My grandfather, Sam Wilson, was, I believe, working with the County Agent's office in neighboring Calhoun County. Mr. Hood got wind of him, offered him the job and Sam, his wife Lois, their daughter Mae Ann and son Sam Jr. moved to Riddles Bend in rural Etowah County. My mother, Kay, and aunts Joyce and Judy came along after the move. I don't know the exact connection between Mr. Hood and Grandaddy, so if someone who does reads this, I'd love for you to tell me!
My grandparents grew up in a little place called Angel Station. (My great-grandmother - my grandmother's mother - was an Angel. Which makes me what - an eighth angel? Hee!) Any wedding guests who went to Jacksonville State and got there by turning off Hwy. 431 have driven past Angel Grove Baptist Church, which many members of my family still attend. Turn right on a road just past the church and you'll go past the old Wilson homeplace, and the newer house where my great aunt Frances - we celebrated her 90th birthday in February - her son Joel and daugter-in-law Doris live and farm today. A bit further down the main highway is a white house on a hill surrounded by the carcasses of many different types of vehicles and farm equipment. That belongs to my grandmother's brother, my great uncle Henry Wynn, who also recently turned 90.
But I digress. My grandparents moved to the farm and lived in a house that Mr. Hood and his wife, Ada Lee, had lived in when they first came ot the area some 20 years before. She was from South Carolina and had been a schoolteacher; I'm not sure what his background was. Interesting, that for a man who has two roads named after him (one in the Bend and a major four-lane in downtown Gadsden) I know the least about "Mr. Guy."
In those days the house was on the opposite side of the road from where my grandparents' house is now. When my mother was little, that side of the road was home to turkeys. The "new" house was built in the 1950s.
In the 40s, however, the old house was at the center of a collection of buildings, most of which are no longer around. There was a garage, a two-story seedhouse, a couple of chicken houses and probably a lot of other stuff I've forgotten. The well house, a shed that once housed pigs and, of course, the tractor shed where the reception will be, are all still there. You'll all be thankful to know that the outhouse my mother and her family used for the first 10 or so years of her life, is gone as well!
In those days the dam on the Coosa near Ohatchee - Henry Neely Dam - had yet to be built and the river was much lower. The eastern edge of the bend is a high bluff now, but must have seemed like a mountain in those days. I'm told that in the fertile river bottoms corn rows a mile long were not uncommon. They grew strawberries there, too. Further back from the river was the main orchard - covering a section of low, rolling hills, and a dairy barn.
In his travels through the newly turned earth, my grandfather amassed quite a collection of arrowheads. My aunt Joyce mounted some of the most impressive ones in shadowboxes; you can see them in the master bedroom.
At some point in the 1950s, someone suggested that Grandaddy sell some of the peaches and other produce he grew on his land. A shed was erected directly across the (then dirt) road from his house under two towering oak trees, and for the next 30-plus years Riddles Bend became a destination for those willing to drive out of their way for fresh produce and peaches the size of softballs (after 20 years living in Georgia, I have NEVER had a peach as good as those).
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