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.
Alice and William P. Hite (1837-1926), married January 4, 1875
Alice Hite was my great-grandmother, my father’s maternal grandmother, born in 1856. I knew her. To me — a young child — she was the literal definition of ancient. She died in April 1941, when I was 9 years old.
Her husband, several years older than she, was William Hite, a veteran of the Civil War. When Mammaw died — I was at her funeral along with other family, including my sister Alice — we were at the cemetery and I recall her casket, before it was lowered, was draped with a Confederate flag, for she had been the last Civil War widow in West Virginia. You’ll note that she married young, and as noted in the photograph, her husband was considerably older.
Mammaw was more than a matriarch. She ruled the household — that household being the homeplace of my father Willis Farley and his siblings and parents. She was tall, straight-backed, and stern, with piercing eyes and little humor. I don’t remember her voice at all — in her final years she suffered from a stroke and was for the most part without speech.
When Alice and I were quite young we spent summers at that homeplace — in Alderson, West Virginia, a small town on the beautiful Greenbrier River whose chief employers were the Federal Women’s Prison and the State Prison for Women. That’s how I came to know Mammaw. I don’t remember her as having much affection for young children — our interactions were mostly at the dinner table. But I’ll say this: she was someone you wouldn’t forget. At the risk of being too aggressive in my assessment, she was, simply, overbearing, unforgiving, and probably unhappy with the way her life turned out: alone, and although respected, not loved by many.
Alice with great-grandchildren Alan, Alice, and David Farley, about 1935
With that, I note that I’ll be very candid in these pages. Mammaw was, to Alice and me, an unforgiving, stiff old woman who had little happiness in her life.
Lest I judge her too harshly, it occurs to me that she was a woman of the nineteenth century; a time when many women were considered “property,” without rights, and expected to serve the man of the house. Remember, she married a much older man; a Civil War veteran hardened by that experience, and probably harsh and demanding in his own way of his young wife.
Reflecting that, it is no wonder that she was less than cheerful, less than outgoing. Perhaps that’s why she became the ruler of the roost in ways that she could achieve without “breaking the rules” of what was expected of women of that time. I can’t imagine what it was like for most women of that day, and there is a lot to excuse them for — Mammaw included.
