Catherine Elam – “Grandma Hale” – 1852-1945
Born in 1852, Catherine Elam Hale was my great-grandmother, my mother’s paternal grandmother. In her later years she lived with my Hale grandparents near Princewick, near Beckley in Raleigh County, West Virginia. My memories of her are quite faint — she died in 1945, when I was only 13 years old, and I had seen her no more than a dozen times. I remember two things about her: as she sat by the kitchen window, looking out across the farm property, she often smoked a corn cob pipe. And she played a harmonica. My mother told me that she wore an apron with a pocket, where she kept her loose tobacco. She would simply hold her empty pipe down in that pocket and fill it with her thumb.
From everything I can remember, along with what I was told by my mother, Grandma Hale was a true mountain woman who lived a hard life in the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. I wish I could have known her better. The people of that place and time were truly unique, and through my grandfather I came to admire their tenacity and capacity for hard work. I wish I could have heard her sing the old mountain songs. These great-grandmothers were the eldest of all the people I have known. Although I was very young when they died, the memories I do have of them are have never gone away.