Possum Hollar

Story telling has always been part of my family. Both Mam maw Jones and Granny Ewen past on to me many of the family stories. I begin today by writing a story from Granddad Ewen. It is a first for me, because Granddad did not tell stories. Unknown to me until just a few days ago, Granddad Ewen wrote down his stories. Mother had a family file which contined several of the stories that Granddad Ewen wrote. Amazing I thought, they are in his own handwriting and in his own words. I will try to copy the story as written, but the pages are faded and some of the writing hard to read. The first story seems to be one about Granny Ewen's childhood in "Possum Hollar". It is writen around 1937 and is in Granddad Ewen's hand writing. Here goes:

"My childhood life was lived just like all mountain girls lives, going to school, hoeing corn, and helping mother's cooking, washing, and house keeping. Our home was a small log house built under a large rock all around except a small clearing where we planted our garden. The name given to this was Possum Hollar, as all little branches has names were we lived. This was my home untill I was about nine years old. It was at that time my father got a job working for a company helping build a tunnel throu a sand stone cliff to open up the way for to take out a large boundry of timeber nine miles from our home. I remember how father would set around the old fashion log fire at night telling mother and us children about the hole they were making throu the cliff, and how the train would come throu hauling the pine logs to the mill to be sawed into lumber. How excited we all was the night he told us we were going to move to the log camp and we would not have to get up at three o'clock in the morning to cook his breakfast so he could get to work by six o'clock. So about a week later, we said good bye to our little log house in possum Hollar."