Pyatt, William

              
ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM PYATT
with wife, Lela Pyatt
Interviewed by Joan Carden and Ada Misek
for the
Oak Ridge Historical Society
May 26, 1972
 
[Editor’s note: Much of this recording is inaudible due to poor recording quality and microphone placement.]
[Side A]
Interviewer: Today is May the 26th, 1972 and we’re at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Pyatt in Clinton. I think his wife said that she calls him ‘Will,’ and he’s also known as ‘Bill,’ and Mrs. Pyatt’s name is Lela. Mr. Pyatt, when did you come to this area?
Mr. Pyatt: I was born in Robertsville.
Interviewer: In what year?
Mr. Pyatt: In 1895. 
Interviewer: Mrs. Pyatt, what is your first remembrance of this area?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I was born in 1897 at Scarboro. 
Interviewer: Mr. Pyatt, would you tell us something about your childhood and how your days were spent or how your family’s days were spent – I presume they farmed – and something about the size of the farm and what you raised?
Mr. Pyatt: We had a small farm and there was, I forget how many [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, there were seven children, but most of them were married when I was born.
Interviewer: Oh, you were just a baby?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, I was a baby. [laughter] The rest of them, well there were two of them that wasn’t married when I was born.
Interviewer: What part of the area did you live in, Mr. Pyatt?
Mr. Pyatt: I lived where that restaurant is down there that –
Interviewer: Snow White?
Mr. Pyatt: Snow White Restaurant. It’s right where the house was standing. And the hospital, the old hospital and the new one is on my place. I went from the [Turn]pike over there back to the top of Black Oak Ridge, the farm. It went up right close to the colored church up there and graveyard up on the top of the ridge, about a hundred yards away from it, I guess, the corner of our land was.
Interviewer: How many acres did y’all have?
Mr. Pyatt: We had about a hundred and twenty acres, just a narrow strip running back through there.
Interviewer: Did you farm it?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, we farmed. The last part of it was the woodland, but we farmed about sixty acres, I guess, that was farmland.
Interviewer: What was your crop? What did you raise?
Mr. Pyatt: We raised corn and hay and grain and oats and wheat. Then we raised potatoes and things like that, you know, all those vegetables. We raised everything that we eat. [laughter] We didn’t buy very much at that time because we didn’t have no money. [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you sell any of your crops? Was any of it sold for more money so that you could have money for other things?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, we sold some. It wasn’t really much. We sold a few hogs and some beef, but it was mostly just potatoes and things like that.
Interviewer: Who were some of your neighbors when you were growing up? Do you recall some of them?
Mr. Pyatt: Oh, Mr. Tadlock, he was the closest neighbor, nearest across the road, and then the old man Tadlock, his father, he lived across the road too. He owned a big farm just above Mr. Tadlock. And Art Peck, who was the neighbor below, and then [inaudible] Robinson and then the Key store which was on down the road, I believe that was all down that way. Then there was Dunlaps and Duncans up above us, our closest neighbors.
Interviewer: Later on you acquired your father’s farm and you stayed on to farm it.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, I bought the rest of the heirs out. I was the youngest and when my father died, why, I bought the other heirs out.
Interviewer: Tell me something about the schools in the area. Were there other schools nearby?
Mr. Pyatt: There was a school down in Robertsville that we had to walk two miles, I believe it was, to school. There was about a hundred and forty or fifty students that went to school there.
Interviewer: How large was the school? Was it one room, two rooms?
Mr. Pyatt: Just one room.
Interviewer: One room for all those students.
Mr. Pyatt: When I first started, it was just one room, and before I quit school, why, we had two teachers.
Interviewer: Were they in two rooms?
Mr. Pyatt: No, they were both in – one in the back of the room and one in the front. [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you go to school for nine months of the year like the children do now, or was it for a shorter time?
Mr. Pyatt: About – I believe it was about eight months, wasn’t it?
Interviewer: Five months? You had crops to take care of too, right? May we ask Mrs. Pyatt a few questions about her childhood? Tell us something about your family and your farm and so forth.
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I was raised in Scarboro. My father was the – he had a country store. Scarboro was a small village. We had – they had two or three stores and three churches, that is Northern Methodist, and the Southern Methodists and the Common Presbyterians. So I went to all of those churches because we just had it once a month, you know, so if there was one thing, then I didn’t get to go. We did have – to church – but we did have, I think, two left Sunday. And we had two doctors, I guess, a Dr. Lee, and also I had an uncle that was a doctor that was close by and he practiced there for a long time, and those early doctors really had some problems because they had to ride horseback, you know. My uncle, he kept two horses. When one would give out, why, he’d take the other one, and his name was Dr. C. D. Jones. And we had Dr. Lee as one of the doctors. Well, let’s see – 
Interviewer: Where did you go to school?
Mrs. Pyatt: I went to school at Scarboro. We had the same one room. [laughter]
Interviewer: How far was the school from your home?
Mrs. Pyatt: It was just a short distance.
Interviewer: You’d really take in the town.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, I lived in the same building a long time.
Interviewer: What was your [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, Mr. Scarboro had a store.
Interviewer: You mean a country store?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, it was a country store, just where you had everything on the – sold all the – everything, you know.
Interviewer: [inaudible] like most houses now [inaudible].
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, there was salt and yogurt and soda and baking powder and things like that, of course, was one thing – one thing you had the shoes and material and most things you’d have around the home, all the things that –
Interviewer: Did you any grain or anything like that that horses could have?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I think they had bridles and things like that [laughter] that you can use [inaudible] with that [inaudible], gardening.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: That’s what he did is he sold [inaudible] in his store.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: There were three of us. I had two brothers. [inaudible]
Interviewer: And your maiden name is?
Mrs. Pyatt: Lowe.
Interviewer: Lowe. [inaudible] parents [inaudible].
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, we’re related to the Crosses, Bakers, and Marks, and they knew the [inaudible] back to [inaudible] get all the [inaudible] together.
Interviewer: You were a Lowe, and your mother was a Cross?
Mrs. Pyatt: She was a Baker, and my grandmother was the Cross. [laughter] I have a pretty good record, but I don’t of my father’s family.
Interviewer: Mrs. Pyatt, you lived in Scarboro. Mr. Pyatt was in Robertsville. How did you all meet?
Mrs. Pyatt: I don’t remember where we met! I think we knew each other all of our lives. [laughter]
Interviewer: You didn’t go to school together, did you?
Mrs. Pyatt: No, we didn’t. We went to different schools.
Interviewer: [inaudible] get-togethers for the United Methodists?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, we must have met at church, you know, and of course a few gatherings. Sometimes they’d have an ice cream supper. 
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible] not that close to home, you know, and you’d come over there and I’d come over there with my cousins.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Was it Linda Coulson? I didn’t [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Well, her and my cousin come over there to the Association at a cemetery, wasn’t it? We went down to the service area together, and that was the first time that we met, there.
Interviewer: What year were y’all married? Do you recall?
Mr. Pyatt: We was married in 1916.
Interviewer: Tell us something about your own children. How many and their names and where they are now.
Mr. Pyatt: Well, we have three: two boys and one girl. Joel lives in Knox County, and then Hughes lives over here on the river at Willows Farm, and Marden, the girl, she lives in Houston. I knew [inaudible].
Interviewer: One of your sons is farming right now, is this right?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, he farms and we have a storm building down here and he quit the merchant business, though.
Interviewer: He’s done a little bit of what both of his parents do.
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: I sold that. I sold the place to a fellow they run off from up here when they built Norris Dam. And he come down and then I sold this place to him.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Well, the first fellow I sold it to was – what was his name?
Interviewer: [inaudible] What year did you sell it to him? What year did you sell your farm? Was it [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, we’d been married six years.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: No, we went [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: We [inaudible] food. Then we sold it and bought a farm over here along the river, right over here.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Well, I believe it was a hundred and twenty-one acres on East Fork Creek Valley and well, it [inaudible], I don’t know what the name of that [inaudible] was in there that run up to the top of the hill. We had about a hundred acres of cultivated land.
Interviewer: [inaudible] the other farms?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes.
Interviewer: [inaudible] some people raised [inaudible] corn. What did you all raise?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, we raised everything. I raised mostly potatoes and things like that and sold [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: [inaudible] was giving us a thrashing.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: And we had, down there, we had [inaudible] and raised all kinds of tomatoes and just everything.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Well we finally got a truck as time went on, but when we first started out, why, you had to take the wagon when you would go into town with your products.
Interviewer: And what was ‘town’? Where did you meet?
Mrs. Pyatt: Knoxville.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Took two days or three days to get there.
Interviewer: Did you have to start early in the morning?
Mrs. Pyatt: And stay all night and then come back.
Mr. Pyatt: We journeyed until night and then stayed the next day and sold out and come back the next night. Two nights. [inaudible] most of the time [inaudible]. [laughter]
Interviewer: In other words, you’d go in the afternoon? Would you leave after dark?
Mr. Pyatt: We left just about dark. We’d go to the road and then [inaudible] and after that it was generally about dark when we’d start to town.
Interviewer: How long would it take you to get to Knoxville?
Mr. Pyatt: Took us about six hours.
Interviewer: And this is with the wagon, with horses pulling the wagon?
Mr. Pyatt: Mhm.
Interviewer: Where was the market located in Knoxville?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, in there down the – where the – yeah, old marketplace. 
Interviewer: Did you all pick blackberries [inaudible].
Mr. Pyatt: No, we didn’t sell no blackberries.
Interviewer: When you got to the market, did you set your [inaudible] out, and did you sell to individuals or did you sell only to stores?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, we sold everywhere we could sell it. We sold mostly to stores.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: What did you say?
Interviewer: [inaudible] did you sell to Cas [Walker]?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, yeah, I sold a truckload to Cas at the time, after I’d started going in the truck, till then, and let us leave their home. He wasn’t in business when I first hauling into town.
Interviewer: When did you get your truck? Do you recall when you bought your first vehicle? [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: No, we had a Ford truck before we lived at East Fork and then after we got down to East Fork, why, we bought a used Chevrolet truck since we’d had an old, old Ford truck. Then we bought that new truck down there after we moved to East Fork. We bought the new truck and [inaudible] large truck then.
Interviewer: [inaudible] Tell us about that.
Mrs. Pyatt: We had a hail storm down there that really hitched us one year. And we had the two acres of grapes and he had the watermelons, acres of watermelons and tomatoes, and everything you could sell on the market, and it completely destroyed it in one hour’s time, and we were really sickened.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, out the back the next thing you know.
Interviewer: How many acres did you say? Two-and-a-half acres?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, some.
Interviewer: Now, you know, you can have a small farm [inaudible] try and raise that many [inaudible] nowadays.
Mrs. Pyatt: No. We had all other things, you know.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: That was – 
Interviewer: Mrs. Pyatt, would you tell us, after you were married and living on the farm and away from the country store, how you might spend a normal day after you had children? How would your day start?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I milked cows, of course, and I don’t know, we raised everything that we used, so I canned and I made my own soap a lot of times. I liked to make – I liked homemade soap. [laughter]
Interviewer: What did you make soap of?
Mrs. Pyatt: You make out of lye and some kind of ‘grease,’ I guess you’d call it, shortening of some sort.
Interviewer: That grease came from the pigs you slaughtered?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Didn’t it take the hide off your skin?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, it was pretty good if you didn’t put too much lye in it. And, of course, it was a long time before I had a washing machine and electricity, too. And we didn’t – 
Interviewer: How did you wash?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, washboard, of course.
Interviewer: Did you heat the water over a fire?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Outside?
Mrs. Pyatt: Outside.
Interviewer: Where did you get your water?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, we most always had a cistern everywhere. We had a well the first time, at Oak Ridge, we had a really deep well. And then later we had cisterns in other places with wells. And finally we got – 
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible] pond, and the water was hard [inaudible].
Interviewer: You washed where? At the pond?
Mr. Pyatt: Washed out of the pond. We had a big pond out on the road. We had, let’s see, I had several come there in March there at the pond. The well water was also hard. It was hard water, and you could not have washed in it.
Interviewer: Was this close to the Oak Ridge [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: No, you know where that Snow White Restaurant is? Right there is where our house was.
Interviewer: And where was the pond?
Mr. Pyatt: The pond was just below it.
Interviewer: In Clinton?
Mr. Pyatt: No, it was down where Robertsville is.
Interviewer: So they evidently filled the pond in, then.
Mr. Pyatt: Oh, yeah, they filled it in.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Well there was some [inaudible]. We had lots of bull frogs and mud turtles in the pond. [laughter]
Interviewer: Where did you all go fishing [inaudible]? All boys fish.
Mr. Pyatt: Well, I went on the creek and the river most of the time.
Interviewer: Where was the creek?
Mr. Pyatt: East Fork Creek, there, it runs right down through there and then the creek would run into the river just above us.
Interviewer: That’s that one in front of the AEC Building, isn’t it?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: And that’s where you all went fishing.
Mr. Pyatt: Well, way on up towards there, way on up towards the river is where we went fishing.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, we hunted a whole lot. We hunted for rabbits and then went hog hunting a lot. Most of the time, we’d catch polecats. [laughter]
Interviewer: What did you do about getting your hay in? Did the farmers help each other with those big crops?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes they helped one another on the farm. When one would have something he couldn’t do by himself, why, the neighbors would come down and help him and then he would help them back.
Interviewer: Who would build houses or who built the houses? [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: People that owned the land. [laughter]
Interviewer: Every place that you moved, was there a home already there, or did you ever have to build a home?
Mr. Pyatt: It was always there. We remodeled some.
Interviewer: Did you do this yourself?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, and then I had an uncle that – he was a carpenter, so he helped sometimes on little jobs. He’d come and stay with us once in a while.
Interviewer: [inaudible] Scarboro?
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Interviewer: Can I ask [inaudible] children [inaudible] got to them, had to get them to the doctor’s?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, you could get a doctor to come to your home.
Interviewer: How did you contact them?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, phone; we had a phone at Robertsville, but I don’t believe we had a phone at Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Who had the phone? Oh, you all had a phone?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, in the home.
Interviewer: Did the neighbors all come to use your phone?
Mrs. Pyatt: No, well, sometimes. [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you have one of the few phones or were phones pretty common?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, they were pretty common, I guess, down at the – 
Mr. Pyatt: We had a phone. The phone company put up there at Scarboro, put a phone station there. I don’t know what you call it. The [inaudible] had phones down there, just went together and [inaudible].
Interviewer: Privately owned phones.
Mr. Pyatt: Privately owned.
Interviewer: How long did they stay in operation?
Mr. Pyatt: I don’t remember. Maybe it was about twenty years, I guess.
Interviewer: [inaudible] Did you ever have to put the lines back up?
Mr. Pyatt: I built lines.
Interviewer: In other words, you couldn’t call Knoxville. It was strictly a community phone?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, it was connected up with the other phones and we called anywhere we wanted to call.
Interviewer: Did you have [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: No, we didn’t have any [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible] But you had phones before you had electricity?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, we had phone, had a battery phone. [laughter]
Interviewer: Oh, I see. Did you have a radio?
Mr. Pyatt: No, we didn’t have a radio for a long time and got a radio.
Interviewer: Well, what did you all do for entertainment?
Mr. Pyatt: [laughter] We worked.
Mrs. Pyatt: One thing, you went to bed earlier, you know.
Interviewer: What time would you normally go to bed?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, about eight thirty, I guess, and always when he was, you know, when he’d come see me, why, my father didn’t let him stay home until 8:30, when he left, he began to walk the floor, and so it seemed like the days were, you were already in bed at 8:30 in those days.
Interviewer: What time would you rise in the morning?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, that’s when we got up at 4:30 and 5:00.
Interviewer: And I take it that as long as you lived on the farm and you were a farmer, these were the hours you – 
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, later, I think we didn’t stay up – I mean, we stayed up more after we got the radio, I guess, television and so forth, we began to stay up more. Things began to change, especially after we had the TV a year in Oak Ridge, why, things began to change.
Interviewer: Do you know who owned the farm at Robertsville when the government came in?
Mr. Pyatt: Mr. Ed Croft.
Interviewer: [inaudible] Who owned the farm [inaudible]? Do you recall?
Mr. Pyatt: You mean when – [inaudible].
Interviewer: Well, when you sold your farm at Wheat, that was still before the government came in, wasn’t it?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, Norris – they were building Norris Dam at the time, I think, the farmer – 
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, in 1934. And I bought up here in 1934.
Interviewer: How much did you get for your farm, Mr. Pyatt? Do you recall?
Mr. Pyatt: I got twelve thousand dollars I believe.
Interviewer: How many acres?
Mr. Pyatt: Hundred and twenty acres.
Interviewer: Including the house and the barn?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Was that a good price back then in 1934?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, I thought it was cheap.
Interviewer: Considering they’re selling a half-acre lot in Oak Ridge for that amount nowadays.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: So you sold for [inaudible]?
Unidentified participant: Seventy thousand dollars.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, a hundred and twenty one, I hear.
Interviewer: You’re a good homeowner.
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, the house cost thirty-five hundred dollars to build our house.
Interviewer: How large was the house at the Wheat farm?
Mr. Pyatt: It was a nice house when it was built. It was run down some when I bought it, but the man that owned it at the time it was built, he was a mail carrier and he had a nice home.
Interviewer: Was this a two-story home?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, two stories and a basement.
Interviewer: Oh, it had a basement. So it a cellar, like, or could be a basement?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, it had windows. It was cellar-like, but it had windows in the front of the building, in the front.
Interviewer: How many rooms did you have?
Mr. Pyatt: Seven rooms, wasn’t it?
Interviewer: When you built it, [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: I didn’t build it, they had it built when I bought it.
Interviewer: So he had invested thirty-five hundred dollars in the building of it.
Mrs. Pyatt: [inaudible]
[Side B]
Mrs. Pyatt: The way they had their money was they would sell butter and eggs and chickens and so forth to make their money.
Interviewer: Who would they sell it to?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, we would have merchants. The merchants would buy things like that, you know.
Interviewer: These were the local country stores?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, butter and everything. We’d have what we call peddlers come around, pick up the butter and sell it.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: They’d pick up the butter and the eggs.
Mrs. Pyatt: Eggs, yeah, and chickens too, you know. Or you could take them to the store too, but these peddlers come around once a week, and they’d pick up all your things you had to sell like that, you know.
Interviewer: Do you recall how much you got for eggs and chickens?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, that was pitiful I guess. I can’t remember what we got, but of course today it bought as much I guess as it, I mean, yeah, it’s just about equal I guess. You could do as much with it probably, the money.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, sometimes.
Interviewer: You would sell to the peddler and then he would sell to the grocer [inaudible]?
Mrs. Pyatt: I think he took it into town, into Knoxville each week.
Interviewer: Nowadays, they talk about the man coming in and cutting the farmer’s profit. It sounds like you had them back then.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you sew and make most of the clothes?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, yeah, we made – I didn’t, of course, weave any myself, but my mother’s folks, all the generation before me did, you know. They began, when I would come home, why, they began to have more material that they didn’t have to weave.
Interviewer: So did you make your boys and your girls clothes?
Mrs. Pyatt: I made shirts for my boys and dresses for my daughter.
Interviewer: Did you buy the trousers in the store?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, mostly overalls. Of course, generally – [laughter]
Mr. Pyatt: No.
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you all have quilting bees?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, sometimes we would. Of course, you had to make all your bed clothes and things like that.
Interviewer: During the day, you were kept very busy running your home and helping out on the farm, like with chickens and cows and so forth. Did you ever have time to visit with one of your neighbors?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, occasionally. Now, they were a little farther apart than they are – of course, we went to church and – 
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Interviewer: When you had your children, where did you have them, at home?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: Did the doctor come?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, we had the doctor.
Interviewer: Did you have a midwife?
Mrs. Pyatt: No.
Interviewer: Did the doctor give you anything when you were having it?
Mrs. Pyatt: No. [laughter]
Interviewer: He just delivered them.
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: I never would have made it.
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: Who helped you with the children, Mrs. Pyatt? Did your mother come in to stay with you?
Mrs. Pyatt: When we were first married, Mrs. Pyatt, well, Mother lived with us for four years, three or four years, and of course she was real good to help me with my oldest son and the others. He had a sister too that was a lot of help, lived nearby, Mrs. Hightower. She – they bought part of the farm, a little Pyatt farm, and lived near us.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: [inaudible] Stella.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Interviewer: [inaudible] sisters too?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes.
Interviewer: Stella is your sister?
Mrs. Pyatt: No, Stella’s not a sister.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Vera, no, Vera is his sister. He has two sisters, and one of them is – Mrs. Hightower is right close to a hundred. And Vera Pearl is Stella’s mother. He has another sister that’s eighty-three, I think, and that’s all they have left of the Pyatt children.
Interviewer: What did your children do for entertainment, Mrs. Pyatt?
Mr. Pyatt: Worked.
All: [laughter]
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, they played ball and things like that, you know.
Interviewer: Nowadays, mothers seem to feel like they should give certain attention to their children, and I think sometimes they’re at a loss as to whether they should be staying with the child or working away. How did you manage to – it sounds like you had an awful lot of hours of work to do – when you had a young child, did the child just stay with you as you worked?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, they mostly stayed with us. Of course, they played around in the yard. You mean when they were small?
Interviewer: When they were small.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, they just played around in the yard. Well, they didn’t have so many toys then. They made their own toys, which I think is a good idea. They learn a lot of – 
Interviewer: Did you milk in the evening, in the afternoon? Did you have to milk in the afternoon?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, night and morning.
Interviewer: What would you do with the children who were young when you had to go milk?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I left them in the house when I didn’t want to stay with them. And sometimes I’d keep a girl, you know, when they were small.
Mr. Pyatt: We had a colored girl that stayed with us.
Interviewer: What did she do?
Mr. Pyatt: Oh, she just done a lot of whatever there was to do around the house.
Interviewer: She was the hired girl.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah. Well, she just stayed with us for board and clothing. Her mother was dead and her father, he worked for me. Her father worked for me, so he just – they just made their home at our place until – this was before she was married.
Interviewer: Did her father work for you just occasionally or did you employ him all the time.
Mr. Pyatt: No, just part of the time. When I got busy at some point, why, he’d come and work.
Interviewer: Like when you were getting tobacco in or something like this, would he help you out with that?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you have difficulty getting people to help you work?
Mr. Pyatt: No, there was always somebody wanting to work. It wasn’t like it is now.
Interviewer: People didn’t mind working back then, it sounds like.
Mr. Pyatt: No, they were glad to get a job.
Interviewer: How much did you pay them?
Mr. Pyatt: Fifty cents and a dollar a day.
Interviewer: And for meals?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: We had one colored fellow that lived on our place for twenty-seven years.
Interviewer: Did you have [inaudible] on your place?
Mr. Pyatt: No, it was not on our place.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: And he would raise a little crop of his own, and then he worked for us. He raised seventeen children while he lived there. [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you pay him in cash money?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, I paid him fifty cents a day.
Interviewer: That was quite a bit back then though. 
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: So this was on the farm at Robertsville, was it?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Your [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah. That was when I was just a boy, he lived there. Well, I believe he moved off when I bought the place out. He done moved, I believe.
Interviewer: Do you recall anything about your father’s family? Was your father born on the place, or had they come from someplace else?
Mr. Pyatt: My father was born – he’s was in Knox County, I believe, is where he was born. It was only three of the Pyatt family that settled in this part. They was come from North Carolina, up next to the Virginia line. It was just the three that [were] all I ever knowed of that settled in this part.
Interviewer: Mr. Pyatt, did the men ever get together in groups and have a social club [inaudible]? How did the men communicate with each other?
Mr. Pyatt: Generally around the store, [inaudible] the store. [laughter]
Interviewer: That was the meeting place?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah. They had a lot of kegs [inaudible] all of the country stores for them to sit on and talk.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, they talked about everything. [laughter]
Interviewer: Mrs. Pyatt, didn’t you mention something about corn shucking?
Mrs. Pyatt: Sometimes we’d have corn shuckings in the fall of the year.
Interviewer: What’s a corn shucking?
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, that’s when you get your corn and shuck it out.
Interviewer: Why do you shuck it out?
Mrs. Pyatt: [laughter] So you won’t have to shuck it when you go to feed the stock [laughter], I guess.
Interviewer: Just for the pig or something?
Mrs. Pyatt: Every morning, why, you had to – when you went to feed – you would have to shuck your corn. Well, it’s much better if it’s all shucked, you know. And then sometimes you would sell some.
Interviewer: You’d sell it shucked?
Mrs. Pyatt: No, you’d have to shuck it.
Interviewer: To sell it?
Mrs. Pyatt: Mhm.
Interviewer: How would you happen to get together for a corn shucking? Did someone say, “Come help me”?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, most every night some of the neighbors would come.
Interviewer: Everyone knew that everyone was doing this.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: What did you say, Mr. Pyatt, about that?
Mr. Pyatt: I said, every time we got a red ear, why, you kissed the woman that was closest to you.
All: [laughter]
Interviewer: Mrs. Pyatt, did you always sit by Mr. Pyatt?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, really and truly, I wasn’t in that deal. I think that that was before I got into the family. Because, you see, really and truly, I didn’t know anything about farming, and it’s been kind of pitiful. [laughter]
Interviewer: But you had to learn.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, I’ve learned a little bit about it of course, but it would have been much better, I guess, if we’d had someone that had been experienced in it.
Interviewer: Did you all have square dances?
Mrs. Pyatt: No, I didn’t – my parents wouldn’t have allowed that for sure. Just got to go to one and my parents didn’t know about that, so they didn’t square – I mean that was just against their religion and all.
Interviewer: When you were courting, did you see each other once a week?
Mrs. Pyatt: On Sundays and sometimes through the week. Now, we had ice cream suppers. You’d call them ‘ice cream suppers,’ I guess, picnics, I guess, too.
Interviewer: Pie suppers?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, we had pie suppers. It was very popular to have some of them in the churches. But my father wouldn’t allow that. I didn’t get to take any on at the school. So we had those; one way we made money and all. 
Interviewer: And so when you were courting, he might come to see you once or twice a week?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, that’s just about all.
Interviewer: Sit on the porch or go to a social sometimes?
Mrs. Pyatt: He had a horse and buggy. That’s the way we did a’courtin’.
Interviewer: Up till 8:30 in the afternoon. [laughter]
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes. No later, for sure.
Interviewer: Would you just go riding?
Mrs. Pyatt: Riding, yes, that’s mostly what we did, rode most of the time. Everybody or most had the horse-and-buggy on the farm, and horses, they rode horses all the time then. All my girlfriends that was on the farm had horses. So that’s about all I knew about farming was from being with my girlfriends, you know, when I was riding.
Interviewer: What did you do for reading material? You didn’t have a daily newspaper then.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, we always had a daily paper.
Interviewer: Where did you get the paper?
Mrs. Pyatt: We had a rural route.
Interviewer: Was it from Knoxville?
Mrs. Pyatt: When I was at Scarboro, why, it was out of Knoxville, I think, and I don’t know where it was at the – 
Mr. Pyatt: Clinton.
Mrs. Pyatt: Clinton, I guess, so it was when we lived at Robertsville. Yeah, that was one thing we did always have was the daily paper.
Interviewer: How often did the mail run?
Mrs. Pyatt: It run every day. I don’t remember now when that started really and truly. When I was younger, we might not have had that, but as far back as I can remember.
Interviewer: And he came on horseback?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, and buggies; they had buggies.
Interviewer: The postmen had buggies?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, carts, you know. That was about 1900, I guess, when they probably started that.
Interviewer: When the government moved into Oak Ridge, where were you living?
Mrs. Pyatt: We were at Norris.
Interviewer: So at this time you probably met some of your former neighbors as they were moved out of the Oak Ridge area. Is this right?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, my brother-in-law and his family, the John Pyatts, they moved out and also the Hightowers and our family. Of course, all those people we knew down there moved out.
Interviewer: John Pyatt, is that your brother?
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible] John Pyatt [inaudible].
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: No, Ralph is; he is his son.
Interviewer: Is John Pyatt’s son.
Mr. Pyatt: Mhm.
Interviewer: And John Pyatt was your brother.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Now, he was a – he worked with the people a lot, did he, in the community?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes. He was a – he was [inaudible], he was a justice of the peace for years here.
Interviewer: And that was your brother.
Mr. Pyatt: Mhm. He was in the timber business about all that time. He logged and went to Chattanooga, he would put them on the river and floated them down to Chattanooga. For years, he’d float the logs everywhere and float them down to Chattanooga, to the saw mill down there. Then after a while, he got to – there were saw mills that were running for him. He bought tracks of timber and cut it, had to saw it up. One time he had, oh, about six or seven thousand acres of land.
Interviewer: Did he own?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, then he went in the military. He went and signed a whole lot of papers.
Interviewer: And it was all part of the Project wasn’t it?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, he had to sell it all, several of his farms, to pay off some debts for people.
Interviewer: [inaudible] have they?
Mr. Pyatt: [laughter] No.
Interviewer: Who was the leader in your community, Mr. Pyatt? It must have been your brother, because he was a Justice of the Peace. [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Well, I reckon he was probably the leader in the community.
Interviewer: Where did he live after he left the home farm?
Mr. Pyatt: He lived down close to Robertsville. He was between Robertsville and Scarboro on that road that goes through that place.
Interviewer: I see. Where was the seven thousand acres he owned? Was that in the Oak Ridge area?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, he owned – over on the river, he owned four or five hundred acres over on the river there.
Interviewer: Where was the farm?
Mr. Pyatt: Below Scarboro, he owned several acres down there and then up above Scarboro, why, he bought a – first, he bought a big farm up there and he lived on it [inaudible]. Then he bought another farm up there too, I believe.
Interviewer: Did you know the Gambles down in Gamble Valley?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: What did they do for a living?
Mr. Pyatt: They farmed mostly.
Interviewer: Most everyone lived on a farm, didn’t they?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, about the only way that you could make a living then.
Interviewer: Did you all have a blacksmith shop, since you had horses?
Mr. Pyatt: No, Lee Foster, he knew a blacksmith working down in that part, he had a blacksmith shop and he just shoed the horses mostly.
Interviewer: Where was this shop?
Mr. Pyatt: It was down just below Robertsville.
Interviewer: You had a farm also, didn’t you, down in Robertsville?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes.
Interviewer: Was there any other little businesses like that around that you all went to, there was a country store and there was a blacksmith shop.
Mr. Pyatt: John Key owned a store there at Robertsville, and he was the only one in that part of town.
Interviewer: Was this the same store that Nash Copeland eventually had?
Mr. Pyatt: No, Nash built a little store above that.
Interviewer: Did you all know anything about Bethel Valley and the Bear Creek Valley?
Mr. Pyatt: We lived in Bethel Valley and Bear – no, we lived in East Fork Valley down close to Wheat.
Interviewer: But you didn’t ever live in Bethel Valley?
Mr. Pyatt: No, I never lived in Bethel Valley.
Interviewer: Did you ever go to church there in that little church [inaudible]?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, we went to church, I went to church sometimes over there.
Interviewer: In Bethel Valley?
Mr. Pyatt: In Bethel Valley. I belonged to the Junior Order [inaudible] over in Bethel.
Unidentified participant: This is that church that’s still standing.
Interviewer: Is that near X-10?
Unidentified participant: [inaudible]
Interviewer: Did you take your corn someplace to have it ground?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, and then I had the corn wheel on my patio.
Interviewer: Oh, you did your own. Did any of the neighbors come to have their corn ground?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, we ground every Saturday.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, that was the cheap corn.
Interviewer: How much did you charge people for grinding the corn?
Mr. Pyatt: We ground a bushel for a gallon.
Interviewer: Oh, you got a gallon of corn for a bushel of rice. Well, that’s a pretty fair trade.
Mr. Pyatt: [laughter]
Interviewer: Did you ever make any molasses, Mr. Pyatt?
Mr. Pyatt: Oh, yes, we made lots of molasses.
Interviewer: How did you make them? Did you take that mule and walk him around all day.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, we ground the cane with a mule.
Interviewer: What do you mean by ‘grinding the cane’? Did you use a walk stone?
Mr. Pyatt: No, it had rollers, big rollers that the cane went through between the rollers and mashed the juice out of it.
Interviewer: And you walked around pulling the mule.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, he went around and around.
Interviewer: How many mules a season did you use?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, you generally used two, just one at a time though. When one of them got tired, then we’d put another one to the wheel.
Interviewer: Did you raise your own cane?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you plant it or did it grow wild?
Mr. Pyatt: Well, we planted it.
Interviewer: Was there a good market for molasses back then?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, there was a pretty good market for molasses.
All: [inaudible]
Interviewer: You say you used a barrel of molasses?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, a barrel of molasses, we used hardly that much, but we did have our own wheat, you know, and made our own bread and everything like that. And we always had work hands mostly because he had the truck farm and you had to have work hands.
Interviewer: Where did you get these people to work?
Mrs. Pyatt: There were just local people around that you could pick up, you know.
Interviewer: Was this in Wheat?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, and also all the time we had the – off and on, you know, work hands.
Interviewer: What is truck farming opposed to any other kind of farming?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, that’s where you raise most everything for the market, you know, such as tomatoes and grapes. He’s always been interested in grapes, you know, had a grape vine.
Interviewer: Does he now?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes, Bill has grapes. [laughter]
Interviewer: Well, what did you all do in the winter when you weren’t trucking.
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, mostly, I guess, we just sat around is all [laughter]. Oh, you had your stock to feed, and of course the women quilt and do things of that type in the wintertime. 
Mr. Pyatt: Then we went to the market. I had a potato house that we put the potatoes in and I’d take the potatoes to the market during the winter. 
Interviewer: So you sold them even during winter.
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: This money you would get from selling your produce, would you very often spend it for something on the farm and just take a small portion to live?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, a whole lot of it went on the farm, but most of it, we took it to live. [laughter] We had to buy sugar and coffee and things like that.
Interviewer: Did you pay taxes back then on your farm company?
Mr. Pyatt: Yes, but they was very cheap then.
Interviewer: As long as you can remember, people paid taxes, is this right?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah, they have paid taxes ever since I was born.
Interviewer: To bring us up to date, when did you go out of the farming business?
Mr. Pyatt: I’m not out of it yet. [laughter]
Interviewer: Oh, you’re still in it?
All: [laughter]
Mr. Pyatt: I’m retired now I reckon.
Interviewer: Tell us about your retirement and when you “retired.”
Mr. Pyatt: Well, I sold my – no, I kept the farm for four or five years after I retired, moved over here, bought four acres here and moved on it. And I truck farm here some. I put my farm in the soil bank and kept it in the soil bank for seven years, I believe, before I sold it. I sold the farm then.
Interviewer: Now, this is the farm on the river that you’re talking about?
Mr. Pyatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: [inaudible]
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, we retired to the four acres and he set it out in grapes and all kinds of berries, strawberries and every kind of berry he could think of and just different things like that, so we haven’t retired too often much until right lately, because there’s a lot of picking to be done, you know. [laughter] He still has his grapes.
Interviewer: Does he sell those?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yes.
Interviewer: He’s just a farmer through and through.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, he couldn’t retire all pretty much.
Interviewer: What do you do know, Mrs. Pyatt, to keep busy now the children are grown?
Mrs. Pyatt: Well, I can get out more than I used to, you know. I belong to the [inaudible] Club and do things around the community and church and so forth, one I used to. But we have company along. We have the children and, well, it’s just about all I want to do to partly keep up the home. Of course we’ve had all those things to pick too, he raised. [laughter]
Interviewer: You help him do that?
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah, then I help him pick. [laughter] Not too much to be made out of it though, I guess, but he enjoys it, you know.
Interviewer: You have to have something to do.
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, yes.
Interviewer: It sounds like you’ve turned out to be quite a country gal.
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, yes, I know quite a lot about farming now. But I haven’t been able to plow and do those things like a lot of women do or have done. But I have learned to make soap, and I learned, in other words, to live on the farm, you know. And you have can, and all those things take so much of your time, you know. And, of course, later we froze our food and, well, in hog killing time, you had all that to work up and everything.
Interviewer: You didn’t have time to get in trouble, did you?
Mrs. Pyatt: No.
Mr. Pyatt: Tell them about our grape juice.
Mrs. Pyatt: Oh, yeah, I used to make grape juice and sell it, not – it wasn’t fermented, but I sold an awful lot of that when we were down at East Fork, and I had such a big vineyard.
Interviewer: Mr. Pyatt mentioned something very silently over here that you plowed twenty feet one time.
Mrs. Pyatt: Yeah. Well, that didn’t work out too good. Someone told my father that he was working me to death. [laughter] They got very concerned about it, you know, and that’s about the last I ever plowed. I thought I could, you know.
Mr. Pyatt: [inaudible]
Interviewer: Well, Mr. Pyatt, we certainly thank you and Mrs. Pyatt for letting us come interview for the Oak Ridge Historical Society. We’re interested in the early history [of] Oak Ridge. This tape will be on record down at the Oak Ridge Library, and I want you and Mrs. Pyatt to come down and hear it along with the other tapes that we’ll have. And we really appreciate you taking the time to tell us about these early days.
[end of recording]