From Our Readers: Of Cabins and Co-ops

My dragonfly

Sandy Stock, Raeford, Lumbee River EMC

1940s Cannon’s Cottages (left) and today’s Dogwood Crafters.

Travel cabins to crafts co-op

I just wanted to send you some information about the old travel cabins in Dillsboro [“I Remember,” July 2015]. They are all joined together now and house items from 80 crafters in 13 rooms. Dogwood Crafters (dogwoodcrafters.com) is a not-for-profit craft cooperative that over the last 39 years has made improvements each year to the inside and outside. We hope to have a home for Appalachian crafters for years and years to come.

Brenda Anders, Dillsboro

Our co-op, precious memories

I am a 90-year-old widowed World War II veteran. I was born and reared in the red clay hills of Surry County with no electricity or running water. We lived in what our state’s Poet Laureate calls a “plank house.” 

In 1940, when I was 16, REA (now the Surry-Yadkin cooperative) came through with power lines pulled by a humpback mule over hills and hollows. It wasn’t long until we had electric lights, a “Kelvinator,” as we called it, an electric washing machine, churn, iron and well water pump. My mother was overjoyed, but she insisted on keeping her woodstove for cooking. Like so many other farm women of that era, she fried chicken in a cast iron skillet. We often had that fried chicken for breakfast on Sunday mornings, along with moon size biscuits and sawmill gravy (often called “Hoover gravy” or “poly sop”) with homemade butter and molasses.

I know times have changed, but the delights of country living came when the co-op brought power lines to the farms. All of our rural folks know the words to that wonderful hymn: “precious memories, how they linger.”

I would like to renew my subscription to your wonderful magazine.

Hugh Snow, Winston-Salem

Onie on the move

I want to thank everyone who reads Carolina Country for sending me stamps, cards, letters and gifts, but most of all is the love you all share by helping me out. I moved from my mother’s home in Blounts Creek, then I moved to the apartment. My foot gave away, and I moved into the group home. People were really good to me there. But I am going to keep on walking as long as I got two feet to carry me. So now I live in an assistance living home, and I like it. Clara Manor will be my home until Jesus comes to get me. Everyone here is kind, respectful, gentle, helpful and understanding. I can clean house, dust, wash dishes. I don’t have much money, but if you have love in your heart and faith, that is what counts.

Onie Frances Rogerson, Clara Manor, 1218 Pamlico St., Washington, NC 27889