KYJacksonPurchase-L Archives

From: Bill Utterback <>
Subject: "Memories & Reveries" - Lydia Kennedy Bond - 'When Granny Was a Child'
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:48:42 -0500

My friends -

This week's postings will be devoted to essays written by those who lived
and experienced the day to day life of the 19th century. I have received
such a positive response to the postings of the essays of Dr. Gordon Wilson
that I have decided to expand on that broad area a little further.

Lydia Kennedy Bond was born in Anderson County, Kentucky in the 1860's. She
was the wife of William Thomas Bond and was a Kennedy by maiden name. Some
members of her wide ranging family came to the Jackson Purchase in the days
before her birth(including some Utterback cousins), and some came later in
the 19th century. Mrs. Bond recorded her early experiences in growing up in
Kentucky, as well as conversations she had with her mother, Bettie Conner
Kennedy(wife of Aaron Kennedy), who was born in 1844, in a small booklet
entitled, "Memories & Reveries". She refers to her mother as "Great-Granny
Kennedy" or just "Granny", as she was writing these memoirs for her own
grandchildren, to whom her mother would have been "Great-Granny Kennedy".
The first installment in this series is entitled, "When Granny was a Child."

Tomorrow, we will have another essay from a different resource.

-B
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Memories & Reveries" - Lydia Kennedy
Bond
WHEN GRANNY WAS A CHILD

One of Granny's great ambitions when she was a little girl was to carry a
bucket of water on her head like the negro women carried on top of their
high piled turbans, when they came from the spring.
She did not aspire to tote a big basket of laundry on her shoulders - but a
bucket of water was a daring accomplishment, "devoutly to be wished," and
she distinctly recalls how soaking wet she got while persevering to master
the art. After each drenching she was spanked and clothed from skin out in
dry apparel only to slip off to the spring in the orchard and try it all
over again. But there was no affinity between the equilibrium of her little
body and the pail of water, and finally the spankings burnt out her
ambitions without her dream being realized.

Another feat she desired to master was to hold a pie well-balanced in her
left hand while with her right, she might dexterously trim off the edges
and then lay the strips of dough across the mince pies and
pare an apple in an unbroken coil and toss it over her left shoulder to
read the mystical auguries of her fortune. It is refreshing to travel back
with Granny more than four-score years to childhood lands of "used-to­be"
and "once upon a time." A good book is worthy of more than one reading, and
Granny's life has many chapters that we enjoy over and over again.

She had all sorts of dolls of that day, for dolls were considered a part of
the home education of children, but she remembers how she dressed up a long
handled gourd and loved it quite as much as the most pretentious store
doll. She had rag dolls, too, and loved them more heartily than the toy
babies. Granny declares she found as much enjoyment in spinning rolls of
wool at the big spinning wheel as in playing dolls, and before she was ten
years old the number of rolls that she could spin in a certain length of
time would have done credit to an older person. She recalls today the hum
of the big wheel that was music to her ear.

Granny reveled in going down to the servant's cabin to "listen in" and hear
stories of "haints" and spooks, after which she was afraid of her own
shadow, and especially after nightfall black mammy had to be bodyguard when
she went back to the big house. We are sure there were many "Uncle Remuses"
in slavery days whose wild stories were impossible to grown-ups but
commonplace in the imagination of a child.

Today we tell our children of the fast-growing bean stalk that reached to
high heaven; and how Homer's horses hurdled the whole world with one leap;
how pearls once fell like leaves from the trees in
a beautiful garden, and the "Magic Carpet" that took an adventurer on
wonderful trips through the air. These bypaths of fancy develop the
imagination and give innocent thrills to the little minds and hearts.
Among all Granny's reminiscences none were more interesting than her first
school days. Her two older sisters took her with them when she was only
four years old. That was about the year of 1848 or '49, when frame school
houses had replaced the log ones. The schools then were of meager
proportions compared with our modern standards, but they filled the needs
of the community in that day. With the passing of the pioneer period when
the homes and farms had been wrested from the wilderness, a new need for
education began to be felt and the schools of your Great-Granny's day were
community undertakings. Parents met and built the rural schoolhouses and
hewed out and installed the furniture. They had comfortable homemade seats
instead of the backless benches of an earlier day. A stove was in the
center of the schoolroom, a water bucket on the shelf in the corner, a
blackboard on stilts propped against the wall behind the teacher's desk.
Pupils in that one room schoolhouse ranged in ages from four to twenty-one
years and reading and recitations were individual. There were no county
school authorities to supervise any educational tactics and little school
law of any consequence, so the parents in a community selected a teacher
and he "boarded around" in the homes of his pupils, spending two or three
weeks at a time in different homes. There were no uniform textbooks, and
Granny said the little ones used books handed down from older brothers and
sisters and "studied whatever they happened to have." They had no writing
tablets, but each pupil had a slate and pencil with which they wrote and
worked sums for the teacher's inspection. They "said speeches" and held
spelling matches every Friday afternoon. Granny remembers distinctly of
being "turned down" in one of these spelling contests on the word
"scissors." Singing schools were also conducted in the schoolhouses to
which the folks came for miles around, for the old-time school was a social
center for the community. Granny's first teacher's name was Rodenbaugh, and
he was afterward an officer under her father who was captain in the Union
Army in the War Between the States. When Granny was in her teens she
finished her education at the old Academy in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, which
was one of the leading institutions of learning for the young folks of that
day, in central Kentucky.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This thread:

• "Memories & Reveries" - Lydia Kennedy Bond - 'When Granny Was a Child' by Bill Utterback <>