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From: "Jess Wilson" <>
Subject: [KYCLAY] ALBERT SAWYERS. A GOOD NEIGHBOR.
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 08:03:55 -0500


ALBERT SAWYERS. A GOOD NEIGHBOR.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the poor.

From"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" by

Thomas Gray


Al Sawyers was a lanky, dark complexioned man. His galloping manner of walking made him appear to be much taller than he was. He spoke in a loud, high-pitched sing-song. His honesty and candid manner of talking about himself was disarming to say the least. I once asked him, "Al, where were you born?"

His answer caught me completely off guard. I do not have the ability to put in writing the rhythm, the musical cadence of his answer. In a rush of words as if he had wanted to say them to someone for a long time. He said: "I was bornd a by-dod bastard. I was born in a fence corner. I was a twin. My mother killed my twin but old Miz McDaniels ran in and saved me. My father was old Miz Sawyers' son. He was fourteen years old. My mother was 30 years old. She worked for old Miz Sawyers. My father climbed up the outside of the house to where my mother was sleeping. They tore the by-dod bed down. Old Miz Sawyers raised me."

One Sunday afternoon in 1941, the year that Ruth and I married, Dad asked us if we would walk up to Al's and see if he could come work the next day. When we got to his house we were told that he was across the hill at a neighbor's. We walked over the hill and found Al and a yard full of people being neighbors. After we had visited, we told Al why we had come. Before he started up the hill with us, he said, "It's going to be dark before you can get home. Let me make you a torch." I had not noticed.

He picked up an axe and a rich pine knot which he split into finger sized splinters. He hacked a broom handle sized stick from a green sapling. He tied the bundle of splinters around one end of the stick with a wire he found hanging on a fence post. He worked as if he had done the same thing many times. It got dark before we got to the top of the ridge, he struck a match to the pine torch. The three of us crossing the ridge in the light of that torch would have made a scene in a Shakespeare play.

Al waved the torch above his shaggy head and began showing us his farm and the fruit trees he had planted. When he had showed us his "barns" and "house" he gave us the torch and by its light we made our way home. In our eyes, Al's buildings were less than we would have desired, however, to him they were home. They were his castle.

Many, many years later, Ruth and I visited the Biltmore estates near Ashville, North Carolina. We heard the story of George Washington Vanderbilt, the rail road tycoon who had built this marvelous palace of stone as a monument to his ego. I have often wondered if Mr. Vanderbilt had been at Biltmore when we were there, would he have been any more proud to show us what he had built than our friend Al Sawyers had been that night with his flickering pine torch.

There is this to consider: George Washington Vanderbilt (1862-1914), Albert Sawyers (1878-1951) and his wife, Delia Bull-Sawyers (1871-1949) are now dead. What Mr. and Mrs. Sawyers and their family had, they had built with their own hands. What Mr. Vanderbilt had, he built with the profits from the sweat of other men's brows. To which of them can we more truly say, "Rest in peace."


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