Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Margaret Jane (Hopson) Kitts' school days

My grandmother, Margaret Jane (Hopson) Kitts (center of circle), was a delightful lady with a twinkle in her eyes. She enjoyed telling stories from her childhood, which was spent divided between Tennessee and Indiana. When she was quite small, her family moved to Indiana but came back to Tennessee for a while before her father, William Hopson, sold their Washburn farm and went to a rented farm in Indiana, where her father's sister America Melvina and her husband Eli Sevier Branson also lived and farmed in or near Jamestown.

There in Indiana, Mamaw enjoyed things like taking her doll on Saturdays and riding with her friend Ruth Woods and Ruth’s older brother Arthur in his car, the first in the area, to the town of Amo. Mamaw was always on the move and enjoyed going to church, school, etc., but a few of the services of town, such as peddlers and the physician Dr. Enoch Idle came to them by horse! Sometimes she would take a buggy and her mid-sized, feisty pony, Nell, and drive herself to town. It was that little mare’s colt that was later gored to death by their oxen Berry and Ben at her ill Uncle Jess Hopson’s home, when the community gathered there to get his wood in before winter after he’d had a stroke and was partially paralyzed.

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