Me (Harrell), my mom and dad, Pearl and Roy, moved to the farm on Old Quarles Road on July 4th, 1947. I was 4+ years old. Freida was born in October of that year, and Rodger came along eight years later. At that age, I didn’t realize the historical significance of the area around there, but I could see an old house (even older than ours) down the road to the south, just across the field from us. I soon learned the occupants of that house, even that they were family, for mom and dad call them Aunt(s) and Uncle(s). There was Uncle Lou (Vanus Hickman Quarles), Aunt Maggie Lamb Quarles, his wife, Aunt Belle (Martha Delena Belle Quarles), Uncle John (John Franklin Quarles), and Uncle Jim (James Lemuel Quarles). All of these men are in the above picture. I learned also that a little ways down the road, on the other side, was another old house where Uncle Bill (Wm Denton Quarles) and Aunt Belle (another Aunt Belle. Her maiden name was Mary Belle Buckner), his wife, lived, and that Uncle Bill was Uncle John’s twin (fraternal) brother. At my age then, it took a while for it to sink in that my Grandma Phillips, (Dollie Quarles Phillips) was a sister to them. She lived on the Phillips family farm in Jackson County, about 10 miles away. Years later I finally discovered there was another brother, Columbus “Lumy” Qualls, who had changed his last name from Quarles to Qualls, due to a family falling out. He was gone before we moved there and I never saw him. In fact, I’ve never even seen a picture of him. I went to school (old Algood High) with a grandson and grand-daughter of his. I went to school with them 10 years before I learned they were related to me, although they knew it. (Lola Carr, their mother, was a daughter of “Lumy”).
Lou, Lumy, Dollie, and Uncle Bill were the only children of Wm Braxton Quarles who married. Aunt Belle, Uncle John, and Uncle Jim, never married. Aunt Belle apparently had a boyfriend, Willie Singleton, but he left the country or something, and Aunt Belle said if she couldn’t marry him, she would never marry. (This is what I’ve heard from family discussions). Aunt Belle live in Nashville for a while, I don’t know how long, and worked in the millinery department at Caster-Knotts. She had moved back home before 1947.
I heard a little in bits and pieces about the Quarles family. Grandma Phillips sometimes referred to a Cap’n Billy, or sometimes Major Billy, when saying something about Wm P. I knew about the Quarles-Burton Cemetery. The Quarles Cemetery back then was over-grown to the point it was almost inaccessible, as you know. I often wondered why Wm Braxton’s children were not buried there, but now I’m thinking that it was in such bad shape it would have been very difficult to do so. All of Braxton’s children , except Lumy, are buried in the Algood Cemetery.
I was only 7 years old when Aunt Belle died, but I remember her as being a very gracious lady. She loved flowers, especially bluebells. The yard around the old house every spring was a carpet of bluebells, buttercups and violets. Uncle Lou, I guess, was head of the household, but I distinctly felt, even that young, that Aunt Belle would have her say heard if she wanted it heard.
Uncle Lou liked to talk. He’d come up to our house a lot just to sit and talk. In later years he’d come for Dad to give him a shave, as he was too shaky to do it himself. He worked fairly hard. He and Maggie were always, in spring and summer, out in the garden working. Dad always planted crops on the land and on the west side of the road he usually had corn. One year when the corn was about knee high, dad was side-dressing it with fertilizer. Uncle Lou came out and told him he was burning up the corn. Dad had fertilized about one acre of the 5 acres planted, but he quit. That one acre made more corn than the rest of the field combined.
Uncle Lou seemed like a good person, but I never knew of him going to church. I think he resented John and Jim living there, although they had as much right to as he did. He refused to go to Uncle Jim’s funeral.
Uncle John was a hard worker. If we needed help, he was always there to help. I remember his word for help was “hop(e)”. I think this is a Scottish dialect for help. Dad said Uncle John was very badly injured in a logging accident when he was around 20 years old, and never was quite the same mentally, and to some extent physically, after that. I believe he could read and write a little, maybe enough to sign his name. He died from pneumonia after getting out one night in a cold rainy, windy storm to chase down a cow that had gotten out of the pasture.
Uncle Bill (Wm Denton Quarles) was a blacksmith. The old blacksmith shop was on the west side of the road right across from the Braxton house. Bill’s first wife (I don’t know her name) died in childbirth, along with the child, a long time before we moved to our place. I only knew Aunt Belle “Bill”, as we called her, to distinguish her from the other Aunt Belle. Aunt Belle Bill and Uncle Bill never had children. Uncle Bill, back in the 1920’s or 30’s, bought a car. He didn’t drive, but he employed Henry Carmack to be his driver. I found that interesting because Henry Carmack, when I first knew him and Grace, didn’t have a car and he and Grace were always walking back and forth to town. That’s how I came to know them. I didn’t realize until much later that Grace was a Quarles. Uncle Bill died, according to Aunt Belle, from taking too much “Black Draught”.
Uncle Jim was, I think now, slightly mentally retarded. He never talked much, and mostly just “hello” and some grunts. He worked around the place, but was not a hard worker. I think his main chore was to chop firewood. He usually sat on the front porch, in good weather, whittling red cedar. Uncle John did this too, and they created huge piles of red cedar shavings. I’m sure Uncle Jim could not read or write. His main area of interest was pocket knife swapping. He would walk up to town and sit or stand around with some other men and they would examine their pocket knives like they were gold nuggets. They would usually end up swapping knives around. Uncle Jim became unmanageable, both physically and mentally, as he grew older. He became abusive toward Aunt Maggie, who finally told Pearl (my mom) that she just couldn’t take care of him anymore. One day Sheriff Bill Bilyeu came to the house and asked Jim if he wanted to go for a ride. The Sheriff took him to the “County Farm”, where he lived for 2 or 3 years until he died.
Most of Braxton’s children died in their 70’s, but Dollie, my grandmother, lived to 101. Uncle Lou lived to his 90’s. Although not a blood Quarles, Aunt Belle Bill lived to 98, and lived alone in her old house until age 96. Rodger would go every day to bring in wood and get whatever she needed. Dad and Rodger built her a bathroom in the old house at some point. She finally had to go to the old Master’s Rest Home, where she stayed until she died.
Below is a picture of the Braxton house taken by me (Harrell) from across the field at our old house. This was taken in April 2004. Two or three years later the tall fir tree in the yard was blown over on the house and smashed it in. It’s still there in that condition, actually worse. We think the house was built around 1878. Grandma Phillips (Dollie Quarles) said she was born (1878) in a log cabin in the field where the new Algood School is now, there on Walton Road. So Braxton must have built the house around then. We have an old deed in which Mary Quarles deeded Braxton 78 acres.
In the 1970’s, Dad bought out all of Braxton’s heirs shares in the place. Of course he was an heir through Dollie, but she signed away her part to her children, and he then bought his brother and sister’s shares. Aunt Bell Bill had a deed for 4 acres and her old house that Uncle Bill had bought, or was given, way back in the 1920’s. When they went to look it up in the courthouse, they found it had never been registered, so legally she didn’t own it. She didn’t want to do anything about it, and said just let it be part of the old Quarles farm, which it was anyway. Dad paid her for it anyway. The rest wasn’t so easy. Lumy had almost 200 living heirs he had to track down and get them to sign their part (which most didn’t know they had) over to him, then he wrote them a check for that part. He told of when he and Marvin Snow, his attorney, tracked down some woman heir in Overton County so far back in the sticks they almost couldn’t get there. They’d seen some rattlesnakes and copperheads along the way, but the woman was out in her garden chopping weeds, barefooted! He finally got it all transferred in the late ’70’s.
So now, Rodger, Freida, and me, jointly own all of Wm Braxton Quarles old farm. There is some 65-70 acres of it, and we are pretty sure most of that lies within Wm P original land grants, but there is no way to prove that. It’s in Greenbelt program, which means no development, which we do not want to do. Dad once wanted to put all of our land in a 500 year irrevocable trust stipulating no development could ever be done, but we never did do that. Dad was really sentimental about the place. He was born (1912) in our old farmhouse, which his father, Columbus Henry Phillips, built in 1910. Dad had to buy it back, because it was sold out of the family in 1913 when the Henry Phillips family moved to Jackson County. An interesting thing is that in 1947 the White Plains House and farm were for sale at the same time our original farm (not Braxton’s) was for sale. Dad said he thought about buying the White Plains farm, but decided on the farm where he was born, next to Braxton’s farm instead.
In the 1950’s I learned a lot about White Plains and the people who lived out the road from us, but I learned more from our 2009 event. I knew Carve and Ida Jones, Henry and Grace Carmack, Steve and Della Burton and their children, Fred Burton and his children (I’ve forgotten his wife’s name). I did not know then that Ida and Grace were sisters, and were Quarles. I knew Mary Ann Burton Bilbrey, Victor and Roselle Burton, Alex and Louella Burton. It took the 2009 Celebration for me to put together all of this Quarles-Burton family, and I don’t know that I’ve got it all yet.
Our home church was Mt. Union Methodist Church in the edge of Jackson County just north of Cookeville, but we only had services two Sunday’s a month. The other Sunday’s we, (mom, Freida and I, would go to the Algood Cumberland Presbyterian Church. That’s where I learned about the Burtons because Steve’s and Fred’s families went there. Fred was the preacher there for a few years. While he was the preacher there, I would go to Bible School there in the summer. On those days, Fred would stop at our place and pick me up to go to church. I’d get in the back of his pickup, along with his children. After Bible school, he’d drop me off at the house.
When I was 18-19, I drove a tractor doing custom hay-cutting, raking and baling, and plowing around Algood and vicinity, for a man named Morris Jarvis. One spring we had the job of plowing all of the fields on Fred Burton’s farm. Fred was putting it in the Soil Bank program and it had to be cultivated to do so. I have plowed every field that now comprises the golf course and houses. Rodger had cultivated the field next to the bluff for many years before it sold. That particular field belonged to Norman Jernigan. Morris had a friend who had a tractor like Morris’ and they were kind of in business together. Morris liked to work at nights, like until midnight or later. So for several nights, we were in Burton’s Cove with two big “Popping” John Deere tractors making quite a bit of noise in that then peaceful place. (no one ever complained that I ever heard of). One day I was trying to plow the barnyard lot in front of Fred’s house, but the ground was so hard I was just scratching the surface. Steve Burton had walked over from his house to watch and I stopped and said to him that this ground was just too hard and dry to plow. He looked at my plow (a three plow rig) and said “well, your plow points are worn out. It might work if you had new ones.” I quit trying and a few days later got some new plow points, came back and the plows sank into that hard ground and I worked it up beautifully. Steve knew what he was talking about.
Now Carve Jones had asked Morris to plow his garden for him. It was a rather large plot. So one night, it was at least midnight, maybe later, Morris and I had left Fred’s place heading home, and when we got to Carves’ place, Morris pulled in and said Carve wanted his garden plowed. I thought to myself “at midnight?” We went ahead and after a few minutes, out comes Carve with a flashlight. He just stood there and watched until we got through. But I wonder to this day what the neighbors were thinking and saying, because those tractors were LOUD!. Of course there were not many people living there compared to now, and most were kin to each other.
So that’s a little view into my growing up among and being one of, the Wm Braxton Quarles line. One of these days, we’re going to have to tear down the old houses on the farm. Rodger and I have talked about it for years, but just have never got around to doing it. We may subconsciously not want to because of sentimentality and historical reasons, but we know that someday the city of Algood is going to “request” their removal, because they really are an eyesore. But time marches on and no one but us really knows or cares about the history of those old houses and what they are associated with.
Thanks to Steve Quarles for digging out that “Road Crew” Picture and triggering for me a lot of memories.
Roy Harrell Phillips
Dec 30, 2018
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