CHAPTER 1
Hamp
A pink marble obelisk rises from the little hillock that dominates the cemetery in old Duluth, Georgia. It has been there for over a hundred years, a monument to love. A three-foot square polished block rises to about shoulder high from the wide chiseled marble base. Above the central block a round tapering column rises another ten feet and is topped off with an urn like cap that adds another two feet to the spire. Sometime in the past fifty years a walnut tree has grown up to half hide the top of the column and shade the pink stone. It's splintered and partly decayed trunk shows signs of numerous lightening strikes. The tree grew up through the gravel of the narrow cemetery road that borders one side of the family plot. Knobs have healed over here and there where it has been trimmed up to let hearses bring their burdens to other parts of the hillside. The white lap sided building that was once the Baptist church still stands on the north side of the cemetery. Looking in any other direction, there is not much left to see but derelict homes and rundown neighborhoods. But, to me, this is where it all begins, with the people who have been laid to rest within the granite borders of the family plot and the community of friends departed.
My grandfather, Elisha Green Ware, moved to Duluth from Walnut Grove, Georgia shortly after my father was born. Within a year, my Grandmother, Emily Robena Carter, died in childbirth and the pink marble obelisk was raised with it first roughly cut inscription:
Erected
In Memory of Precious
Emily Robena
Daughter of
James W.& Laura Carter
Wife of Dr. E.G. Ware
Born Dec. 4 1864
And fell asleep in Jesus
July 12, 1896
As a daughter, she was obedient and good.
As a wife, she was perfection.
As a mother, she was positive and firm,
patient, kind, gentle and loving.
As a Christian, she was earnest, devoted, faithful, and true.
I had seen the obelisk before; when my father and I stopped by to pay our respects at the family shrine. It stood out, caught your eye, in a field of stone bordered family lots and gray headstones. But it had been standing there for seventy five years before I read its message. Love was in my father's house. It sloshed between the members. It was sentimental, lavish, joyful, immediate, and lasting. It was responsible and loyal in life and in death. That was the way it was, and it was inconceivable in my father's family for it to be otherwise. There was nothing pretentious, arrogant, or ingenuous about it. It was like laughter that filled all the distances between them.
My father was two years old when my grandmother died leaving three young children. Viola was the oldest. Samuel David Hawthorn, who was two years older than my father, was next. My father, James Theodore Hamilton Carter, was the youngest. My grandfather had a penchant for giving his children family names even if it meant that they would each have four or five. Viola became more than a sister to the boys; she became the female head of the house. Probably the most influential woman in the children's lives was Aunt Charity, the cook that lived with the family until the household was broken up. She was really the children's surrogate mother. Until I recently learned about Aunt Charity's role, I never quit understood why my father gave our Chinese ahma (nurse maid) so much latitude in my upbringing. Both brothers became known by their third names, Hawthorn and Hamilton. Although Hamilton, or Hamp, as he was known most of his life, was the youngest of the three, he seems to have had a great deal of influence over his siblings. In later life they not only loved him, but idolized him.
As a child, I heard very little about my grandfather, accept that he was a physician, and nothing about my grandmother Ware. My first real knowledge of him came after my own mother's death when my father came to live with us in Staunton, Virginia for a short time. One week we drove down through the mountains of North Carolina into the foothills of North Georgia to visit Duluth. It was homecoming for my Dad, a time to pass on memories and a legacy. We came into town down old highway U.S. 29, which was still two lanes, turned across the railroad tracks, moved down the rows of red brick storefronts that seemed to stand at parade rest as we passed by. Like so many old graying towns that straddled the railroad, the buildings reflected an era that was not only passed, but almost forgotten. A few buildings were still in use. Others were empty, boarded up, or in such bad repair that no one still cared for them. As my Dad reminisced aloud everything came alive as we drove down Main Street and then explored the roads west of town where the family farm had once been. He showed me a house that was a duplicate of the old home place, and we went back and forth passing the newer homes and the new stone Baptist church until finally we came back to town and the old cemetery.
According to the lore in Mathews County, Virginia, five Ware brothers arrived on the western bank of Chesapeake Bay sometime before the American Revolution. There are still places like Ware's Warf, Ware's Neck, and Ware's Church in the area. One of the Wares, Lt. Edward Ware, was born in Amherst County, Virginia in 1760. He married Sarah Thurmond. Edward and enlisted in the Revolutionary Army at the age of sixteen. His brother James also fought in the Revolutionary Army and was sighted for bravery in the field by General Washington after the battle of Yorktown. Edward Ware seems to have served as a Private, a Sergeant (sic), a Brevet, and a Second Lieutenant. He fought in battles at Guilford and York. After the Revolution he moved to Madison County, Georgia where he amasses a small fortune. In his Will he gave each of his eleven children a horse and a saddle, and, much to my chagrin, a slave. Three of the five brothers left Virginia and ended up in what is now Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Of course, they were all Anglicans. Henry Ware, one of George's sons, was a strong Presbyterian and opposed immersion. His wife joined a Baptist Church; there were no Presbyterian Churches near her. Henry told her that he would shoot the preacher when he immersed her. However, after advising with his mother, his wife was baptized and Henry did not shoot the minister, but cried.
My great grand father Asa Jones Ware was born in 1813 and out lived three of his wives. He was first married to Francis Bird by whom he had two children and five grandchildren. Following her death Asa married Mary Ann Hood, my great grandmother, and had three children, the last of the three by her was my grandfather, Elisha Green Ware. William Ware, the second child of this marriage, and his wife, Cornelia McElhannan, had nine children and at least six grand children. This is not particularly unusual for the times, because there was a shortage of men after the Civil War; but it created quite a problem when Mary Hood died. Asa was already in his eighties when he married a third time to Victoria Harmon who was eighteen years old, but already had four children. Asa and his new family moved to Talladega, Alabama where a fifth child, John Ware, was born. According to my grandfather, Asa lost everything he owned in the Civil War. After the Civil War, there was not much left to divide up. Nevertheless at Asa's death there were considerable hard feelings among the three sets of children about the division of the properties that he had later acquired. The children of the second marriage were particularly unhappy because they, of necessity, had left home without anything. Litigation, it appears, went on for over a generation.
Shortly after the Civil War, Elisha who was thirteen, decided to leave home. He had very little education because the schools had been closed during the war. In a letter he wrote in October of 1924 he told my parents that the day he left home he was literally without a penny, and he walked all day until twilight looking for a job with a blacksmith. At that point in life being a blacksmith was his ideal vocation. He found three places that wanted a "striker," but was told in each place that he was too small. They told him he was not strong enough to handle the hammer. Not only was his pride deeply wounded, but he didn't have a cent to pay for a nights lodging. He walked on in the darkness until, as he said, "Darkness, Ghosts & Hobgoblins drove me to seek a place to spend the night." He wound up that "awful night" at the home of a Mr. A. C. Bennett. My grandfather wrote,
I told Mr. Bennett my condition & said to him, 'I want to stay all night with you, but I have not one cent to pay for my lodging.' He said, 'My dear boy, I won't charge you one penny.' I said, 'Mr. Bennett I am much oblige to you, but I will not accept the proposition. We will talk the matter over in the morning.' Next morning I felt somewhat refreshed, but during the night, I thought over my plans for the next day. I got up in the night, wrote out a note for One Dollar to A.C. Bennett, or bearer, for this amount. The next morning, at the table, I had the note all prepared, & (Sic) handed it to him. He said, 'No, I won't charge you anything.' I told him very frankly, that I did not belong to the charity class. He finally said, 'I will accept the note, because, of your youth & manliness.' At that time, I mean that night, something was said about prohibition, in which I expressed myself, unmistakably, a prohibitionist, Now this made a strong impression, on a young boy sitting close by, the man, & (sic) the Christian, that you know as Joe Bennett. Now about the note; 4 years later, I redeemed that note, & (sic) no paper, I ever possessed, lay closer to my heart than that(sic).
When my father grew up, Duluth was far removed from Atlanta. Most people made the trip by train. Duluth had a reputation in those days of having quite a number of illegal stills that made some mighty fine corn whisky. A story was told that once upon a time on a train going north from Atlanta the conductor went to sleep and was about to pass one of the stops without announcing the town. Someone waved a bottle of whisky under his nose and he woke up with a start and announced, "Doo Luth!" Another tale has it that a woman was buying a ticket for herself and her child at the ticket window in Atlanta, and she placed the money through the grated window telling the ticket agent, "Two to Duluth." To her surprise the ticket agent replied, "Twi-dill-lee-dee, Mam."
Lake Linear, which is west of the current city of Duluth, and is one of today's big attractions for Atlanta residence did not exist. The area around Duluth was hills and very thick woods with a few flat areas down by the river. The soil was not particularly good except to grown corn. But, people survived and for the most part the town flourished along the railroad tracks.
I had known that my grandfather was a physician, but I had not know until my Dad told me, that my grandfather had gone to Atlanta for two years for his training in medicine. At the time there were no medical schools as we know them today. It was a source of immense pride to him that he had actually studied medicine, and he insisted on being called Doctor Ware. People in Duluth who remember him or have heard about him still refer to him as Dr. Ware. I do not know what kind of practice he had; he was the only doctor in town. I gather that he treated almost everyone in town and the surrounding area. From what my father and uncle told me he was an avid reader and was well informed on both national and local events. His love and respect of learning was passed on to his children at a very early age.
When his children were still young he took them to Atlanta to the see the cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta, although it had not been fully completed. The cyclorama is a life size reproduction of the Battle of Atlanta. A viewer passed under the set and came up through a stairwell on to a platform in the very middle of the battle. From the platform one viewed the battle in every direction with all of its gory details. The way in which the artist had built the work was such that the floor messed seamlessly into the walls. It gave the illusion of being able to see miles in every direction. Below the platform were life size sculptures of the soldiers, cannons, rifles, and animals. The battle then blended into the horizons of farmhouses and horseback riders. The artist had researched his work so well that the sculptures near the platform were recognizable persons who participate in the battle. The dead and wounded were replicas of actually fallen men. The cyclorama was a great work of art that still available to be seen in Atlanta, but at the time it was a grim reminder of the not too distant past. My father told me that there was a woman in their viewing group who recognized a member of her family and had to be led off the platform in tears. I can only guess the reasons for my grandfather taking the boys to the cyclorama, but I do know that he wanted his boys to grow up with an understanding of the world that was not limited to the hills and hollows of Gwinnett County, Georgia.
Even with three children my grandfather was a lonely man. I do not know why he never remarried. He was certainly young enough. My father once told me that at night he would occasionally find him crying, and when my dad would ask him what the problem was, it was always about missing my grandmother. It was not uncommon during this period of time for a man to outlast more than one wife. Child bearing and its dangers were all too natural for the period.
My grandfather was a very devout person, a leader in the Baptist Church for most of his adult life. He was a teetotaler. His strong prohibitionist views and actions got him into trouble more than one time with the local bootleggers in the hills around Duluth. He was forever telling the state revenuers where the illegal stills were hidden and often paid the consequence for passing on the information. Some times the farm animals were let out of their pastures or harassed, and other times it was more serious. The big barn back of the house was burned down by an irate moonshiner whose still had been found and destroyed because my grandfather had told the revenuers where it was located.
Living on the farm was often difficult. The boys did their share of the plowing and care of the livestock. It was hard manual labor. They knew years when the crops were good and years when the crops were bad. They even had the misfortune of having their smoke house burn down. Smokehouses in the area were build of logs which were raise above ground level in order to put slow burning hickory limbs under the floor so that the smoke could rise up through the floor and cure the meat. One had to be careful when curing hogs that the heat was not too great from the hickory limbs smoldering under the smokehouse. Unfortunately, one winter the hickory limbs were fanned by a light wind when the ventilator that controlled the burn under the house was not closed properly. The fat from the meat began to melt and dripped down through the cracks in the floor and before the night was over the smokehouse had burst into flame and all the pork was lost.
Actually my grandfather was both a physician and a farmer. Although my father attended school in Duluth, the farm was where he grew up. He never lost the love of farming even while we lived in China. Next to our home on the Baptist Compound in Shanghai, my dad always had a large garden. We also had at least one cow that grazed the campus grounds and provided the families at the Baptist Compound with milk, cottage cheese, and sometimes butter. The cow barn at the Compound was at the back of our house outside the high fence that enclosed the campus. I remember there being pigs, ducks, geese, and chickens out in the cow barn area. Immediately behind our house my father had planted grape vines, and every fall we had all the muscadines and scuppernongs we could eat and put up as preserves.
It seems that my Grandfather not only had horses, raise cows, and hogs, he even had goats. One of my uncle's favorite stories of their childhood was the time that a large billy goat climbed the hay stack in the barn and was up on the second floor of the building enjoying the hay and making a mess. The two boys who were about eight and ten years old were sent up the ladder to catch him and bring him down. The goat turned out to be ornery and loved to butt people who messed with him. In the hayloft he managed to elude them each time they were close to catching him. Finally they devised a strategy. Hawthorn would stand at the door of the hayloft through which the hay was loaded on to the second floor, and Hamilton, as my father was called by his family, would guide the goat toward the door. They almost had the goat cornered, when suddenly it lowered its head and charged Hawthorn in the open door. Luckily the goat's horns passed between his legs, but the goat's back raised him off the floor, out the door, through the air, and onto the barnyard below. He rode the goat all they way down and landed facing backwards, straddling the goat. All is well that ends well. No one was hurt. The goat was out of the hayloft, and Hawthorn had had the ride of his life.
