Submitted by Sally Wheeler, Associate Professor of English, and great-granddaughter of Cordie.
I have very clear memories of Granny from my childhood as a tiny, spirited mountain woman. Once when I was very little, we visited her at the old homeplace back in the mountains of North Carolina. I remember little about the visit except that we were far back in the hills. I was, however, fascinated by her kitchen stove that was a big black wood-burning iron affair with shelves and doors on the back for keeping food warm.
My clearer memory of her is of one day, years later, on my grandfather's farm. My non-farming father and two of his brothers were trying to grease a tractor and they really didn't know how. I was watching from the barn loft when Granny arrived on the scene, her apron flapping in the breeze and her corncob pipe leaving a thin trail of smoke behind her. That pipe alone was enough to make her quite an exotic figure for me. She took one look at the tractor, grabbed the grease gun from my father, and with a minimum of effort greased it, laughed and teased the men, and headed on her way.
The following article which appeared in The Clay County Progress was written by her son, Guy Padgett, who was for many years editor of that newspaper.
Cordie
The hour was approaching two in the afternoon. Friends and neighbors had brought food already prepared and served the family which consisted of a thirty-two year old widow and five children, ages ranging from twenty-two months to ten years. Scarcely any food was eaten from the lunch table, because this young family had just lost a husband and father.
William Edgar Padgett, know throughout Clay County, North Carolina as Ed, had succumbed to his third bout with pneumonia on February 18, 1908 at the young age of thirty-three. Just twenty-four hours had passed since he had ceased to breathe, since he had passed from this life to the life beyond.
The February weather was cold and blustery. Although the mules that pulled the wagon that bore the corpse over the frozen ground were a black and a bay, they soon looked like matched iron-grays. Snow had begun to fall and the wind swirled it in every direction. This was a young, high-spirited team, but they were held in check by the strong hands of family friend Johnny Carter who tightly gripped the check lines. These mules pulled the body of their former master to its final resting place over the half-mile distance from the farm house to the Sweetwater Methodist Church where the funeral service was held. The wagon bumped slowly over the frozen dirt road.
Col. Greene Henderson Haigler, Worshipful Master of Clay Lodge No. 301, Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons, performed the final graveside rites as a band of Brother Masons paid their last respects to a fallen brother.
As the widow, Cordie Coleman Padgett stood silently surrounded by her children, she had yet given little thought to how their life would change. But as she turned from the grave and returned to their modest home which she and her husband had recently put together, she also turned from thoughts of her husband now buried on that cold hillside to thoughts of the family's future.
Today, a family with no money and no husband or father would be aided by Social Security, Welfare or other Social Services agencies. There would also be jobs that a woman with a house full of kids could take. None of these options were there for a young mountain woman early in the twentieth century.
All she had were a few acres of cleared land on a mountain farm, the new small farmhouse, the two mules, two milk cows, and the chickens that roosted in the trees behind the barn. She had a supply of dried fruit, some leather britches, and a big crock of pickled beans. But as time would tell, her most important assets were within; they consisted of such virtues as: ambition, independence, frugality, industry, honesty, confidence in herself and pride in her children and a determination that approached stubbornness.
To understand Granny Padgett, as she became known later in life to her family and friends alike, one must know something about her younger days. Experiences she had as a child served her well in preparation for the challenges ahead. She was only a few months old when her father, William H. Coleman, died and her mother before her had to assume the role of head of household. Her father was wounded by a gun shot while serving in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and he returned home a cripple and susceptible to disease. The arduous tasks of clearing land for fields and pastureland, of log-rollings and plowing of new ground were for stronger men. He never fully recovered from his war wound and died at the youthful age of forty-three.
As young Cordie grew, she took her stance beside her brothers in the fields, the woodyard, barn or wherever there was a job to be done. She learned to cope with many tasks that were traditionally considered "man's work." Her mother, born Adeline Rogers in 1838, re-married several years after the death of Cordie's father; however, this marriage did not prove successful and two of little Cordie's teenage brothers ran the step-father off and forbade him to ever set foot on the farm again. Cordie was twenty when she married Ed Padgett, was thirty-two at the time of his death, so she actually lived only twelve years in a home headed by a man.
Since there were three older sisters who helped their mother with household chores, there was less need for Cordie to help so she turned her abilities to the outside. She often challenged the male roles of his brothers but they all seems completely devoted to her and accepted her as an equal worker while still their pet little sister. Whenever there was a young horse or mule on the farm that the boys could not ride, teenage Cordie would slip out to the barnyard and coax that unbroken animal into letting her get astride. Later she would ride it before her brothers as if she was royalty arriving on a prized stallion. The lady-like way for girls to ride was side-saddle, but young Cordie would have none of that.
Two of her sisters married when they were in their teens, but the oldest of the four sisters did not marry until she was about forty years of age and she was the expert in cooking, sewing, weaving and general household management. Young Cordie became proficient at the spinning wheel, but she was always glad to give it up to her older sister and slip outside to work.
Beside raising cattle, hogs and poultry for food, the family also kept a flock of sheep, the source of the wool used in spinning and weaving. After the wool was cut from the sheep, it had to be washed, carded into rolls and spun into thread from which cloth was woven. This was all done by the women on the farm. About once a year each girl would receive a piece of calico from which they made themselves a Sunday dress. Other than this one outfit, practically all their clothes, including underwear and the boy's britches were made in the home from cloth they wove themselves.
This was typical life on a farm in the late part of the nineteenth century in the United States when Cordie Coleman Padgett was born in 1875.
In 1908 when her husband died, there was no Welfare Program and almost no jobs outside the home for women. The strength and endurance of a man were needed for most jobs. Now the entire responsibility for caring for her little brood of five children fell on her young, thin shoulders. The rugged farm life that she was destined to follow for most of the rest of her life had at least been somewhat prepared for by the rugged pioneer life she had lived as a child.
After providing shelter, clothes and food for her five small children, her one burning desire was to give each one of them an education. Because of the primitive society in which she spent her childhood, she had little formal schooling. The family lived at least five miles from a school and of course there were no buses and would not be for a long time to come. Cordia was fortunate to find a buyer for her farm on Sweetwater and she was able to buy a good farm within two miles of Hayesville High School, one of the best schools in the entire mountain region. On the new farm she went to work tilling the soil. By day she would work at outside farm jobs and by night she would make and repair clothes. She also would turn up the oil lamp and help the children with their school lessons, encouraged them to improve their minds.
When her husband died, he had left her with a good team of mules. Now, there is something paradoxical about a mule; the better he is, the meaner he is. It soon became clear to the young widow that the mules she had were so young and lively, so big and unruly, that it would be dangerous for a woman or a ten-year-old boy to try to manage them so she traded them for some gentle horses. She soon found out, however, that the reason the horses were so gentle was because they were too old to be mean--or good. Several trades later, she still had an inferior work team so she started to raise a team of mules herself. By the time they were old enough and large enough to do heavy farm work, her little brood of children were through high school and gone, either to college or to their own homes. Reluctantly, she sold the two mules that had grown up with her children and depended on hired help with their own horsepower to do the heavy farmwork.
She put a few more dollars onto what she had received for the mules and bought two young registered Jersey mild cows and a cream separator and became one of the first "dairy farmers" in Clay County to sell cream to a commercial creamery. In 1924, Nantahala Creamery of Franklin, NC started picking up cream from farmers in Clay County.
In 1930, she became the first poultry farmer in the county to ship "hatching eggs." She purchased baby chicks from a hatchery "up East" and when the hens came into production, she shipped eggs back to them by parcel post. The hatchery furnished light weight wooden cartons in which she would ship the eggs and then they would return the containers to her. She sold eggs in this fashion for about two years until local merchants started collecting eggs and delivering feeds by truck. She continued raising chickens and selling hatching eggs for a living until she retired at age 75 and moved away from the farm to live with one of her daughters, Edna Bailey.
The Padgett children didn't have fine clothes, indoor plumbing, electric lights, telephones, sufficient transportation, or many other conveniences that even very poor people take for granted today. They were not worried because those luxuries were unknown in the mountain area where they lived and grew into adulthood. Doing without is so much easier for those who never had!