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Interview with Felix Hooper

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  • Hooper 1 Interviewee: Felix Hooper Also present: Fannie Mae Hooper (wife) Interviewer: Philip Coyle Date: December 6, 2005 Duration: 1:01:23 Philip Coyle: can I get you to say your name and spell your name for me? Felix Hooper: Felix Hooper. PC: And I guess that is spelled F-e-l-i-x Hooper. FH: F-e-l-i-x H-oo-p-e-r. PC: Tell me when and where you were born. FH: Well, I was born August I, 1908 just across the creek over here. I've lived in this vicinity about all my life. PC: Now I think you wanted to talk about Blackwood Lumber so maybe you could talk about Blackwood Lumber. FH: Well, that's why I asked you what part of it you want to know about. PC: Now did you work for Blackwood lumber or what? FH: Yeah. I worked for them up until from the time I was young, wasn't a man, till about 1939 I guess it was and then I went on construction work and stayed on construction work about three or four years. PC: Well let me ask you some questions. Now you were born in 1908 so now that right there is remarkable. So, I have to ask you about that like I have to ask you about your own parents and your life as you were growing up in this Caney Fork. FH: My father was Andrew Hamilton Hooper and my mother was Arilla Brown Hooper. They had a pretty good family and they all managed to get education but me. Blackwood Lumber Company come in here. I started work one summer and I was going to go to high school and that's as far as I ever got. PC: So, you can remember the day before Blackwood Lumber Company came in. FH: Oh yes. I remember when the President of the company. My daddy and myself had been, we had to go, we grew our own wheat and we had to go to the wheat mill and was coming back - the president of the Blackwood Company, you know where that bridge is down there at Jack the Dippers, they were surveying that out or walking it out, they wouldn't have it surveyed yet. And he stopped with my daddy and myself and set his foot up on the hub of the old wagon and told us what they was a doing, what they was going to do and they was going to build a railroad from Sylva and log the places up here and he guessed they would build a mill up somewhere in the Caney Fork community. It had not been decided yet so they got two or three places in view and then the next I remember was they was a grading the railroad through what we used to call Loves Field. That's the angles that straight there that was called Hooper 2 Loves Field. I went through thee a time or two and then they come on up here and people had to sign right of way for them, my daddy signed the right of way for them to build a railroad right through this, where I'm sitting here. Extended. And from Sylva to East LaPorte was the Tuckaseegee and Southeastern RR. It was chartered. This on up here was just a logging road and they had a, they made an old bus or two out of old trucks and they used them to haul passengers from Sylva to East LaPorte and up Caney Fork. And then they bought a bus was made more like a streetcar. And they used it until about 1929 I guess. Everything went down. Lumber was one of the first things and banks and real estate and they had to close the mill down. They didn't operate no more for a while and then they started operating one mill. There were two band mills and I worked in the mill all the time. I never worked in the woods or on the section, anything, I worked in the mill all the time. Up until about 1939 I guess when I decided I'd had enough. PC: The mill shut down in 1929 is that right? FH: No, that's when the Depression hit what they called the Hoover Panic. Hoover was President and he called it the Hoover Panic. I don't know much about politics then, don't care, don't make me no difference. Tell you what happened. They closed it down. They stacked lumber. They just kept sawing and stacking lumber thinking it would come out. They added on different and then they moved down. They had a trestle there to that rock below where the old wrecker station used to be, the Cullowhee Valley Wrecker Service. They had a bridge that went down there and they hauled lumber down that and stacked it along the river and then they quit. I don't know how long it was before they got to selling a little bit. And then they kind of got it thinned down I don’t know how long it took them. They started back operating one mill. And finally, I got back to working with one mill operating. And they operated one mill, they sold it to Mead Paper Company, I believe that was in ’45, I’m not positive. But they sold out to Mead Paper Company. They owned a whole lot of you know all about the Forest Service. The Forest Service got ahold of it from Mead, I guess. PC: So then were you working then straight through. Did you get laid off in '29 or did you work straight through. FH: No, nobody worked straight through. A watchman, two men, one for the day and one of the night and that was the only people that was working. PC: Just to watch all that lumber that they had cut there. FH: Yeah on account of insurance. And they put a little old steam boiler, you had three big boilers to make steam to run the mill, well they put a little old boiler to make steam to run a water pump. PC: Now in 1929 you would have been 21 years old. So were you on your own at that point. Did you have your own family or were you still with your parents. FH: No, didn't have no family, I got her in 1938. That's my first family. I lived with my parents. PC: So I guess when you lost your job were you working at all then or were you just FH: No, I had two old mules. Leave one on the scale and lead the other one off and he weighed 700 and some lbs. Get about 60 pounds. The creek hadn't mucked all this away in here then so we tended Hooper 3 that and then my brother in law had bought a place up on the, just before you cross the first bridge up there. The first bridge going up the hill in that where Odell Lovedahl lived, you know that? PC: I do. FH: Well he owned that and the '40 flood washed it away but then we growed corn up there. He had one patch that he owned himself and we rented the rest and with them mules, I had a brother who was older than I was, we rented that and growed corn on it. I growed hay and wheat here. I had three stacks of wheat and a stack of rye in 1940 over there in the field and the creek got up about halfway in it. And we had a crib I guess I don't have much corn in it. You can see it over there. Well it got halfway up in there and we had to shuck it out and take what was one top. We ground our own meal. We're getting away from Blackwood. PC: That's alright. FH: We had our own mill grinding the wheat, well we took the best off the top where the water didn't get it and we shucked the rest out and fed it to the horses. We had to sell our cattle. We had pretty good bunch of cattle for a small place and we had to sell them all but two milk cows. We kept our horses. We'd gone out of the mule business at that time and we kept our horses and two cows and sold the rest. PC: Now you sold them just because you were trying to survive then after that flood then I guess. FH: Well didn't have no hay and nothing to feed them what was you going to do? Didn't get too much out of them. I forget how many we had that sold, got $165 for them. About $10 a head. PC: You know I was here when that last flood came through just a couple of years ago the one that they just fixed up your property down here. FH: Oh, that was last September. A year ago. PC: Now how did that flood compare to the 1940 flood? FH: Oh that was nothing compared to this. You see that old barn sitting over there and that crib and it was halfway up in that crib. PC: I guess it would have come up all the way to… your house didn't get flooded or anything. FH: It wasn't here. PC: But what I mean, where this house was, where this house is now, it probably was up FH: Yeah, and I don't guess maybe it washed away. But when the '40 flood come, the man that lived above here built a bridge out of locusts and it washed that away. Fannie Mae Hooper: Wasn't the old trestle here and it didn't wash it away. FH: No they had the railroad all took out to East LaPorte… FMH: You see the railroad going on up to the mountains to get the timber come right through here and they crossed the creek right there where the bridge is. Hooper 4 FH: And they'd go back to Blackwood Company they could saw about 90 board feet. I've got it wrong. 42,000 with that one little old mill that run after the Depression, they could cut 42,000 board feet a day. When they run both mills, they had two old men and they didn't push it and they, one of them died and the other one left, and when it got started back up they were sawing about 35,000 feet a day on this mill. FMH: Another thing that was interesting to me and would be good for you to know about too, they had a little crane that would go across the mountain up there on into Canada and pull those logs across there and then brought them on down here. PC: I had heard that, yeah you can see, I've been up to Sugar Creek Gap and you can see where it might have gone. FMH: I've rode the little old train up to the Sugar Creek Gap. PC: Now did it go up John's Creek or did it? FH: No, it went up you know where Sugar Creek is? Sugar Creek Church. Well, it went from there to the Sugar Creek Gap and through the Sugar Creek Gap back over to the Canada Station. PC: It's hard for me to figure out how it could of gotten up that mountain, cause it was pretty steep there from Sugar Creek. FH: Well now let me explain that to you. They had what they call the incline and they pulled the logs up in there at the head of Sugar Creek and dropped them down Sugar Creek down to the main line. And they picked them up, they dumped them off the narrow gauge on a landing and then they picked them up there with and hauled them down with the standard gauge. PC: Well you rode that narrow gauge one all the way up to Sugar Creek Gap? FMH: We were just children and my daddy and mother was taking us camping out from Sugar Creek Gap there and the man that was driving the trail said, "Just get in here and ride." We was walking and we rode the little train out to Sugar Creek Gap and then walked out to Old Bald stayed took three days. FH: No you didn't go to Old Bald, you went to Rough Butt. FMH: Well wherever it was, I didn't know at the time. I was just a girl, but I remember riding the little train. PC: Somebody once told me that the mill from Blackwood Lumber Company came from what they used to call the Norwood Lumber Company which was down Forney Creek, I believe. FH: No, if I get it right, it come from Blackwood, Virginia. The main old mill, of course it didn't all come from there. The main, the first one they put in they operated it I don't know how long before they started the second mill. But it come from Blackwood, Virginia so that's the reason it was named the Blackwood Lumber Company. I don't know what it was named up there. I know a boy that lived over here in East LaPorte and he said that was the second time he heard the whistle blow its last blow. Hooper 5 PC: He had come down with that mill I guess. FH: Yeah, his daddy had worked at that Blackwood Mill and he come down here and helped build this mill and he, they had a planing mill, a dry kiln and a planing mill and this boy’s daddy was over the planing mill… FMH: And another thing I would like to add into it, there was over 400 little houses they built for the people to live in. FH: No, they wasn't 400 houses Fannie Mae. There's a 117 houses in this East LaPorte area. Some of them was 3 room, some of them 4 room, some of them added on. They started out building them four rooms and people would move into them, the family would get bigger, they'd add a room or two onto it. PC: I have to ask you a question which is kind of about Blackwood Lumber which is about the Chestnut trees. Now there's few people alive today that remember the Chestnut trees. Do you remember them? FH: Oh, I remember them well. He's talking about the native. PC: Yeah, I'm talking about the old American Chestnut. FH: He's talking about the native Chestnuts. About everybody had Chestnut orchard. We had one over here above the barn. And then back in along in the mountains we called it, they had this Willow Chestnut trees. I remember one time before the Depression, had an old car over yonder - a friend of mine from Macon county we was working on the carriage together we decided we was going Chestnut hunting and he come over and then him and my daddy went out on Old Bald Ridge if you know where that is, what they called the Old Bald Ridge, was eating their lunch over by Old Bald Ridge Spring. When I first went out there a trail went around it and was sitting there and looking and we'd got a few Chestnuts, not too many. We was setting there and he said, "Mr. Hooper, it won't be long until you not be getting any Chestnuts." "Why's that" I believe his name was Elvin, Elvin Henson. And he said he'd been up in Pennsylvania working on a high extension line, putting up a steel poles and he said that out in Pennsylvania and out in there, he said every Chestnut tree had died. PC: Hang on- I'm going to ask you that question again because I do think it's very important that we get a recording of you talking about Chestnut trees, but I’m going to wait until she’s off the phone. While we're waiting tell me again where's the house that you grew up in? FH: Set over there where you turn down the hill. My grandson lives in it. PC: Where you turn down the hill toward East LaPorte? FH: No right here just when you come… PC: The ones that's kind of green painted now, oh yeah, that one. FH: Started to paint it green. I don't know whether if he got it all painted green or not. PC: So that's the house you grew up in. Hooper 6 FH: Now that house was built in 1913. Now you can figure how old I was when we moved into it. I guess tore down a better house than that one, because that old house was filled, it was storm seeded, weather boarded and sealed and had a board roof on it. PC: Now some people to me, they've called that house over here and there's a big white house at the corner of Moses Creek, isn't that one sometimes called the Hooper House? FH: Yeah PC: Now who lived there? FH: Well… [Fannie Mae finished with phone call comes in] PC: I was asking you about that house, but what I would really like to ask you about is to get back to that Chestnut story. And I'll tell you why I'm focusing on this Chestnut story and the reason is is because the Blue Ridge Parkway is building a visitor’s center over there in Asheville and one of the exhibits that they have at that Visitor's Center is about Chestnut trees. And there's not that many people like yourself who can talk about Chestnut trees with first-hand experience. So maybe I'll ask you to tell that story about being up on Old Ball Ridge at the Old Bald Spring again. FH: Well, we was eating lunch and this Henson boy been up in Pennsylvania working on a power line and he told my daddy about the trees being all dead up in Pennsylvania and all took out where he were and he said that it would eventually come down here. Well it wasn't but just a year or two that it was here. They were still logging up on Moses Creek. That must have been around 1928 or '29. Then Blackwood Lumber Company didn’t sell much Chestnut lumber, there was no market for it. PC: Things change, now there's a market for Chestnut lumber, old barns and stuff now FH: There's certain trees they just cut and sometimes they cut one and when it would fall off the roller bed it would just break all to pieces. The same way with what they called Hemlock. They called a band of this timber that growed up in here Hemlock. They thought a lot of that. It made awful good framing for houses and stuff. It had a pretty good market. But this old Chestnut didn’t. PC: Well I’m interested in a term you used, you said that everybody had Chestnut orchards you called it. FH: Well, they'd have anywhere from 3 or 4-5, 8 or 10 trees. Just about everybody. Well I don't above here, but I know that the Midlands down here below, that’s where you turn down in here, they had I don't know how many big old Chestnut trees out there. PC: Now did people go to their own particular Chestnut trees, like they had maybe a ramp patch where they would go to the same tree every year and get Chestnuts or did you just go out and forage wherever you wanted to. FH: Well back before I was remembering or anything I’ve heard my daddy tell about him and an uncle, my uncle going out to Moses Creek, they had an old camp out there, they growed hogs Hooper 7 just in the wild, and taking some of the children and getting a sack full. And up there on Moses Creek I had an uncle and well, he married my aunt, and there was a, when Blackwood come they had a big orchard over at house and they had an old big long seed sacks we called them that would hold a bushel and a half. They'd pick up them Chestnuts and soak them in salty water to get the worms out of them, most of them, and they… I’ve been up there and we’d set and eat Chestnuts till bedtime. Had a lot. I know I went up there after the Blackwood Lumber Company come in and picked up a few cause there was a bunch more in there picking them up. I guess I got a gallon maybe. PC: So now when did they cut down all those Chestnuts cause certainly when you go hiking up in the woods now you can still see the stumps, but when did they… FH: Old Chestnut stump won't never rot. They cut this Chestnut up I’m talking about in about 1921 I guess it was. They started logging in there you know where the state road ends on Moses Creek PC: Yes, I do FH: Well, them Chestnuts stood back over that way. You know you go on up there, the Forest Service road and they make the turn, well it was over there. My uncle lived in an old house there where them pine trees is. PC: I see, that's one of my favorite places to go walking. FH: So they cut the Chestnut tree down and they never died until they moved in on what this is what we went up what they called Chastain's Creek, Shut-Ins Creek, whatever you want to call it. We went up there, they was in there and the Chestnuts hadn't died then. So, the Chestnut must have died, started dying around 19 and… I don't know ours died quicker than anybody’s. I couldn't say, they must have started dying in the last '30s. PC: I have a question for you which is do you know how John's Creek got its name? FH: No. I don't know how Caney Fork got its name. Now there's several people wrote about it and there's always somebody writes in the paper about things. Now they had not too long ago, I don't know whether it was a local paper or the Citizen, they had a big write up, a map or something of it about Caney Fork and about all of this, where it got its name. You know there ain’t too many people know about the Meigs and Freeman line. PC: What do you know? FH: Well, I got an argument with a friend of mine about where it was and he said "Oh, no, it come through Cowee Gap and on through Sylva and through there." Well, there's a friend of mine, two professors and one or two and myself and there's for or five of us, I don't know how many now, went up the, you know where Norma Jean Coggins lives? PC: Yes FH: Well, they lived in that old big white house there. Between Norma Jeans' and where, the boy lives on the highway patrol Hooper 8 PC: It's the Brown’s house, isn't it? FH: I don't know whether they painted it or not. PC: Oh no, I mean the name of the people there was Brown FH: Browns yeah. Well he was a Brown and he took us and showed us where the Freeman line went through, he pointed to it FMH: There was a lot of Chestnut trees in on that property. I'm 89 years old and I know a whole lot of it too. PC: Well that's what I wanted to do was to come back on another day and interview you particularly. FMH: And we lived on that Brown property for years and my grandparents lived on it and they was a lot of Chestnut trees on that. PC: We were talking about the Meigs-Freeman line and that got me thinking about Indians and whether there were any Indian people that ever came up here in your youth - when you were a young man. FH: Well I don't know. Used to be my father would plow that field out there next to the creek, he plowed up. He called them Indian relics. Arrows and wedges and things like that. Somebody come along smarter than him you know and he'd give them to them. Then he told me one time that in that field over there where these people bought it, him and his brother who was a digging a ditch in the springhead and when they got in there at the springhead they found a lot a whole lot of Indian things, pots and things like that. FMH: You know about Judaculla Rock. PC: Well I was going to ask you because you used to live, I guess during the Depression you were saying, you lived basically right across the creek from Judaculla Rock. FH: No, I farmed across the creek from it. I lived over there but I farmed that flat, there was a big bottom in there before the flood washed it away. PC: People must have talked about Judaculla Rock back in those days. What did they say about it? FH: Well, everybody had a different opinion. FMH: Tell him about the mountain up there. FH: Well there's a cove up here on the mountain that there was an Indian lived through the Trail of Tears. He hid out up there and they called it the Jenny Cove. My daddy said that there's an old man by the name of Indian Jim lived up there. My grandfather, he wasn't in the service in a way, but he was what they called the Home Guard. He was in the Home Guard. And then they tell me, I've tried getting to it a time or two but I never did, I went the wrong way till I found out which way to go, that the Indian Chiefs buried up here you know where this old house is up right around the bend there, the Hunter House, Bucks Creek. PC: The one that just got pulled out? Hooper 9 FH: NO. Up here what they called the old Hunter House. PC: Yeah, I know it FH: This big old house, they redone it. Well he's buried a standing up they tell me on top of that mountain up there where he could watch them play ball in what they call the Town House down there at Cullowhee. Of course, now that's all been redone down there and I think the Town House is in there where the old, old stadium was, football stadium. PC: Yeah, I have a colleague there who's doing some excavations for that old Town House there. She's digging up where the area around that Town House. And they found old balls. FH: Well now they was an Indian Mound down there next to the creek and I don't know why in the world the college let that be leveled down. They leveled that down. That was a very stupid thing in my opinion. PC: Yeah let me get back to that, you talked about that Indian Jim you called him? FH: Indian Jim that lived up here in the cove. PC: Now was that up in Moses Creek or where was that? FH: No, it's right back up here. FMH: All of this in here and the valley belonged to his family. FH: Belonged to my grandpa. You go right out here and there's a road goes up the hill, I think you got to have four-wheel drive to get in there. PC: Now when you are talking about your grandfather being in the Home Guard, what war are you talking about then? FH: Well the War between the States. PC: That's what I thought you were talking about. FH: Yep. He wouldn't have been in the Revolutionary War PC: No, and I was thinking it certainly wasn't WWI, so it must have been the War between the States. FH: No, I remember FMH: Have you ever met anybody could remember like that? PC: Very few, I've only known one other person who had a grandparent who was in the Civil War, the War between the States. This lady who's 92, but very few. So, tell me about your grandfather who was in that war. FH: Well, I don't know too much about it. But all I know about my daddy told me one time about they called them renegades. I'm going back the old-fashioned way, they called them renegades. And my grandpa was out on a trip, I don't know what his business was but he wasn't at home and somebody Hooper 10 got my grandmother word that they was a coming and my uncle took the horses and took them up there what I was talking about Jenny Cove and hid them till they got gone. Well they didn't burn them out nor didn't steal nothing I don't think. My grandmother recognized one of them, he lived right down the river down here, John T. Wike and so they left them alone. My granddaddy got back home and so one time he come up to visit, the old man did, I don’t know if it was after my grandpa died or not, it might have been. I don’t remember right now when he died, and he got ready to leave, he said, "Well Chrisey come down and see me sometime." She said, "Old John T. Wike I'll not come down to see you and you needn't worry yourself about coming back to see me." And said, "You know why." The old man, that was the end of their relationship. PC: Well the more things change, the more they stay the same. Everybody’s against everybody else. Back then and just like today. That's funny because I know there's a Mr. Wike who teaches at Cullowhee Valley School. He just came back to take care of that Wike cemetery there. FH: He might be a little relation to this old man but not much. That set of Wikes was good people. FMH: That was an awful long time ago. Any of the folks wouldn’t be living now. FH: No, the old man’s been dead a long time. I remember him. We used to have, we'd have to make a trip to Sylva ever so often and we had an old mule and a saddle horse that we worked together. And the old mule would run away every time a crow flew across it. I had a hold… had an extra line on her and I had to hold it. My daddy make some remark about the old man. The road went right through his yard and turned off to go the old River Road over here where the Masonic Hall is. Across down there. PC: I know we're going on a little bit and you could tell me when you start to get tired or that nurse is going to show up but I do want to ask you because you talked about being up there on Old Bald Ridge and now you were up there gathering Chestnuts or were you hunting up there or what were you doing up there. FH: No, we just went up there to hunt Chestnuts. It's more on a picnic, FMH: Didn't they grow down real low up on the mountain up there on Old Bald, didn't they grow real low on the, you could just reach up and get them. FH: No, they growed just like they did here. PC: Tall FMH: They's some trees up there that growed that way cause I remember them. PC: Yeah, if you go up there you can see it's like the wind will shake some of the trees you know. FMH: They wasn't as tall as they were down in the valley PC: Now did they call that tall mountain there Richland Balsam, did they call it that back then. FH: Richland Balsam. No I reckon Richland Balsam is further back that way, towards the Parkway, back in that Shining Rock and back through there. Hooper 11 PC: Yeah, this is going to be kind of a general question but maybe you could just… when you got on up into that high country up there, what was it like back there in your day. Were people grazing animals up there or what was it like up there? FH: Well, they pastured cattle, sheep, horses, hogs, we growed our hogs on Moses Creek. All back there and it was all timbered when I first started going. I guess I’m some 88 years old, I don't remember. The first time I ever went to take the cattle, we took them on what was called the Flat Gap Pass. You can see it on the Parkway driving down toward Balsam, Beech Gap and all through there. PC: Keep talking about that country because I'm not picturing which gap you're talking about. Like I’ve been up there to Old Bald Ridge and where that hits the Parkway and also to Wet Camp Gap that area over there on Rough Butt Creek. But you were talking about a cattle road. And where was that cattle road again? Or cattle trail I guess? FH: Well they built a fence all the way down Old Bald and down the mountain, fenced off that watershed in there for sheep range. Well in later years we ranged on Dark Creek. You know where Dark Creek is? PC: I do FH: We ranged cattle on Dark Creek and that area in there where the Parkway is, all that back down through towards where the apple orchards was. And then they finally fenced that off and we had to use the head of Caney Fork in later years and then we quit and what cattle I had till I finally quit, wasn't making nothing off of them, I kept here around the house. I kept about 8 or 10 cows and a bull. I bred them myself, I bred them on up till… I had them bred till they couldn't figure out whether they was purebred or not. Whiteface. PC: I'm very interested in that when you're talking about taking your cattle up there, up into that high country and so still to this day there are those grassy areas up there and is that where you would pasture your cattle up there. FH: Yeah. We'd take them up there in May and then get them when the first snow come. My daddy had to go get them one time on election day which would have been in November and it had snowed up there and his cattle was still up there, pretty warm sun, fall, and him and old man Hooper went out there and brought them in. When they went to the election, they found out what had happened, the snow and they went up there and got them all rounded up, I think maybe had a little old trail, drove them in. PC: And where would you stay when you were up there, did you have a cabin? FH: Well we had a lean to. FMH: Indian style. FH: Built up with logs and then had a place in front of the logs, in front of it where there wasn't boards over it where they built big log fires. I mean big ones. It was all you could to carry. And then you'd get pretty cold. Hooper 12 PC: Now some of those cattle must have had calves I imagine. FH: Oh, they did. PC: So I'm wondering if you ever milked any of those cows up there? FH: No, we had a milk cow. You had a milk cow and then you had cows that wouldn't give enough milk to raise calves. PC: Yeah. So, you had your milk cows down here that you would milk and then those were just purely for meat. FH: Then we'd take all, maybe sometime we'd have some that was too young to take the first time and we'd wait maybe a month or something, two or three weeks or something, before we'd take them. FMH: They pastured the mountain over there. I remember the cows being over there on the mountain. It's not growed up like it is now. PC: Well that's what I was thinking, the forest itself must have looked a lot different back in those days. FH: Yeah it looked a lot different. PC: Tell me about it, what did it look like back in them days? FH: Well, you get up on them tops, there wasn't nothing but grass, a few old scrubby old trees like she said that you could, all along them tops up there. And it was just straight. You think, if you've been on the Bald Ridge and know anything about it, that whole thing down there to about where you jumped off into Brasstown and in there, the tops of it was great. And then there was weeds that growed in the coves that the cattle would eat. PC: They would go down into those coves? FH: Yeah. They ate that old tough grass and go down in the coves and eat the weeds and young stuff that's a growing up. The cattle kept that old, all that underbrush off as long as they pastured it. They killed that little old young stuff out and you wouldn't have nothing and if one got by it made a tree. PC: Now did you ever, how did you decide who was going to pasture their cattle where. Did you ever get into fights with other people? FH: Well, some had a special place they pastured. Some of us just take them and turn them loose, let them go wherever they wanted to. And then we'd go about once a month and give them salt. PC: I mean, who owned that land up there, cause I assume you all didn't? FH: Well, Highlands Forest Company. They owned it back when before Highland Forest Company gotten it. PC: I wonder if that was Vanderbilt’s actually who might have owned Highland Forest Company. FH: No, Vanderbilt was over there in Pisgah Forest and in through there. They logged all that over in there. Hooper 13 PC: So you were basically, that company just let you graze cattle up there. Nobody really paid any attention to it, I guess. FH: Nobody paid any attention. You just go and build you a little old log house somewhere you wanted to, that's the way my uncle did. I knowed a lot of people that just go and build a little old log house and start turning land. Growed hogs and cattle and things and lived. PC: But they didn't really own the land or anything? FH: No. PC: But now the Hooper’s here did own this land. How did that happen, how did you come to actually own that land? FH: Well I'll tell you, I did have the deeds to it but I've kind of forgot. PC: That probably goes back to the Cherokee Removal or something, back to the Trail of Tears time or something. FH: Well, it goes back a long way. PC: Or maybe even that Meigs-Freeman line. FH: There’s some of it that my grandfather entered 1853 I believe. Absalom, My great grandfather was, he was born in ’53 and died in '45. He's buried over here in East LaPorte cemetery. You know where that is? East LaPorte church is over there. PC: Uh-huh. FH: You can see it coming this way. They's a cemetery up on the hill and he's buried up there. FMH: Him and his wife too, isn't it? FH: Yeah PC: He was born in '45 and died in '53, is that what you said, so that he was over 100. FH: No, he was born in 1853 and died in '45, the dates here. PC: Wow. FH: He lacked from '45 to '53 of being 100 years old, lacked seven years didn't he, six or seven. FMH: His son owned most of this property up here over into Moses Creek. And them Hooper’s over there are not from his family but they're connected through that son of Absalom. FH: Ah, I can't tell you nothing with her talking. I was going to tell you something of interest to you but it's gone now. PC: Here I got a different question for you. Maybe that one will come back. Which is I've often wondered about that flood in 1940 that the Blackwood Lumber Company had basically cleared a lot of that timber from this countryside before that flood and it strikes me that it kind of… it made that flood Hooper 14 worse by having all those trees cut down. FH: Yeah, well you see they built roads in there and hauled the timber out on trucks in the later date. They hauled pulpwood. They made all the Chestnuts into pulpwood and then they went from pulpwood to mixed wood, Mead paper company did, and they used a lot of that mixed wood. But they was logging in there whenever the flood come. PC: Because I mean to take out that amount of wood it must have trashed the forest. I mean, the forest must have been beat up pretty good from that. FH: You know there was a lot of roads in there and everything, but I don't think that had anything to do with that. PC: You don't. FH: You could, from here up to about Sugar Creek, I believe it was nine slides where so much water had got in the ground. Those rocks, it just slid off the rocks. That is a lot of rain come on the head of Caney Fork Creek. And all they had is a river too. Morrison Knudson had just got, just get moved in here to build Thorpe Dam. I went to work for Morrison Knudson. Worked for them till… I helped build the power house from the bottom to the top. And then I worked about two or three months a piddling around after they got it built. Worked till October I think it was. Maybe it was October whenever they start operating it. I've forgot. PC: Well you know, got just a couple more questions. I know I'm pushing you here, but didn't they plan to actually flood out Caney Fork? At one point weren't they planning to put a dam here on Caney Fork and make a reservoir? FH: I think that was a bluff to get one in somewhere else. PC: Is that right? FH: Neuse River… New River. I know one time I was a going to somewhere with one of my boys and an old trailer and I had a sign on my truck that said "Save Caney Fork Creek" and a fellow commenced blowing his horn at me and I said Doug who was that. He said that's somebody that got annoyed at your sign on the truck. Said he had one on his about saving the… I told you a minute ago… River, and so. PC: So it was all tied in with that New River Dam that they wanted to put in. FH: I don't know what ever happened. They didn't put that dam on Caney Fork Creek. Just a bluff PC: Yeah, okay. So here's my official last question for today, although I reserve the right to hopefully come back maybe another time. This is a question everybody asks. Now everybody is going to have to ask you this question as you get close to 100 years old, you know, and of course, the question is, to what do you attribute your age. What did you do to live to be nearly 100? FH: I reckon, hard work and the food I eat. I eat a whole lot of syrup and fat back meat and biscuits. we always had… Hooper 15 FMH: In other words they ate what we growed. FH: Grew our own. We eat what we growed and growed what we eat. PC: Now, I have a lot more questions but I'm not going to push it today because I know that you've got other things to do today but… FMH: He might get tired but… FH: I had a bad night last night and this morning. PC: You know, so I’m going to turn off the tape recorder for right now.
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  • Felix Hooper of Cullowhee worked for Blackwood Lumber Company from his early teen years to 1939, and he talks about the company’s arrival in the county and the infrastructure they used up until 1929, when the market crashed. He worked in the company’s mill until 1939, when he left the company; he then talks briefly about his life farming and the effect of the flood of 1940, and he shares his memories of the flood before resuming his discussion of Blackwood’s lumber operations in Jackson County. He also shares his memories of the chestnut before the blight, and he then talks about Cherokee relics and artifacts in the area and shares some stories of his grandfather during the Civil War. He then discusses pasturing his cattle in higher territory such as Bald Ridge, and how that land has changed since then, and he also shares some information about a planned dam on Caney Fork that never materialized. He closes by talking about what may have helped him live so long. Also present during the interview is Hooper’s wife, Fannie Mae Hooper.