"God Giveth the Increase": Lurline Stokes Murray's Narrative of Farming and Faith

In 1986, as I began conducting oral histories with older southern farmers about changes in rural life, I asked an agricultural extension agent in Florence, South Carolina, to recommend some likely narrators. He was eager to help, but his first list included only men. "What about women who farmed?" I pressed. Without hesitating, he replied, "You need to see Mrs. J. W. Murray." ¹

Lurline Stokes Murray immediately understood the urgency of the Smithsonian Institution project. She hardly needed a young historian to tell her that she had witnessed dramatic changes on the land, and she already knew that too many friends had taken memories of "the old ways" to their graves. While we talked, we ate hot biscuits topped with homemade butter and pear preserves. Before I left Florence, I had recorded some ten hours of interviews, worshiped with her at Faith Southern Methodist Church, and shared Sunday dinner with her sons Julian and Russell and their families. A few months later Mrs. Murray charmed Smithsonian photographer Eric Long, too.

Oral histories remind us that people's lives rarely follow the categories that historians cultivate like neat rows. Interviews with Mrs. Murray revealed how domestic and farm economies intertwined and that continuity and change coexisted. She and Julian ran a modern farming operation, but she also practiced what older folks call "live at home" farming. While she mastered complicated federal agriculture programs, adapted the farm's crop mix to new market conditions, and watched tractors and combines grow to mammoth proportions, she still met as many of her subsistence needs as possible and adhered to a "waste not, want not" ethic.

Born in 1915, Lurline Murray, like so many women of her age and class, took hard work for granted. But the nature of that work evolved as she assumed the roles of daughter, wife, mother, farmer, and friend. When Russell was born in 1935, she went into labor while plowing; in 1947 she barned tobacco until dark the day before she gave birth to Julian. As a young wife, Mrs. Murray managed the farm while her second husband worked in Columbia as a railroad machinist. In middle age, she helped her son farm and nursed an ailing mother and husband until their deaths. Reproductive, productive, and social labors always overlapped.

Mrs. Murray proved an ideal guide through a portion of the farm economy that has eluded serious analysis: women's production for market. By the 1940s, Lurline and her mother had built a thriving trade in butter, eggs, and seasonal vegetables. Besides the cash and credit that they earned, the women also accumulated a "profit of friendship" that paid off when customers rendered services for reduced prices and offered advice for free. When the Murrays had to refinance their farm mortgage, they conferred with a banker to whom Lurline sold produce. Her mother's doctor, another regular customer, refused to accept payments for Julia Stokes's care.

Conversations with Lurline Murray generated far more than grist for the social historian's mill. She articulated a philosophy of life forged from hard work and good neighbors, hurts and disappointments, grace and faith that restored my soul in the winter of 1987. Learning that she had survived a bad first marriage and found a loving second husband balmed emotional wounds that I was nursing as I anticipated a divorce. I admired Mrs. Murray's imaginative preparations for old age. I had begun our interviews with the goal of using life histories to document a culture, but like biographers across the ages I had come to see her "virtues. . . serving me as a sort of looking glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life." ²

For several years I kept in touch with Lurline Murray more than I did most of the two hundred people that I had interviewed for the southern...