Irwin, John Rice

              ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN RICE IRWIN
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 17, 2011
 
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is June 17th and I’m at the Museum of Appalachia with John Rice Irwin. Thank you for taking time to talk with us.
Mr. Irwin: My pleasure. 
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about your beginnings. Of course, this is the Oak Ridge Oral History Project and I know you had your early days in that area. So tell me about your family and your life. Where were you born and where did you grow up?
Mr. Irwin: Well, my association with Oak Ridge really started about 1935 when the federal government bought our property up in Union County in the same valley for the building of Oak Ridge, for the building of Norris Dam rather. About fifty-six thousand acres of people that in that area had to move and we chose, my family and my father and grandfather and uncles and aunts just moved down the valley about thirty miles into what is now Oak Ridge. That was in 1935. So we had a good size farm there and it became sort of a community of the Union County people, about twelve to fifteen families from Union County just sort of moved down Big Valley and settled there.
Mr. McDaniel: So that was in 1930 –
Mr. Irwin: About 1935.
Mr. McDaniel: 1935. How old were you when you moved?
Mr. Irwin: Five.
Mr. McDaniel: Five? So you all moved down to the Oak Ridge area from Union County and then low and behold seven years later you had to move again.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. We had the distinction, if that’s the proper word, of being routed twice by the government. In the case of Oak Ridge we had just a short time to move. We came out – I remember we came back from Nash Copeland’s store Monday and there was a little note pinned to the screen door flapping in the wind. My father read it silently and I didn’t know what it said but knew it was something pretty awful because of the reaction that my father and mother had. Gave us two weeks to get out, really. It wasn’t just a matter of loading up a moving van. We had three hundred and twenty-five acres of land and a lot of it was in corn and wheat. I don’t know why I remember little things when I can’t remember big things but I remember we had fifteen hundred bushel of oats we had to move.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Irwin: We had two barns full of tobacco that was not yet graded. It was on the stalk and we had to take care of all of that. We had quite a few cattle and about forty or fifty hogs and of course all your other animals, the chickens and the mules and the horses and then the chattels, all of the personal things. We lived on the same farm with my Grandfather Irwin and Grandmother. They had the residual of the furniture and all the things that – 
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a sec. [adjusting microphone] Just – oh, excuse me. I’m sorry. Move that up just a little bit to about there. There we go. That’s better. Let me see here. There we go. So you lived on it with your grandmother and grandfather?
Mr. Irwin: We lived in a separate house. They had the old large Victorian eight room home and we had a smaller house that my father and my mother’s father helped build. So it wasn’t just a matter of having a short period of time to move; it was a matter of gathering all of these things together. Of course the big problem was – two problems. One was to find a place to go. When you have fifty thousand acres of property being occupied, the question is where are all these people going to go? Most of them, virtually all of them wanted to stay in the general area. They didn’t want to go to another region or another state. So you had the problem of the increased price of surrounding property. It became very scarce. I don’t know how – and nearly all of the people did manage to stay within twenty or thirty or fifty miles. So that was one problem, to find another place and to purchase it and move there. Then in addition to that, the problem with transportation: this was in 1942 and ’43 and you had the rationing of the gas and tires and everything. As I recall, there was only two or three trucks available. Of course the government didn’t participate in it at all. It was left up to the individual to find the means of getting the trucks.
Mr. McDaniel: You had all this and you had two weeks to move? You had all the - I mean, you know, that’s amazing.
Mr. Irwin: Some of the people had a longer period of time to move. There were what was called hot spots, and the hot spot was an area where they needed to have immediate occupancy, and we happened to be in one of those. So my dad found a farm near Norris on the Mountain Road and about a hundred and twenty acres. Then my grandfather and grandmother bought another farm about a mile away, so we ended up being pretty close together.
Mr. McDaniel: Do you remember what your father got paid for his land in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Irwin: We had about, as I said, I think three hundred and twenty-five acres, and the initial appraisal and the offer – and it was more than an offer; it was a, “Here it is. Take it or leave it” – was ten thousand five hundred dollars, and that included the two homesteads and two or three rental houses and several big barns as well as the acreage. For the first time, my family became involved in litigation. They contested it, as did a good many of the people in the area. I believe that we got, after it went to court in Knoxville – Judge Taylor was the presiding judge over there and that was the first time I was ever in a court room. But I think the final settlement was eighteen thousand. But even with that, we couldn’t replace that much land and buildings.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess you probably couldn’t take everything with you. I mean there were things that you had to leave, weren’t there?
Mr. Irwin: Well, we were not allowed to take any of the things that were considered to be permanent fixtures of the houses and the chandeliers, which we didn’t have but my grandfather had, the fancy mantelpieces and all this. All that had to stay behind. But this, as I say, the problem of – I’m surprised the land prices didn’t go up more than what they did because you had so many people vying for whatever property was available.
Mr. McDaniel: What was available. Sure, I’m sure. Did the government – you know you would think that the government would come in and say, “Okay, we’re going to have to move these three thousand people out of here, and they’re not going to go far, so we’re going to restrict what someone else can charge them.” Did they do that or not?
Mr. Irwin: No, not at all. You would think that they would have had some remuneration because of circumstances. But to my knowledge, and I think I’m right, the government did absolutely nothing to expedite and facilitate the moving of these people, of all these people, with one exception that I’m aware of, and that is the cemeteries. They did agree to move the cemeteries, but some of them didn’t get moved for quite a while. Of course you have to remember that this was right in the middle of the war and the overriding purpose of the Oak Ridge Project was to get it going. They probably would have been more considerate in normal times than they were.
Mr. McDaniel: But it was pretty tough. I mean it was tough. I can’t imagine having been moved once and then six, seven years later turning around and having to be moved again and each time, I’m sure, taking a loss.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. Two moves is synonymous to a burnout they say.
Mr. McDaniel: So where exactly was your family farm in relation to what Oak Ridge is now?
Mr. Irwin: Our farm went from the top of Pine Ridge, which is adjacent to the Y-12 area, from there west and north over to where the whole valley there, over to where – I think the Garden Apartments. Are you familiar with those?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, sure. 
Mr. Irwin: I think that they were all – 
Mr. McDaniel: That whole area right there?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. It was about less than a mile off of what is now the Turnpike which was then Highway 61.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you were before the war, before they came and moved you, you were a kid living there, working on the farm, I guess. Where did you go to school?
Mr. Irwin: My first year was at Robertsville and then I only went there for one year. Then Scarboro was built or opened and moved over there. Those are about seven years of sort of a lifetime because my brother David and I spent a lot of time with my grandfather and worked on the farm from the time we were six or seven years old. We had, when we got in from school, we had all these chores to do and then in the summer we kept busy most of the time and when we weren’t working for my parents, we were picking blackberries and selling them and hulling walnuts and seining for minnows to sell and so forth. I just finished a story of the Museum of Appalachia. It started out to be that but it ended up being part of my story of John Rice Irwin, which is pretty egotistical, I guess.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s all right. They’re not mutually exclusive I would guess.
Mr. Irwin: They were intertwined. But it was just amazing what we remember from those years there. I was talking to one of my brothers the other day and we would – I don’t know how the subject came up, but we were out in the mountains one day and we came across a little tree and it was a hazelnut tree. It illustrates how you remember little things. I called my brother. I said, “Do you remember when we found that little hazelnut tree?” He did remember it, although he was eight or nine years old and remembered a lot more about it. But that illustrates the fact that we remembered so many details in seining for – and fishing in the streams and learning of all the trees. He didn’t start out to teach us about the names of the various trees, but we somehow by osmosis sort of learned.
Mr. McDaniel: Just being there with him and learned.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. The herbs and various plants. As I say, those seven years seemed like an eternity in a very pleasant period in my life.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess now as you look back on that, you think that was probably some of the most precious time in your life was those seven years you spent with your grandfather and your brother, you know.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, my grandmother, too.
Mr. McDaniel: And your grandmother.
Mr. Irwin: And my parents but for some reason Alex Haley always talked about how much more you were in love with your grandparents than your parents. He said you had a – the parents – how did he phrase this – had a common enemy, the fact that they had to tell you what to do and to be responsible and so forth. But in the case with your grandparents, they could let you do what you wanted to do and then not worry about it, send you home at the end of the day and be done with you.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Exactly. Well good. So when you moved out of there, when the war came and the Manhattan Project came and you moved out, you moved over to Norris. You got a farm in Norris. So did you stay here?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. My dad before we – just before we moved, the first thing that I remember that was indicative of what was to come was the little building or sort of an underground cellar type thing that they built across the road from us, and they said it was a place to store explosives. Then we began to see people coming in to the surveyors and you began to see them everywhere surveying the land. Of course nobody knew what was going on. Then the question arose as to whether or not this was inevitable that we move. I remember they had a meeting there at Robertsville School and Congressman John Jennings came, and at that time it was sort of assumed that the Congressman was omnipotent, that he could do anything. I remember the testimonies of those old people and the younger ones, too. With tears in their eyes they mentioned that their grandparents, their great-grandparents had come in their oxen cart and they had spent their lives there and their parents had spent their lives there and they had cultivated those hills and valleys and they often mentioned the cemetery, as you know, that they had relatives and some of them had their children who were buried there. I remember one old man said the only thing that he wished for was that he could live there the rest of his days and that his children could live there and that the land could be passed on. When it was over I’m not sure what a lot of people thought that Jennings could do anything about it, but he didn’t, as I recall. I was only, what, ten years old I guess. He didn’t indicate that it was inevitable that we all move. He just listened and smiled and of course everybody reminded him of the fact that they had supported him and voted for him and this kind of thing. But that was the one thing that I still remember is the pleadings of those people, that their homes be spared.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you see very many of them after everybody started moving away?
Mr. Irwin: Not too much. At that time, you had people were occupied on the farms and everybody had to spend all their time and effort and so forth and there wasn’t a lot of time for social mingling except during the church services. But getting back to your question about after we moved up here on what we call the Old Sam Hill place. It was a hundred and ten acres, I believe. So we started working, cleaning the farm up. It was grown up. Then started at Glenn Alcon School. We kept busy all the time. I had a trap line during the winter. I would get up in the morning and help milk. We milked about thirty cows in an old log barn and before we started milking them in the morning, I would run my trap line on Buffalo Creek and Johns Creek and along the mountain and get back in time by about seven o’clock to help my brother and father milk the cows. Then we would go to school. We took our milk to the Norris Creamery, and that was just a mile from the school. That was a little bit later in high school. Then it was during the war 
years of course, and instead of my dad taking us on up to the school, he would drop us off at the creamery which was half a mile away to save gas, and we’d have to walk all the rest of the way.
Mr. McDaniel: He had to take the milk anyway, didn’t he?
Mr. Irwin: Right. Oh yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] So he might as well take you guys with him.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, but he didn’t take us all the way.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. Now what did you catch on your trap lines? What did you trap and what did you do with them I guess?
Mr. Irwin: I trapped – one of the most memorable animals was what we call polecats or skunks. Not many people would do that because of obvious reasons. You get that smell. But I trapped them, and I would trap possums and I hunted possums every night. And a few mink and muskrats was probably the most profitable.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So for the possums what would you do with the possums? What did people use them for?
Mr. Irwin: Well, it was an important industry from the very first settlers in America. The fur business had a lot to do with how America was settled from the very beginning when John Jacob Aster came into New York from Heidelberg, Germany, I believe it was, and started buying a few furs, and then he realized that it was a profitable thing to do and he hired other people. He eventually became the richest man in America. He even bought ships to send them back to Europe. So the fur business has always been very important. Every farm child, farm boy in America, practically, in the 1800s and on up until the 1940s supplemented their income by catching these animals. A lot of people ate the possums and the coons but they – and I’ve got a coon out here now. It’s catching all my little chickens. Remind me. But Sears and Roebuck bought a lot of the fur. They had a fur section. They bought them in tandem, and of course they were in vogue. They were in style for the women during that time. There was a place in St. Louis, F. C. Taylor Fur Company that bought – you could ship them.
Mr. McDaniel: They would buy the fur from you.
Mr. Irwin: They’d buy them and they had a fur list indicating how much they would pay for poor quality, fair, medium and excellent. Of course, they never bought any excellent furs. They were all – 
Mr. McDaniel: Of course not. [laughter]
Mr. Irwin: The price was – I did catch a few mink and they were pretty high during that time. But I remember once when it was so cold that the schools were closed. The highest it got that day was eight degrees above zero, and I decided I would use that day to extend my trap lines and so forth. I remember that everything was frozen, but I caught one skunk in the creek near where a big spring came in, and the water didn’t freeze because that was spring water. I knew it would freeze and it would be difficult to skin, so I decided I would skin it there. So I started to skin it, and after two or three or four minutes, it would freeze and you couldn’t continue the process of skinning. And my fingers would freeze, too. So after two or three or four minutes I’d let it thaw and I’d put it back in the spring water and it would thaw out. It must have taken me two hours to skin that skunk. I remember that after skinning it and making a board to put it on to stretch the hide, it brought thirty-five cents. 
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Irwin: So it wasn’t very profitable. But the mink brought considerably more, I remember. I think I got as much as thirty dollars for a mink hide and that was great.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Wow.
Mr. Irwin: And that was considered to be a lot of money at that time.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, that was a lot of money back then. Now did you do any of that when you were living – before you moved up to Norris area? I guess you were too young probably to do very much of that back in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Irwin: Well actually yes and no. I was twelve – I was eleven there. I turned twelve in December just as we moved out. But I was buying from the neighbor boys possums and I had chickens. My brothers and I raised chickens and sold them, raised them up to 
frying size.
Mr. McDaniel: Didn’t you have an egg business? Was that you that had the egg business, you and your brother?
Mr. Irwin: Well it was mostly the frying chickens.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh the chickens. That’s right, it was the chickens.
Mr. Irwin: We would take them from – we would peddle them door-to-door, at that time, in Clinton mostly. At that time there was no – everything was rationed including food. You couldn’t buy any meat hardly in the stores. We would go from – my uncle would 
take us in his little coupe and he would park on a street in Clinton and my brother David would take one side of the street and I would take another. We would have a chicken under each arm and go down the street and knock on the doors and say, “Would you like to buy a chicken?” You can imagine how many would sell today. 
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure.
Mr. Irwin: We were selling them on foot. They had to kill them and pick the feathers and dress them and everything. They were, by today’s standards, they were very high. We would get seventy-five cents apiece for them. I figured one time that the chickens today in the grocery stores – you make a computation of dressing them and so forth – are about fifty times cheaper today than they were then. 
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Irwin: And eggs were bringing – well, we could hire people to work on the farm for seventy-five cents a day, ten hours, ten hour day. My dad always paid a dollar a day but the going rate was seventy-five cents. So you had – the person could work all day, a good healthy farm hand for seventy-five cents, and they could buy two dozen eggs at the most. And now, a laborer could buy probably fifty dozen eggs if he was paid even minimum wage. So people are always talking about the cost of food and it’s gone down, realistically. So we had a school bus driver, an old man by the name of Bill Key, and sometimes we could walk about a mile and catch the bus or we could catch the bus a little closer home, but we had to ride all the way down into Roane County and back and so forth. But he would buy possums, and one night my uncle who lived with my grandmother and grandfather caught two possums in my grandmother’s chicken house. We put them under a tub and they were going to do away with them, kill them. They agreed to let me have one of the possums. I don’t know why they didn’t give me both of them. But the next morning we got ready to get on the bus – this was in the Oak Ridge area. I got started on the bus and I had this sack, grass sack or – we called them ‘grass sacks.’ And the old man, Bill Key, said, “What do you got in the sack, Johnny?” And I said, “I got a possum to sell you.” And he said, “Well, let me see him.” I gave him the burlap bag. He didn’t take him out of the bag, but he felt of him through the sack or down the back, you know, to see how fat he was. He said, “Oh he’s a mighty poor one Johnny. I can’t give you much for him.” I said, “Well, how much?” He said, “I’ll give you fifteen cents. That’s the most I can give.” I said, “Well if you take him home and fatten him up a little bit surely it would be worth twenty cents.” So he finally agreed to give me twenty cents for him. He also sold suckers and he said, “Now do you want it in money or do you want suckers?” And I said, “I want it in money.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That was your school bus driver?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that is funny. That is funny.
Mr. Irwin: So during that time I was making a little money about, well, in the fall, we would haul walnuts and take them to the store. We got nine cents a gallon for black walnuts after they were hulled. I’d pick blackberries in the summer and sold them for twenty cents a gallon. Then when – we worked for my parents all the time, most of the time, and I started plowing, I remember, when I was eight years old. The reason I remember my age is that I was watching them plow with the mules and I wanted to plow. My dad said, “You’re too little.” There was a cousin older than me who was helping, Albert Stooksbury. I remember him saying, “I did my first plowing when I was eight years old.” My dad said, “Well try it if you want to.” So I tried plowing the row and did pretty well. So he let me from that point on. He trusted me with the mules and a team of mules and driving the wagons and so forth. Kids can do a lot if you trust them and if they’re conscientious. I was driving a hay wagon off the mountains when I was up here when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. My dad wouldn’t trust any of the hired help coming down the mountain, those steep slopes and not turning it over. But I was involved in entrepreneurial things when I was eleven years old down there. My dad would let me keep the money, but he never paid us. I never heard of any such thing as an allowance. If we requested money for helping him we’d probably got a slap in the face.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] You ate his food and slept under his roof. You had to do some of the work, didn’t you?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, but of course we never expected it. It was just part of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure. Exactly. Let’s talk about your relationship with Oak Ridge after your family moved away. I mean, what kind of relationship did you have with Oak Ridge through the years after that.
Mr. Irwin: Well in the beginning the only relationship we had with Oak Ridge would be the people who had moved in there and they would come out on the weekends and so forth. So we got acquainted with some of them. The thing that I guess I remember as much as anything is the scarcity of housing for those people if they didn’t live in Oak Ridge. Most of them – I don’t know – I shouldn’t say most of them, but many of them didn’t live in Oak Ridge if they worked there. Some of them lived in Kentucky and Virginia and drove to work back and forth every day about sixty-five, seventy miles. They would stay home overnight, and then some of them would live as far away as the Kingsport [Tennessee] area which is about a hundred miles. The housing – anything you had that could shelter people, you could rent, and if it was an old garage or a house that had been abandoned or whatever. I remember there was a lady and her family from Finland that rented a room from our neighbor, Uncle Campbell Sharp. We got acquainted with her. Everybody that had any extra housing, they could rent it out without any difficulty.
Mr. McDaniel: So anyway, you were talking a little bit about the people who would come up and see you that lived in Oak Ridge. Now, in your relationship with Oak Ridge, I guess after the war – 
Mr. Irwin: Well during. During and after, too.
Mr. McDaniel: During and after the war. Did your parents ever go back to Oak Ridge after they left? I mean did they – when did they ever go back? Did they go back when the gates were there?
Mr. Irwin: No. When we were moving out – I’ll try to get to you question there – but when we were moving out, we didn’t manage to get to hire a truck. And Old Man Wally Cassidy – and one day we were moving there, all of our livestock and furniture and everything up to the present home place here in Norris, and it occurred to my father and the rest of them that we had all these things up here that we had moved and left unguarded into the new home place. He told me to get on the – they were coming out with a load of hay and to come up here and spend the night and feed the livestock that we’d brought up already, sort of to watch the – to guard the place.
Mr. McDaniel: How old were you?
Mr. Irwin: I just had turned twelve. I came up and I was expected to go back down there in the next day or two. As it turned out, I never did get back down there because they were bringing more things and they needed somebody to guard them. And that was when I left. When I went back, I guess it was in ’45 or ’46, whenever they opened the gates. I mean they built the entire town while we were – before any of us got back and my parents and grandparents, none of them had a chance to go back when the gates were closed.
Mr. McDaniel: It was ’49 when they opened the gates.
Mr. Irwin: Oh, that was ’49, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So you all never went back again until after the gates were opened?
Mr. Irwin: No. A totally different world. All the houses were gone, and the grading of the hills, and it was just almost like it was up in Union County when they flooded there. It was – the topography – 
Mr. McDaniel: Was completely different, wasn’t it?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: How did your dad feel about it? Did he ever get over it or did he ever have the thought that, “Well the government needed it. It was for the good of the country.”
Mr. Irwin: Well, I’ve been asked that question. In Union County, we were more attached to the land and all around. Everybody that lived up there were – every person was related to the other neighbors and it was much more of a traumatic kind of thing. To tell 
you the truth, my people never were too satisfied down there where Oak Ridge is because they were among – even though they were close by, they were among strangers and everything. To some extent, they were sort of happy, as I say, to some extent, to get back up near their – 
Mr. McDaniel: Near home.
Mr. Irwin: Near home. But I think generally there was a feeling that if the government did something, it was meant to be. It was inevitable. It was like God doing something, and you didn’t question it too much. In the beginning they – like what I mentioned 
about the church services or the church meeting when they tried to stop it, but people I guess they were so preoccupied in worrying about moving that people that didn’t have any land down there had no place to go and everybody was so engrossed in trying to find a place to live that that was uppermost in their minds rather than talking about the philosophical aspect of why the government did it and so forth.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. But I guess later on and later in years what did your – did you ever hear your dad talk about that?
Mr. Irwin: I never heard much complaint in a negative kind of way and it was a matter of it was over with and they were pleased, as I say, to be back up closer to their roots.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. [They had] more to do than sit around and worry about the past. You’ve got things to do today, I guess.
Mr. Irwin: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well we sure appreciate you taking time to talk with us. That’s very interesting and that will make a great addition to our collection. So thank you, Sir.
Mr. Irwin: You going to give me prime – am I going to be on the cover or something?
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] You’ll be on the cover of something. We’ll figure out what that is.
[end of recording]