Crossing McDaniel Branch: A Personal Journey from a 19th Century Lifestyle to the Space Age

By Hugh W. Denny

In 1938, Hugh W. Denny was born into a log house without electricity. Eighty years later, he wrote his memoir on a laptop. Crossing McDaniel Branch is a memoir celebrating his and his family lives, but also shows how rural nineteenth century America made possible the technological wonders of the twenty-first.

As a child, Denny

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Denny Books
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781641339094

Hugh W. Denny

Growing up, Hugh W. Denny farmed tobacco and corn with mules, milked cows and slaughtered pigs, and spent most of his education in a one-teacher schoolhouse. In high school he was active in interscholastic debate and finished at the top of his class. He earned an MS in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. After four years of Army ROTC, he graduated with highest distinction and served as a second lieutenant during the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crisis.During his 35 years at the Georgia Tech Research Institution, Denny helped improve the reliability of the Department of Defense and NASA. He was active in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and was twice elected to the Board of Directors of Electromagnetic Compatibility Society, served as the Secretary of EMCS' Standards Committee, and served as Treasurer and Chair of the EMCS' International Symposia. He has written one technical book, authored 35 refereed papers, and was the principal author or major contributor to 57 reports. He also has four patents.Denny is married to Marguerite Ann Leahey. They have two daughters and three grandsons. Denny wrote Crossing McDaniel Branch for his grandsons. Now retired, he enjoys his daughters, dotes on his grandsons, and grows azaleas, rhododendrons, and camellias.

Book preview

ebk-cover.jpg

Copyright © 2023 by Hugh W. Denny. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64133-910-0 (sc)

ISBN 978-1-64133-909-4 (e)

2023.05.15

AuthorFlex Media

9029 Jefferson Hwy

Suite D#123

New Orleans, LA 70123

www.authorflexmedia.com

I. INTRODUCTION

This is an effort to capture personal recollections of what it was like as a youngster in the days of mule-drawn plows and wagons, no indoor plumbing, and no central heat nor air conditioning. Tom Brokaw, a well-known newscaster and author, named my parents’ generation (those born between 1910 and 1925) The Greatest Generation because they fought and won WWII. Those born between 1946 and 1960 are known as the Baby Boomer generation because of the explosion of new babies born after the GI’s returned home. The November 5, 1951 issue of Time Magazine dubbed those of us born between 1925 and 1945 the Silent Generation for we did not issue manifestos, make anti-war speeches, or carry protest posters. Many of us went on to harness the scientific and technological advances of the Second World War, and to develop innovative inventions that laid the groundwork for even more technological progress in the late 20th century. I personally think of my generation as the Bridge Generation for we were born into the rural/small town cultural society typical of the 19th Century and laid the groundwork for and lived to experience the current urban/electronic age of the 21st Century. For example, I am using personal computers (both laptops and desktops) to record my experiences herein, search for information and confirm data for this material via the internet, enjoy high definition television via CATV, carry a cell phone, experience the miracles of health care advances, and enjoy modern amenities, whereas I was ten years old before electricity reached our home on Rock Springs Creek in western Putnam County, Tenne ssee.

Of course, every book must have a dedication. This one is dedicated to my grandsons, who are the joy of my life. As I begin this effort (late 2003), they are less than one year old and haven’t yet developed those personality traits, behavior patterns, hair styles, and clothing tastes that are unlikely to conform to my definition of what is reasonable or appropriate. If I am so blessed, maybe I will live long enough to be able to gripe about their tastes in clothing and for them to conclude that the old man is way out of touch with modern times and just doesn’t understand. And they will be correct, I won’t. Hopefully, when they are old enough to be grandfathers, they will remember me with respect (maybe even fondness), and, who knows, may even be able to recognize some of my physical traits when they look in the mirror and utter some inane expression they picked up from me (or perhaps via their mothers) but have forgotten what it really means, but seems appropriate to the circumstance at hand.

Denny Lane as Originally Routed

Ok, an obvious question: What and where is McDaniel Branch? Just west of where it peels off St. Mary’s Road, Denny Lane¹ crosses a small stream that empties into Rock Springs Creek. When I was a child, this small stream was often referred to as McDaniel Branch. Throughout my youth, I wondered why it was called that for I knew it originated in a cave spring on my great-grandparent’s farm, and they were Huddlestons. So why wasn’t it called Huddleston Branch? During my later genealogy research, I came across a copy of the deed where my great-grandfather, John Smith Denny, bought the farm where my grandfather was born. The owner of the property on the northern boundary of the farm was R. B. McDaniel, ergo McDaniel Branch. In 1871, McDaniel sold the farm to Thomas Sexton, my g-great grandfather and the father of Lucinda Tennessee Sexton who married Henry Carr Huddleston.

Rock Spring Creek

An oft-told story by Mama² was that one time she was returning from visiting my Grandmother Carr and when she got back to this creek it was flooded. At that time, there was no bridge or culvert across McDaniel Branch. There was, however, a water gate suspended across the creek to keep the farm animals from leaving the pasture via the creek. The floodwaters in the creek were high enough to tilt the water gate out to a steep angle relative to vertical. Inching your way along the bottom plank of the gate while holding on to the top plank or the support cable was the only way to cross the flooded stream. However, Mama had both Rebecca and me with her. Rebecca was still a baby, so how was Mama going to cross the steeply angled water gate with Rebecca in one arm, while holding my hand with her other hand, and still hang on herself via the top plank or support cable? Her solution was to deposit one of us on the approach side of the stream with strict instructions to STAY while she carried or led the other across the tilted water gate. Thus, she ferried one of us across, deposited that one on the other side, and instructed that one to STAY while she went back across the flooded stream and picked up the one she left behind. Remember, we were crossing the smaller of the two streams, so therefore the child waiting on the side of the small stream while the other was crossing was not more than a few feet from the roaring main channel of Rock Spring Creek! Now, you can understand why when we country kids were told to do something, it was necessary that we obey for there were potential life-threatening consequences if we did not.

McDaniel Branch: Line of Demarcation Between My 19th Century Youth and My 21st Century Lifestyle (Map excerpted from mytopo No. 17-0105-4997-01R)

I view this small stream as the metaphorical boundary between my 19th Century agrarian youth and the Twentieth First Century in which I am writing this.

In the year I was born (1938), the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) was struggling to recover from the Great Depression and Europe was in turbulence. (Most historians now assert that the United States did not really come out of the Depression until World War II, which officially began on December 7, 1941 with Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, HI.) I say officially because, for quite a while before this, the United States was technically neutral in the conflict in Europe yet was providing England and France with war materiel via the Lend Lease Program. In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term of office and John Nance Garner was Vice President.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) became law in 1938 and set the work week at 44 hours for the first year the Act was in effect, 42 hours the second year, and 40 hours subsequently. (Prior to the Act, it was common for factory workers to have to work seven days a week, particularly in the poorer sections of big cities.) The standard work week only meant that hours worked beyond that time had to be paid as overtime. The minimum wage was set at 25 cents an hour! This amounts to a grand total of $11 a week for 44 hours of work. I recall my wife Margie’s parents saying that when they married, their take home pay for a week’s work was $9. (Farm workers were not covered under the FLSA and thus the minimum wage did not apply to farm labor.) In 1938³

Also, in 1938:

The ball point pen was invented

Nylon was first used as toothbrush bristles (women’s stockings and parachutes came later)

Teflon was discovered (took awhile for nonstick cookware to come about)

The Xerox copying process was developed (it was turned down by several major companies, so the Xerox Company was established to produce and sell the copier)

Superman comics debuted

The atom was first split (in Germany no less!)

Nescafe, the first decaffeinated coffee, was developed by Nestle

Dairy Queen (the first drive in) was started

Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds created panic when it was broadcast unannounced on the radio

Time Magazine named Adolph Hitler Man of the Year!

Then, many, if not most, people of the nation still lived in small towns and on farms. They grew their own food and were generally self-sufficient. However, there was very little spare cash available so even if you had something extra to sell there weren’t many people with enough money to buy it. I recall that Daddy indicated that farm labor paid less than $2 per day. Generally, you were in the field by at least 7:00 A.M, stopped for 20 – 30 minutes for a lunch of something brought from home with a jar of (warm) water while sitting under a tree at the edge of the field, and worked until at least 7:00 P.M, or later, if you were trying to complete the task before the next day, before it rained, or for a whole host of other reasons. A common saying often heard was you worked from can’t ‘til can’t, i.e., you worked from before you could see in the morning until it was too dark to see at the end of the day. I recall many times Daddy unharnessing the mules and feeding them by the light of a kerosene lantern. So, you can see that the average rate of pay for farm work was about 10 – 15 cents an hour, or less. In addition, very little farm labor was for direct pay. Most of it was in the form of barter; for example, I would help you plant, plow, or gather your crop in return for you helping me. A lot of farm labor was done on the shares, whereby the sharecropper, a male, would agree to work for a crop season, or a year, for one-third to one-half of the proceeds of a crop of corn, wheat, tobacco, etc. The farmer typically provided some type of housing, minimal at best, for the family, and all able-bodied members of the family were expected to help with the chores or any work that needed to be done on the farm. Sharecroppers were both black and white. In the days of segregation, the housing for blacks was inferior (more like the stereotypical slave cabin) to that of white sharecroppers, which was definitely not luxurious by any means! At the end of a crop season or two, the sharecropper and his family typically moved on to somewhere else. Occasionally, the renter and his family would stay several years at one place, but this was unusual. With the explosion of factory jobs during World War II, many sharecroppers left the farms and moved to industrial cities where they found better paying jobs and built better lives for their families. (To get a sense of what it was like during this time, read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.)

II. FOOTHILL FARMING IN THE FORTIES AND FIFTIES

In the mid-1900s, most Appalachian Area farms were what would be classified today as subsistence farms for they were not large enough to support largescale crop production. The terrain was hilly and rocky and the fields were not large enough to produce large yields, so most farmers could grow only enough foodstuffs to feed themselves and have a little to sell to purchase nonfood stuffs; in other words, you just subsisted. Every farm had a vegetable garden and grew enough corn and hay to feed the animals. They typically raised a few pigs, sheep or goats, and some cattle for milk, meat and maybe some for market. The primary cash crop was burley tob acco.

Burley Tobacco

In this part of Tennessee, as well as in North Carolina and Kentucky, air-cured burley tobacco was the primary cash crop. Tobacco cultivation in the 40’s seemed to be a 13-month job. In other words, you never finished, nor did you ever get a break from the labor. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but there was an enormous amount of work involved, with the vast majority of it manual labor.

The tobacco crop began in early spring (really, late winter around the month of March) with the preparation of the seed, or plant, bed. A rectangular spot was marked off. It was about 5 feet wide and some 40 to 50 feet long. On this spot was piled a stack of wood about 2 – 3 feet high. To access this much wood with rational effort meant that the location of the plant bed had to be near or in the woods, i.e., a forested area. Often, the spot chosen was in a timbered area that not only provided the wood but also meant that the soil was fertile. Clearly, to cut and stack this much wood required a lot of labor and took a lot of time. Therefore, the task of preparing the bed had to begin several weeks to a few months in advance so as to allow the wood to season (dry) sufficiently to burn. The burning of the wood accomplished several significant things: (1) the heat from the fire effectively sterilized the soil to remove fungi spores, insect larvae, and, primarily, kill weed seeds, and added mineral products via the wood ash to the soil. Once the wood was completely burned and the embers and ash had cooled, the bed area was thoroughly tilled (by hand with hoe, mattock, shovel, and rake) to mix the ash into the soil. Then the soil-ash mixture was raked to break clumps of soil; stones and unburned pieces of wood were removed. Logs of 5 – 6 inches in diameter were then placed around the perimeter of the bed to provide support for the canvas covering to be applied after the seeds were sown.

Tobacco seeds are extremely fine – about the size of black pepper flecks. One ounce of tobacco seeds contains approximately 300,000 seeds. If you have ever seen the seed of Bermuda grass, you have a good idea of what the tiny seeds look like. The seeds were sown by broadcasting them over the prepared area of the bed. To obtain uniform coverage over the area, a packet of the seed would be mixed with, say, a quart or half gallon of sand or fine dry soil. Once the seed were distributed over the bed, the soil containing the seed was tamped down by walking across the bed in such a manner as to leave footprints uniformly everywhere.

After sowing the seed, a seedbed canvas such as that shown on the next page was stretched between the logs along the sides and across the ends of the bed. This cloth cover (1) allowed rain to penetrate and to keep the seed sufficiently moist to germinate, (2) kept small animals and birds from digging up the seeds and plants, and, most important, (3) protected the small tender tobacco plants from frost. The best way to describe seedbed canvas is to think of cheese cloth, because basically that is what it was. It was white, porous to both air and water, and relatively strong. It had a strip of reinforcing material along the edges with metal rings located every 18 inches or so apart. These metal-reinforced eyelets permitted the canvas to be anchored with small nails driven into the logs around the bed to hold the covering in place and to allow it to be removed easily when the plants were pulled later. (Without the need to try to pull nails driven through the canvas material directly, the canvas cover could be reused for several years.) Plant bed covers were very carefully taken care of because they were relatively expensive. I have carefully kept some small sections of canvas such as that shown that were my father’s. I’m sure they are several years old. Daddy always took advantage of the good germinating and growing conditions afforded by the tobacco plant bed to grow lettuce and radishes along the edges of the beds so that we would have a start on early spring vegetables.

Seedbed Canvas

Depending on how warm the weather was, the seeds would germinate in about a week. They would grow quickly under the protection of the canvas. Once the danger of frost was past, which in Middle Tennessee was around the first of May, the canvas would be removed from the bed to allow more sunlight to reach the plants and make them grow more quickly.

During the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was enacted. One of the provisions of this act was that if farmers agreed to limit production of certain crops, the government would set a price floor for the product. If market demands were insufficient to