Hard times

Bonham Daily Favorite, April 8, 1915

Civil War Times Are Duplicated, Says L. C. Penwell of This City, Who Was Here on the Ground At Time.

We are experiencing some very hard times just now, because of a partial failure crops, together with the low price of cotton and the great European war.  A feeling of uneasiness and doubt seems to prevail, but I believe we have crossed the Rubicon, that the worst is over and that the bright sunlight of prosperity will soon shine again.  God's chosen people can not be kept down long.

We are partly to blame ourselves for these hard times, because of our extravagance.  Besides, I think sometimes that our imaginary wants bother us more than our real ones.  We are living in an advanced age, and all, whether able or not, are trying to keep up with the procession.  I think it is about time to call a halt and take a retrospective view of the situation and profit by our experiences.  As I can scarcely write an article without referring to the past, this will be no exception.

​The present hard times remind me of the sixties, the dark days of the Civil War.  We were cut off from the outside world and forced a rely almost entirely upon our own resources.  People lived pretty hard, but you did not hear half the complaining that you do now.  We dressed in home-spun and home-made clothing and lived at home and boarded at the same place.  Our victuals was plain but wholesome and not much of a variety, and consisted in many instances of corn bread, mast-fed pork and beef killed off the range any time of the year, and far sweeter and more tender than meat we have now.  We had sorghum molasses and many raised fruit.  Never since a boy have I tasted anything that will compare with the large, blood-red, juicy Indian peach of early days.

For awhile biscuit were a rarity, and you would often see a cow-lot full of calves and not enough cream could be gotten from the cows for coffee.  For coffee we used barley or rye, toned up with a little okra.  Sure-enough coffee cost $8.00 a pound in United States or $16.00 in Confederate money.  It was, therefore, just about as scarce as hen's teeth.  We made our own candles, and quite a number had honey.  Many raised barley and the bees lived on that and the sweet prairie flowers that bedecked the earth like Joseph's coat of many colors.

As I have said before, times were hard here, but not as hard as they were further east, near the war zone.  For an eye-opener I will quote the rules and regulations of the Confederate Hotel at Withville, Virginia, November 14, 1864.  This is authentic, and was given me by a neighbor who was living there at the time.  Of course Confederate money was used in this transaction:

Board and lodging per day        $30.00

Single meal                                          10.00.

Lodging per day                                 5.00

Keeping a horse per day                15.00

Single horse feed                                 5.00

Extra charge for fire in room       10.00

How is that for high?

Grits and bootleg whiskey

I was born and raised in Northeast Texas, but I never had grits until in the Army. I guess my father didn’t like grits. That’s the only reason I can figure for my mother never serving grits. She was from a farm family, sharecroppers for a time until her father saved enough and bought his own place northwest of Maud, Texas. Her family raised most of their own food – vegetables and a hog a year. They had a smokehouse, too.

Before joining the Army at age 18, I had been out of Texas one time, and that not by much. One Saturday while visiting my father’s parents in New Boston, Daddy asked me if I wanted to go to Texarkana with him and Grandpa. You bet, I said, and got in the back seat of the car. Texarkana was a city, must have had 25,000 people then. I was about 12 at the time and had never been to a town bigger than New Boston, so a 15-mile trip to Texarkana was a big deal.

Here is what I remember from the trip: Daddy drove, Grandpa was in the passenger seat. We got in Texarkana, and Daddy drove to a liquor store on the Arkansas-side of State Line Avenue. Grandpa went into the store and returned a couple minutes later with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Daddy drove back to New Boston.

From later conversation by my father, I decided the Texarkana trip was unusual for Grandpa’s whiskey buying. Most of the time, he got his whiskey from local bootleggers. All of Texas was dry then – no alcohol sold legally – which gave additional income to legal sales in Arkansas and illegal whiskey in Texas and Oklahoma. What some people did, other than operate stills in the woods, was go to Texarkana, Arkansas, and buy many bottles and sell the whiskey from home.

Daddy said he did that one time. He got a couple dozen pints of whiskey in Arkansas, then drove home to Maud. He said he was exceptionally nervous and wondering when he would be stopped by the highway patrol or alcohol bureau. Had that happened, it is quite possible he would have spent time in jail, lost his job, and Momma and us kids living on handouts from relatives, none of whom had anything to spare.

Before September 1964, that whiskey run to Texarkana, Arkansas, was my one and only trip outside Texas, a few hundred feet. When enlisting in the Army, I went from Rocky Branch to Texarkana and then by bus to Shreveport to Fort Polk, Louisiana. A long way beyond a short trip for Grandpa’s whiskey, a bus ride that eventually led to Korea, Maryland, Vietnam and Maryland again.