Daughter of Oka Newton Ana Lou Blassingame
Excerpts from a letter written to Fred Newton May 20, 2000
The five years daddy share cropped Aunt Molly (Noblit married William Lytle) and grandma's (Orlena Noblit Newton) were very impressionable years in my life. I was between 9 and 14 years old. Depression years, some days barely enough to eat yet I was never hungry. Being an only child for 15 years I never had anyone to play with. I just stayed out of the way and listened. I remember them talking ( grandma and Aunt Mollie) about when Granddad Noblit (Thomas Hughes Noblit Sr.) would take two oxcarts from Giles Co.to Memphis to get merchandise of the day to sell in the store there on Puncheon Branch. Things like iron pots and kettles, wooden trunks and chamber pots were some of the things. If the weather was good they could make the trip in six weeks but during wet times the Tennessee River would flood and traveling would be much slower. I wonder when the store closed for business? The building was still useable when Mama and Daddy married in 1919 because they went to housekeeping in the store building. When I went to school at Puncheon in the 1930s the rock foundation of the store building was still there and the rock steps very much intact.
I always liked to listen to them (Mollie Lytle and Orlena Newton) tell about hunting the turkey nest. The turkey hens would steal nest in the woods in the spring of the year and the children were sent out to find the nest and sometimes found baby turkeys.
I remember where the old blacksmith shop was (every farm had a place to shoe the oxen) at the foot of the hill below Aunt Mollie's house. Also the old log spring house was close by, by the 1930s it was in great disrepair. The blacksmith shop stood for years. I don't think it ever fell, the trees and vines just grew up through it.
As far as children's graves back beyond the Noblit Cemetery , Daddy (Okla Newton) carried me there and showed me them to me. At that time they were in the grove of scrub timber. There was a stack of flat rock at the head of each grave and a single rock at the foot of each. Daddy thought they were both Noblit children who were born and died soon after they Grandpa reached their destination. Farther back on the hill was a good house abandoned at that time that daddy called the Sewell House.
During the years we lived near the cemetery at the bottom of the hill (Lytle House), I saw a person buried in a home made coffin, lined with black muslin, Jesse Forsythe, the blacksmith at Peach made it. The old man died of tuberculosis, no family except 2 teenage daughters. His head marker was a plank but when I went to the cemetery in 1996 with Aunt Lillie (Newton) I noticed that he had a very nice marble headstone.