainwright. When I saw Jim later in the week I asked him how much money he got for playing at the dance. He told me he didn't get paid anything. Sol had collected the money and kept it! | 
