"Cotton mills, sharecropping and moonshining often were the options of rural Georgians." - Jim Wooten in an obituary for Herman Talmadge
I ran across this sentence today and wanted to preserve it here.
There's a well known story in my family involving the first two options in that list. A cousin Howard Simms, remembered witnessing the following conversation and told us about it forty or fifty years ago.
Benjamin Wilson Baird 1860-1932 -- "Papa"
During the early days of the twenties my grandfather, Wilson Baird, sat with his cousin Jay Simms, talking about the farm depression (which hit right after WWI and long before the crash of '29). With my grandmother great with their eleventh child (my mother) Wilse announced he was considering leaving the farm and going to work for Bibb Manufacturing at their cotton mill in nearby Porterdale on the Yellow River. Jay responded "Wilse, I believe I'd go to sharecropping before I'd raise my children in a mill town."
As far as I know moonshining was not a part of that conversation.
The Bairds did move to Porterdale and my mother was born there, the only one of her siblings not born on the farm. Had the Bairds (from "good stock" according to my grandmother) not become Porterdale "lintheads" would a boy from another mill town have found her there in the late thirties and married her? I am the third child from that union.
Makes it hard for me to mourn Papa's farm troubles. 😀
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