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Clawson House

I have enclosed a story I wrote about my grandparent’s home I wrote after it burned in Feb 2008. It was published in the Lafollette Press in my hometown. It is self explanatory I think. My grandmother (Eva Mae Rogers Clawson) is from Major David's line. She is on the website as the last generation listed in Major David's line of descendants. My mother Sara was her daughter. Anyway what I have written is essentially from my memories at their house as a child. I felt moved to capture this when I visited the loss for the first time. I thought you might t enjoy reading it and if you feel others in the family might, you can send to whomever. Later

Richard Brown
Germantown, TN

Gar and Eva Mae Clawson’s New House on Back Valley Road in Speedwell

The front page of the February 28th 2008 edition of the LaFollette Press featured a moving story of Lonnie Goins and his family’s escape from a house fire on the Back Valley Road in the Speedwell community. The house was a total loss and their dog that alerted them of the fire and enabled their escape unfortunately died in the fire. Although the Goins family avoided serious injury in the fire, they lost most of their belongings. For that, I am very sorry. The article and picture by Jennifer Caldwell described the tragedy vividly but did not give the true historical story of this 100 year old house lost to the fire that evening. This family’s emotional loss is also shared by members of another large family as well.

After thinking about this tragic event this past week, I felt compelled to share what this home meant to me and my family. This was the home of my grandparents, Melvin Garfield and Eva Mae Rogers Clawson, known to all in the back valley area as Gar and Evie or Pap and Granny to their many grand and great grandchildren. Pap built this home himself to accommodate his growing family when he was a young man. At that time in his hard life, Pap logged the mountains with his brother, Jehu, for the abundant and valuable poplar and oak timber. The brothers would haul the logs, which they had harvested with a cross cut saw, by mule drawn wagon to the Powell River. In time, they would bind these logs into a raft of 100 logs and then ride this free floating log raft down the Powell to the Clinch and then down the Tennessee River to market in Chattanooga only to return by train to start the labor intense process over again. They would usually make 7-8 such trips each year. Winter time raft rides were especially difficult and dangerous. Granny would prepare enough food for these seven day float trips. Pap once told me, with somewhat of a complaining tone in his voice, that even after getting his own logs cut into boards at a local sawmill to build the house, it still cost him a little over $100 to complete. Granny’s brother, John Rogers, brought his carpentering skills into the effort to complete their two story “new house”. I think this would have been around 1915 or so. The new house had no plumbing originally. Water was gathered from the spring down the hill at Davis creek and an adjacent outhouse served its purpose for the family. Heat was provided by two back to back coal burning fireplaces. One side heated the bedroom and the other side the living room. Those fireplaces and their chimney are all that remain from the fire. A Warm Morning stove heated the kitchen. Four of their seven children, Myrl Clawson Sharp, Cecil Clawson Goins, Bonnie Clawson Russell and Ralph Clawson, were born in the old Davy Beeler log house which sat on the property closer to Davis creek than the house that burned. That log house was built around 1795 and was one of the oldest homes in the Powell Valley. It was always referred to by our adult family members as “the old house” in conversation. Pap was born and raised in that four room log house. In May of 1908, Gar and his new 17 year old bride, Eva Rogers Clawson, also spent their honeymoon night there. Granny said Pap got up at 4AM the next morning, left her there and went to the field to plow his corn. The preacher who married them came to visit later that day and found Pap and his mule in the field working. He was quoted as saying to Gar, “I do declare, this is first time I have ever seen a man spend his honeymoon looking at a mule in the rear end”. And so began their long life together there on Back Valley Road. The only remaining log structure today is the corn crib that was built about the same time as the old house. It was moved several years ago and reconstructed by John Rice Irwin at his Appalachian Museum in Norris.

My mother, Sara Bet Clawson Brown, was the first of the three children born in Gar and Evie’s new two story frame house. Next came John and finally, Dr. George “Doc” Clawson, a local veterinarian and home builder. He was the youngest of their seven children and the last to be born in the new home. Granny told me the cost for the midwife to assist in the delivery of baby George was $2.00, which she was able to save over her pregnancy months from the selling of eggs to the cooks in the CCC camp located on their property just across Davis creek from the house. She also did laundry for the boys in the camp in the 1930’s and was able to make enough money to have the luxury of a linoleum floor installed in her kitchen. My guess is that same linoleum floor was likely still under the current flooring and also burned that night. Prior to this modern improvement, her wood floors in the house were cleaned with sand, lye soap and water. The sand was gathered from the creek and sprinkled on the wet surface. The floor was then scrubbed clean with lye soap and a hickory handled broom Granny made from broom straw she grew. All her seven children were raised in their new house. Over those many years, they grew from babies into teenagers and then adults, all instilled with their parents’ incredible work ethic, a real good dose of common sense and a firm moral foundation based on faith in Jesus Christ. They left that home to serve in the military, attend school, get married and have children of their own. We all frequently returned to re-experience the old home place, the love of our parents and grandparents, and especially Granny’s home cooking provided at our family gatherings.

Every Sunday after church at New Salem Baptist Church, the Clawson and Rogers family members, the uncles and aunts with all us youngin’s in tow would gather at Granny’s house for Sunday dinner. What a spread on the dining room table she would prepare from that kitchen in her new house. Chicken and dumplings was a specialty I remember best. The smell of home made yeast rolls baking in her oven filled the house. Fresh churned butter with the little flower imprinted on top from her wooden butter mold on those rolls was as good as it gets in that “cooking from scratch” approach to preparing a meal. There was always country ham that Pap had “coured”, as he called it, in the smoke house. I can taste that red eye gravy and Granny’s biscuits even now while writing this. We would have Granny’s home made blackberry and apple jelly which she kept in a little shelved jelly closet in the dinning room with a curtain for a door. We had sweet tea or cold “blue john” milk from the Philco refrigerator that sat in the dinning room next to a bushel basket of apples Pap kept for winter time treats. There was always fresh sweet corn, green beans, peas, mashed and sweet taters, cabbage slaw, “mush melons”, watermelon, pickled beets (that I am still addicted to today) and plenty of those big slab tomato slices from Granny’s garden located just off the back porch by the apple tree. She was very particular about that garden. Not a weed one could escape that little hoe she used. The middle part of the hard hickory handle on that hoe was so worn by the friction of her hand that its diameter was half its original size from use over all those years. Granny had a garden on that same plot of ground all her married life and was still working that garden up till her death well into the 9th decade of her wonderful life living with Pap in that new house.

Speaking of their marriage, Pap and Granny spent 75 years together as husband and wife, most of which was in that house that is now gone. Pap died at age 98 about 25 years ago on a cold Christmas Eve in the same year they had celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary with great fan fair a few months earlier in May. I remember going up to the house in Speedwell that night to tell Granny that Pap had died. She was asleep in the bedroom by the coal burning fireplace pictured in the Press article. Of course she cried at the news while telling us all how much she had already missed him the last week while he was in the hospital in LaFollette. She kept telling us in her grief, “Children, you just can’t know how much I will miss Dad” (her most personal name for Pap). How true that was, I now realize. Being that close to another person for that long is not so common to the human experience for any of us. I could only imagine her pain in loosing him that night.

That feather bed she slept in that night was the same bed her oldest daughter, Myrl, had died in from colon cancer some 25 years prior to that sad night. I spent more time at Granny and Pap’s during that time than any other in my life. I would stay overnight with them occasionally. Aunt Myrl had been comforted and attended to in her last days by Granny. Unlike health care today, terminally ill patients were most commonly cared for by family and typically would die at home surrounded by and cared for by their loved ones. Granny would also leave this world several years later lying in that same bedroom, in that same feather bed she and Pap had shared together for most of their lives together. Aunt Myrl was a school teacher at the Braden School in Blue Spring Hollow. She gave up those responsibilities when she received the news of her advanced cancer. My mother, also a teacher, took over her sister’s classes for the remainder of that year, moving me, as a six year old first grader, from Wellsprings School to get the remainder of my first year’s education under her guidance at the Braden school. Almost daily, we would stop at Granny’s to visit on the way back to our home in Wellsprings. We would find her involved in canning of vegetables in her kitchen or doing the wash on a washboard on the porch or making lye soap out by the old house in the fall after hog killing or quilting with her neighbor Lou Berry or cooking Pap’s supper. Granny was always busy. As a little boy, I always felt very secure around her and in awe of her ability to do anything that needed to be done. One thing she could do that especially impressed me as a child. She had an incredible talent for ringing a chicken’s neck. After coaxing the hen in close with the shelled corn she threw from a couple of handfuls she carried bunched up in her apron, the fatal act was swift and seemingly effortless in my eyes. On one occasion, I remember her doing two chickens this way at one time, one with each hand.

In the summer months, after those Sunday dinners, the men would set on the porch and visit. They would prop their feet up on the porch support poles and lean back in the white wooden rocking chairs Pap had on the porch. As a small child, I would then witness a strange form of entertainment they would pursue while chewing tobacco, talking and swapping their stories. A single broom straw would be positioned vertically between the sole and toe of their shoe propped up against that pole. A fly would be killed with the swatter and placed on the end of the broom straw. Then they would lean back and waiting began. My excitement would build. Usually in a matter of minutes, a white faced hornet would appear out of nowhere, hover near the fly and in an instant, steal the fly off the broom straw. Now, a white faced hornet was something to be respected and feared. I was told they could follow the path of a rock thrown at their nest right back to person who threw it so it took some nerve for me to try this feat. I finally did it one day and suddenly I felt like one of the men that summer afternoon on Granny’s front porch as I sat there among the real heroes of my life.

>One of my most vivid and lasting experiences from that front porch was singing hymns from an old shaped note song book Granny had kept from her youthful days in singing school. We would sing “I’ll Fly Away” or “On Jordan’s Stormy Bank I Stand” or “Give Me That Old Time Religion” or some other old hymn that was familiar to the participants. Granny would start by sounding out the shaped notes that she had learned as a child attending singing school with her “la-do-me-do-ray-fa-etc” until she found the tune and away we would go. People from their small community, members the church and other kin folks, which was the majority of the locals in Speedwell, would come and go all Sunday afternoon. On one occasion, Twin Wilson came by to see Granny. She was a neighbor and a member of New Salem Church. Twin was gifted by God to sing so as to touch your soul. From time to time, when she felt the Spirit, she would just bust out singing some old hymn acappella in an old time drone that would be so moving as to make chills all over you. Sitting on the porch that day in Granny’s metal glider, the Spirit moved Twin to start singing. Mom told me that the Holy Spirit was speaking to us though Twin’s songs. The Spirit spoke to me that day through her, I know that. I will never forget that special time listening to her sing.

These wonderful childhood memories and so many, many more are forever etched vividly into my mind as I think of those warm afternoons spent on that front porch after our family gatherings around Granny’s dining room table. Pap and Granny’s new house was indeed a place overflowing with love and adventure for me as a small child. I always felt that love when I went to visit them there until their death. The indelible image of Granny standing on the porch and Pap sitting there with his dog, Tip, by his side as they were telling me to “hurry back” was captured in a photo I took in 1980, which I so cherish now that they are gone.

I was home in LaFollette this past week and went by the house after Mildred Asbury (her grandmother was Pap’s only sister) at Peoples Bank told me that it had burned. Those old porch posts that Pap cut from logs when he built the house so long ago, those posts I had swung around as a child so many times, the posts that Granny had stretched a rope between to hang her quilts on to air out in the spring, the posts my Dad and uncles had propped their feet against to watch the hornet catch the fly trick that so fascinated me as a child, had fallen. They were laying out in the yard evenly spaced all around the porch as if placed there by someone, but charred black by the fire that took away Granny and Pap’s new house. When I would ask my grandparents why they thought God had let them live together as long as they had, Granny would quickly tell me that Christ was building her and Dad a home in heaven and it must be a real fine mansion ‘cause it was apparently taking Him a real long time to build it. It is a comfort for me to know Pap and Granny are together again now in another “new house”. This one was built by the Master Carpenter himself, just for them.

Richard Brown
Professor, Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine
University of Tennessee
Memphis, TN

June 15 2010 08:04:08