Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 39. MARRYING MY SWEETHEART (Pp 77-78) My sweetheart, Ruth, was one of Rev. and
Mrs. Emory Dean's daughters and we had courted for two or three years. She had about decided I wasn't going to marry her but I had made up my mind that I wouldn't marry till I had saved enough money to buy furniture for us. I wanted a stove to cook on, a table to eat at and a bed to sleep on. I used an old truck and went to Waycross and bought some secondhand furniture a few weeks before we married. As I was going to Waycross that morning I passed Uncle Owen Gibson's house
and he was sitting on his porch. I drove up to the gate and said "Come go to Waycross with me." Uncle Owen said "When are you coming back?" and I said "We'll be back by one o'clock." And sure enough, we drove back up to his house right at one o'clock. Uncle Owen said "If someone had told me they could make a wagon that you could drive to Waycross and back in half a day, I would have told them I wouldn't believe that! And if they had told me that they could
make a machine that would fly through the air, I'd say that I knew that wasn't so!" I got a good bit of furniture in Waycross but most of what we used carne from Uncle Owen's son, Owen, who had gotten a job in Jacksonville and was selling his household stuff. I bought his furniture which included a stove, dining room table and rocking chair and my daughter, Martha Cannon, has some of that old furniture in her home in Waycross now. My brother,
Elvie, had volunteered to get the marriage license for us. Neither Ruth nor I had to go to the courthouse to get it. Elvie had gotten it from Judge J. J. Stokes who was Ordinary at that time. Ruth and I didn't take anyone with us when we went to get married. We went to Bro. G. H. Jacobs' house after dark on July 3, 1921 and told him we wanted him to marry us. He called his son, Jim, to come in and witness the ceremony, I didn't save the marriage certificate and don't even
remember if Elvie ever got us one or not. I have said that if something happened to Jim Jacobs, I probably couldn't prove we ever got married! We didn't go anywhere on a honeymoon. We had rented a house on the Emory Dean farm and hadn't been there long when a crowd of friends came to serenade us. Jim Jacobs had spread the news of our wedding and had brought a bunch of friends with him that night. Charlie and Anna Jacobs were there too, I wouldn't open the door for them to
come in so they beat on pots and pans and shot off guns to make as much racket as they could, They took a 2x6 plank and slid it in the bedroom window and underneath the bed. Then they pulled the board up and down till they broke the bed down, Before they left they stuffed the kitchen chimney with a croaker sack and I didn't know about it till the next day when we tried to cook our first breakfast on the wood stove. Smoke filled the kitchen and I had to crawl up on the roof and pull that sack
out. We were happy in our first home, with the secondhand furniture. Ruth went to cooking and cleaning and I went to farming. | 
