By Robin A. Edgar

Mable Carlyle was born in 1931, the oldest of eight siblings, three boys and five girls all together. Her father, Alfred Searcy from Rutherford County was a farmer and her mother, Vinetta Hyder, was also from Rutherford and worked as a schoolteacher in Cedar Creek in Rutherford County. After they married, they moved to the Hyder/Womack family farm on Big Level Road in Polk County.

 

“Besides farming, my father had sawmills, but my mother stayed home to raise the children. When we weren’t helping on the farm, we went to school for eight months, starting after the harvest and finishing around April in time to plant. We went back in July and half of August, when the crops were laid by, before the harvest.

 

“About four of us were in school during the Depression. Since we could not afford to buy lunch (about 25 cents a week), we carried a homemade biscuit with country ham or just a sweet potato. We were embarrassed because other kids had sandwiches with white bread and bananas and sometimes we would take a toe sack (gunnysack) full of greens or turnips or potatoes in trade for lunches.

 

“We rode an unheated school bus to Sunny View, which went through high school at the time. The bus had long bench seats on either side with two long benches back to back in the center. That bus was unpredictable depending on the weather or the conditions of the roads, which could get pretty muddy because nothing was paved.

 

“When we got home, we made onion sandwiches or peeled a sweet potato before daddy called us to work in the fields, take care of the animals, and haul in firewood and water. Since we didn’t have electricity, we did our homework after dark by the light of a kerosene lamp.

 

“We grew up so poor that we were healthy, eating a lot of greens and onions. Breakfast was usually biscuits and gravy or piece of fatback. We rarely had eggs because we sold them, mostly in the black community in Rutherfordton. We also sold blackberries, shelled peas, and live chickens. We didn’t use pesticides; if there were bugs on the potatoes, we picked them off. Daddy used herbs to treat our ailments. We used a lot of turpentine for cuts to prevent infection and onion poultices for chest colds.

 

“On Christmas Eve, we put up a cedar tree off the farm and used puffs of cotton for snow and made chains or bells and reindeer out of construction paper. If there was some money (we went months sometimes without a penny in the house), each kid might get an orange, a bag of raisins still on the stem and wrapped in cellophane, and sometimes even a peppermint candy stick along with some underwear or socks. Some years, they were stretching just to get the oranges.

 

“To visit grandpa Searcy in Bill’s Creek in the north end of Rutherford County for Christmas, it took five or six hours by wagon pulled by a mule. We would stay overnight with the kids sleeping on the living room floor. Visiting my mother’s parents by wagon took that long, too. I remember everyone crowded around the radio, head to head, to hear the Grand Old Opry there.

 

“Sunday was considered the day of rest, so my mother did her major cooking on Saturday (fried chicken and baked sweet potatoes). We attended Big Level Baptist Church and, if we didn’t have transportation, the Lebanon Methodist Church. Mother used to tell us Bible stories as we worked and led a family devotion most every night. We were so fortunate that she would read to us from the classics like Charles Dickens and James Fennimore Cooper because a lot of the parents couldn’t read and write.”

 

Mable says her family survived the Depression because they all worked together as a team. As the children did their part, they learned life skills like perseverance, honesty, and doing the job well. They also didn’t throw things away if they broke because her father could fix almost anything with bailing wire. Her advice to future generations is to learn to be self-sufficient and produce at least some of your food.