Tag Archives: John Houston McCarn

Dura and Houston McCarn

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I recently reviewed The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman: Music, Moonshine & Murder in Bug Tussle, Alabama, by Joyce H. Cauthen with Robin Sterling, for Alabama Writers’ Forum and First Draft magazine. I was compelled to add the following note to my author bio: [Journey] was pleased to find that his great-grandparents, John Houston McCarn and Dura Evelyn Graves McCarn, are a part of Fiddling Tom’s story; he is quick to point out that they appear in the context of music – not moonshine and murder.

The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman includes generous excerpts from an autobiographical book Freeman wrote that was never published. Cauthen took his manuscript, her own research and information on historical contexts, and Robin Sterling’s extensive research to bring Freeman’s story and the story of his community to light. She contacted me just before the book’s publication to tell me that she had found my family connection to a part of Freeman’s story.

I chose not to include the family connection in my review. The book has so many fascinating anecdotes and information that it was a challenge to figure out what to leave out. But this is my essay about my great-grandparents so I will feel free to focus on my kin.

(L-R) Houston, Jewel, and Dura McCarn

I have written about my great grandfather, John Houston McCarn, who was a schoolteacher in and around Cullman County. He was born in 1865 and didn’t die until 1959, so I have vague memories of him from when I was very young. As I grew older, it dawned on me that this old man that I had first-hand memories of was born the year the Civil War ended. Houston married Dura Evelyn Graves, who was fifteen years his junior, and they had seven children together. Their first-born daughter, Jewel, died in childhood in 1909, the year my grandmother, Eula, was born. Dura died an early death in the 1920s. Houston and Dura raised their family in a dogtrot-style house, always referred to as “the homeplace,” on a large farm in the community of Bremen. That house is long gone but I remember it, too. When I knew it, the dogtrot had been closed in and my grandmother’s sister, Bessie, lived there.

I’m writing now about things that happened in the late-19th and early-20th centuries before electricity and mass media changed the dynamics of how neighbors interacted with and entertained each other. Grandpa Houston played the fiddle, as did his daughter Nadine. Son Burnett played guitar and Eula played the piano. I assume Bessie, Ray, and Zell played instruments, also, and I seem to remember my grandmother saying that Dura played the piano. I imagine the family gathering on the wide porch or in front of the fireplace and playing music together. I’m told that Grandpa had a lot of books, so perhaps they read or told stories together, too. Family histories are derived from stitching together the bits and pieces of stories that come down through the years.

Bremen was up the mountain from the community of Wilburn, which over time came to be called “Bug Tussle.” According to Cauthen, “Bug Tussle” was the informal designation not just for Wilburn, but for parts of the communities that surround it. Bremen was close so some might have placed Grandpa’s farm in Bug Tussle. Either way, Bremen’s proximity to Bug Tussle is how my ancestors became a part of Freeman’s story.

The most satisfying part of the book’s comments about my great-grandparents is that they confirm stories about the two that I have heard all my life. Tom Freeman calls my great-grandfather “Uncle Houston McCarn.” He writes that “Uncle Houston” would drive his horse and buggy down Brushy Pond Mountain and say, “Fiddling Tom, go home with me & fiddle some for me tonight.” Houston had the first car in his community, according to my grandmother, but never bothered to learn to drive himself. Tom and his fiddle would hop in the buggy and go to Bremen, play well into the next morning, and after going to bed around 3:00 AM, Dura would wake them for breakfast at 4:00. On another visit to play at Houston’s house, Tom claims, “I played 63 hours with only four hours out to sleep.” Tom challenges any doubters of the veracity of his claim to contact J.H. McCarn.

Houston taught at one and two-room schools through the years and often went to college in the summers to augment his already impressive education. While he was away, he’d leave his children to toil with the sharecroppers to tend to the farm. He used his education to be a good teacher, but a stern taskmaster. Tom calls Houston “one of the best old-timer school teachers I ever saw.” Tom’s son had “Uncle Houston” as a teacher and Tom writes that he “learned my boy more in one day than he had ever learned in 5 years of going to school.”

Tom’s grandson Donald Freeman shared another Houston McCarn teaching story with Joyce Cauthen. He heard it from his grandfather: A group of parents went to the local school commission asking for a teacher who could control the unruly boys who kept running teachers off from the McKinley Chapel school. The commission told the parents, “Yes, we have one, but you might not want him.” The parents wanted him anyway and Houston McCarn arrived at the school on the first day with “a six-foot hickory limb and a double barrel shotgun. Within two days you could hear a pin drop.”

My great-grandmother Dura McCarn died when my grandmother was a young girl so we only knew her through the fond memories of Grandmother and her siblings. Tom, though, also knew Dura (he calls her “Dewey”) and he can back up her children’s affectionate words. She was, he writes, “one of the best women I ever met in my life.”

Cicero is given credit for saying that “the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living” in the 1st Century BC. That idea persists today in the idea of the “second death” – when there is no living memory of those who have passed on to “the next thing,” as my parents’ friend Phoebe Barr used to say. I must say I’m grateful to Fiddling Tom Freeman and his chronicler, Joyce Cauthen, for helping to extend the living memory of Houston and Dura McCarn.

Notes on Cursive Writing

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My great-grandfather John Houston McCarn was born in 1865, the year that Lincoln was assassinated. He lived until 1959. That is significant for me because I vaguely remember seeing Grandpa McCarn when I was a pre-schooler. We went to his house in Cullman “town”; I got impatient that the old gentleman was hard of hearing and things had to be repeated all the time.

When I was older, I realized that Houston McCarn was born the year the Civil War ended; I was impressed that I had known a person with that particular direct connection to history.

Grandpa McCarn was a highly educated man and a school teacher. Based on the amount of land and real estate he managed to accrue in Cullman, Jefferson, and Walker counties in his long lifetime, he was a savvy investor as well. Six of his seven children were alive when he died and the property was split in many directions, so none, I suspect, got a lot.

I remember going to the Cullman county community of Bremen with my mother and grandmother to witness an auction of one of Houston McCarn’s rural schoolhouses, just a few hundred yards away from the “home place” where my grandmother Eula McCarn Harbison and her siblings grew up.

Mother remembers Grandpa McCarn’s large library. We have no clue what happened to his books when he died, but I shudder to think of the probability that they were discarded.

The discipline of clear penmanship was part of every school teacher’s domain in the days when Grandpa was teaching and I would look at samples of Grandpa McCarn’s elegant writing in letters and penmanship exercises in my grandmother’s chests of drawers when I was young.

After Grandmother Harbison died, I came to be in possession of two faded sheets of Grandpa’s writing. One sheet has his stylish rendering of the letter “E” with a few sample words starting with that letter. One of the words, coincidentally, is the name “Edward.” Even though the writing predates me by decades, the coincidence is neat.

The second sheet is the rendering of two images of birds. Grandpa McCarn used these images to teach the basic strokes of cursive writing. I have wondered how his students – farm boys and girls in rural Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – reacted to the rigorous discipline of Houston’s exercises in cursive penmanship.

I had the fading sheets of writing framed and they hang in my bedroom. I know they will seem worthless to anyone who runs across them when I am gone, but they are remarkably valuable to me. Houston would probably be stunned to know that his doodling from a century ago or more is hanging in a place of honor in the home of that 4-year-old boy.

Grandpa McCarn’s son-in-law, my grandfather Leonard Harbison, was a farmer’s son from a large family. He lacked a lengthy formal education, but he had mastered Grandpa McCarn’s deliberate and stylized birds and was still drawing them into his old age. I remember Granddaddy Harbison’s skilled rendering of the birds in the margins of books. He lived to age 93, almost as long as his scholarly father-in-law.

Over a decade after Grandpa McCarn died, those of us in Birmingham city schools had weekly classes in penmanship. I remember that in second grade, when we shifted from printing to cursive, it was referred to as “real writing.”

I have thought of it in those terms ever since.

At that time, Birmingham City Schools employed handwriting specialists – teachers who came to schools to ensure that the students’ cursive writing was up to par. In addition, we took weekly handwriting classes as part of our curriculum and were assigned a grade for penmanship in our report cards.

One time in fifth grade, my straight-A report card was marred by a “C” in penmanship from Mrs. Caskey. I think the shock of that “C” instilled in me a life-long commitment to be conscientious about my handwriting. Over the years, it has changed drastically; as I get older, it loses a bit of its confidence, but it’s still a source of pride.

It saddens me that cursive writing is no longer taught to elementary school students. A “good hand,” as it was called in the past, was once a mark of an educated person. Now, I list cursive writing as a “special skill” on my vita.

Nowadays, when I write notes to young people, I struggle with whether or not I should write in cursive. More often than not, I print the text and sign my name in cursive. I worry that I might insult the recipient either way: Am I insinuating they can’t read cursive? or Am I deliberately writing in a style they can’t read?

Literacy in general is a touchy area in dealing with youth, for whom “literacy” may take on a very different meaning than it did when I was their age. A young friend tactfully put me in my place recently. I was accustomed since her birth to sending picture books to her for Christmas and her birthday. The last time I gave her a picture book, she wrote a polite thank you note with a gentle reprimand, telling me, “I am reading chapter books now.”

I got her point, vowed to gift her no more picture books, and was delighted that she knew to send a handwritten thank you note.

“That’s not writing; it’s just typing” (or words to that effect) was Truman Capote’s catty dismissal of the Beat writers in general, and Jack Kerouac in particular, in the 1950s.

I wonder how he might respond to our age of tweets and posts, blogs and instant messaging, to the obsolescence of typewriters and handwriting in general. How might he and his contemporaries react to the fact that cursive writing has become a lost art?

Birmingham’s Evocative Past

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Coe’s “Down Town Birmingham” (c. 1935)

My father was born in the Employees Hospital in Fairfield in 1931. The hospital – which was later renamed Lloyd Noland Hospital in honor of its founding physician – was a company hospital of Tennessee Coal and Iron, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Dad grew up in Ensley, within sight of U.S. Steel’s mammoth Ensley Works, where my grandfather worked.

 

Lloyd Noland Hospital went through changes in ownership, was closed in 2004, and razed in 2009.

 

The mining districts and steel mills around Birmingham, and the communities that sprang up around them, hold an ongoing fascination for me. My mother’s family moved from Cullman County to Birmingham in the 1940s and her father transitioned from farmer to steel worker at a steel fabrication factory. Mother’s parents lived in west Birmingham throughout their decades in the city. The house I most attach to them was in Fairfield Highlands. The Fairfield Works of U.S. Steel was visible down in the valley from their back yard. I remember my grandmother taking a damp rag to wipe the factory soot off her clothesline when she hung clothes on the line to dry.

 

My ongoing interest in the industrial history of the Birmingham district was greatly satisfied by a new exhibit hanging in the Birmingham Museum of Art this spring (www.artsbma.org). “Magic City Realism: Richard Coe’s Birmingham” is a collection of over sixty pieces – mostly etchings and a few paintings – by Alabama native Richard Coe. The pieces were made during Coe’s residency in Birmingham during the Depression in the mid-1930s.

 

Sometimes, it feels like the only history of Birmingham that gets any attention began in 1963 but the place has a rich and fascinating 90+ year history prior to that watershed year of the Civil Rights Movement. Coe’s Depression-era works capture a moment of that history and make me feel closer to my own family’s Birmingham. His etchings capture urban images of downtown and hospitals and churches; industrial scenes of factories – in action sometimes, idle other times; and domestic scenes of neighborhoods and humble houses – often in the shadow of the factories. One of the paintings features a neighborhood “No Nox” gas station. 

The 1930s images of the downtown city center feature many of the same buildings that made up the core of the downtown when I was a young child in Birmingham in the ‘50s and 60s, before newer buildings in the ‘70s and ‘80s moved the city center a few blocks north and transformed the skyline.

 

Part of my mother’s family’s lore is evoked by a Coe etching of St. Vincent’s hospital on the city’s southside. My mother and her mother before her would recount how my great-grandmother, Dura Graves McCarn, was in St. Vincent’s when she was dying at a young age. When it became clear that nothing more could be done, my great-grandfather, John Houston McCarn, ordered her brought home. Aunt Bertha sent her car and driver to pick Dura up and transport her back to Cullman to be at home with her family in her final days.  

 

Coe’s “Saint Vincent’s Hospital” (c. 1935)

Four decades later, when I was quite young, my grandmother Harbison was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s; it was still in the same imposing old brick building pictured in a 1930s Coe etching. Nuns still walked the grounds in full traditional habit, just as they do in the foreground of Coe’s depiction. The St. Vincent’s of the 21st Century is very different – another megalith serving the city’s southside medical complex.

 

Coe’s Stilt Walkers (c. 1935)

Coe’s domestic images often feature humble houses and outbuildings, rickety fences, the inevitable clothesline. Most often, the people featured in these environments are African American – women talking off a front porch; children playing with a “Pet Possum” or walking on makeshift stilts; a birdhouse perched atop a roof. 

 

But it’s the industrial scenes that I find most pleasing and beautiful in the series. Sloss Furnaces alongside First Avenue North is pictured at its peak, before it was abandoned in 1971 and became today’s National Historic Landmark and industrial museum (www.slossfurnaces.com).  

Coe’s “Sloss Furnaces” (c. 1935)

Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, 2018

Steel mills, steam plants, streetcar barns, railroad tracks, even the desolate landscape of a slag pile evoke a Birmingham of the past that I still find incredibly vibrant and rich in industrial-era history. As I drive through Birmingham now I still seek out the remains of that industrial past which wasn’t so long ago, really, but seems incredibly distant and almost quaint.

These are the memories that are inspired by Richard Coe’s art at the Birmingham Museum. And any sighting of a clothesline always brings a flood of memories to mind. 

Eula Harbison at Clothesline; Fairfield Highlands (c. 1960)