Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1915
During the early part of this year we began seeing trainloads of mules going to Newport News to embark for Europe and the war. About the same time, rather realized that he could never make a living for his family on the farm, because the soil was extremely overworked, Williamsburg provided a very poor market, and Richmond and Newport News were too far away to be of much use in those days before motor transportation was available. So he accepted a position as working foreman on a peach orchard in Millstone, Maryland. Sometimes during the summer we had an auction of all our farm equipment which seemed like an awful lot of stuff to me. Them father packed the household things, (the breakables in flour barrels packed with straw), and shipped them off by freight to Millstone. Then father took the train to our new home while mother and the rest of us stayed a short while (perhaps only a day or two) with the Wickers.
Then mother and we four children took the train to Old Point Comfort, the night boat to Washington, D.C., a taxi to Union Station, and another train to Hancock, Maryland. Father met us there with Mr. Fulton, manager of the peach orchard who, in his Model T. Ford, transported us to the house on Pigskin Ridge, a log cabin now clapboarded over. It was a primitive, rectangular dwelling with a kitchen, a family room, and a bedroom on the first floor, and two bedrooms on the second. There was a very flimsy back porch. Connected to the house was a square shed where everything not in constant use was stored. It served other purposes as well, for when father butchered a sheep during the winter he hung it up there. He also set up a handmill that he got from somewhere - which had a big balance wheel on each side of the hopper - and used it for grinding cornbread. (I believe he also ground peanuts for peanut butter in the meat grinder in the kitchen as he had done in Williamsburg). On one wall of the building I mailed up a random lot of spools and had them connected with string belts so that when I turned one the others would also turn. A little distance behind the shed was a dilapidated old barn. It was torn down while we were there, and when father plowed up the ground on that spot to make a kitchen garden he turned up two non-poisonous snakes. Water had to be carried from a spring that was down the hill in a little valley in the peach orchard east of the house.
In September, Virginia and I started school a mile or two west of the house. It was a one-room, board schoolhouse mounted on two-foot-high posts, which made it very difficult to crawl under it and retrieve stray baseballs. This school was just as primitive as any that Washington Irving could have written about, and it was a terrible comedown after our model one in Williamsburg. It was Appalachia at its worst, but we didn't know it then. Since the school was located at the edge of a forest it didn't seem necessary to provide a privy for the boys, and the girl's was a rustic one with some of the wall boards missing so it didn't provide much privacy.
The schoolhouse had a vestibule just inside the only door with nails along the wall for hanging up coats and hats. In one corner was a shelf upon which was a galvanized bucket of water with a dipper in it for drinking. When it was empty, one big boy, or two little boys were assigned the task of filling it. The nearest well was down the road a piece, but when my turn came we had to go to the next house half a mile away because my partner's folks were feuding with the folks who lived in the near house. This was the first time I had ever heard of such as thing, and I lost no time reporting it at home. The ages of pupils ranged from five years to twenty and there was some attempt to have a size range of the desks to suit the kids as much as possible. In each desk there was a hole in the upper right hand corner for an inkwell, but it would have been nothing short of disaster to have ink around that crowd. We had no paper or pencils, either, but slates of several sizes and shapes were still used as a matter of course. There is a method of holding a slate pencil that, when stroked across the slate, produces a sound that makes your teeth "stand on edge", as the saying goes. There was always some kid who could do this without being seen and it was a sure-fire way of driving the teacher up the wall.