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 LaVerne Farmer LaVerne Farmer personifies many of the changes in rural southern women’s lives over the course of the twentieth century. Born at the height of the Great Depression on July 12, 1931, she grew up the only child of a prosperous farm family. She attended college at the University of Tennessee, eventually earning a master’s degree, and she enjoyed a career as a home demonstration agent and later as an administrator with the Tennessee Cooperative Extension Service. Farmer was born in Townsend, Tennessee, an old community nestled in Tuckaleechee Cove of the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Blount County. First settled in the 1790s, generations of Tuckaleechee Cove residents made their livings as subsistence farmers. Then in 1890, Knoxville lawyer and businessman John English began to acquire tracts of timber in Tuckaleechee Cove and the surrounding mountains. The Cove became the center of his fledgling lumbering enterprise, which he sold to Pennsylvania-born businessman W. B. Townsend in 1901. Townsend called his timber operation Little River Lumber Company, and he established a sawmill in Tuckaleechee Cove. By 1902, a post office was established at the site, and the community became known as Townsend. Little River Lumber Company gradually expanded , constructing a railroad into the Great Smoky Mountains, and provided hundreds of mountain men with new job opportunities off the farm. In the early years of the twentieth century, many Townsend families combined subsistence farming with lumbering jobs in order to make ends meet. As Little River Lumber Company grew, other Townsend residents seized on new economic opportunities, Farmer’s grandparents among them. They turned their subsistence farm into a thriving dairy farm and creamery operation , bottling milk from their small herd to sell to residents of the nearby lumber camps and later to workers at New Deal public works projects in the area. By the time LaVerne Farmer was born, the farm and creamery employed her grandparents, both her parents, and several hired hands. Government intervention would ultimately transform the lives of the Farmers and of most Townsend residents. Little River Lumber Company weathered a series of economic ups and downs but went out of business in 48 Country Women Cope with Hard Times 1938 after the federal government purchased most of its timber holdings for the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Farmer’s family ceased their dairy farming and milk bottling in the late 1940s when the federal government enacted new regulations designed to guarantee the safety of bottled milk. Complying with the new rules would have been prohibitively expensive for the family. In addition, Farmer’s grandparents were quite elderly by this point. Farmer’s father continued to do some part-time farming, but he made his living as a school bus driver and a rural mail carrier after the demise of the dairy. On August 9, 1993, I interviewed Miss Farmer at the Blount County Farm Bureau Building where she had just attended a meeting. Now retired, she lives with her mother on the farm where she was raised. Miss Farmer’s interview reflects her education and her broad perspective on the changes in southern rural life. At first, she talks in very general terms about the conditions of rural life early in the century, but as the interview progresses, she speaks in more personal terms. I sent the transcript to Miss Farmer in the fall of 1994. She corrected a few errors in the transcript and completed the family history questionnaire, but she offered no further comments on the interview.  I was born in 1931, but of course, I’ve heard the family talk about the Depression. I was an only child, but my parents lived with my dad’s parents when they were first married, so it was a three-generation family for a while. Mother was from a family with six children. Families back in the teens and World War I and the twenties were pretty much self-sufficient as far as the farm families. They produced most of their own goods, maybe purchasing a few staples like sugar and things like that. The families did most of their own work. Sometimes they would share with neighbors to get jobs done. But if they were large families, the children and the parents did most of the work themselves. Now, as far as food production, they raised most of their vegetables. Pork was the main meat source. Occasionally if they had sheep, they would have mutton...

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