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 Korola Neville Lee Korola Neville Lee was born December 10, 1911, in Blount County, Tennessee. Blount County, situated between the Tennessee River and the Great Smoky Mountains south of Knoxville, was settled in the 1780s. By the early twentieth century, the county’s economy was a mix of agriculture and industry. The Aluminum Company of America established a large manufacturing facility near the county seat, Maryville, and several other small industries provided wage work for many town dwellers and rural people who continued to farm part-time after they took factory jobs. The majority of Blount Countians continued to farm full-time until the Second World War, however. Large farms lined the county’s rich river and creek bottoms while smaller farms dotted the upland slopes. Korola Lee’s father, Ephraim Perry Lee, was a prosperous landowning farmer born just after the Civil War, and Miss Lee shared the Civil War stories she had heard from her grandmother. Miss Lee had a half brother and half sister from her father’s first marriage. She was the middle child of five from her father’s second marriage to Mary Ann Eliza Josephine McCammon , a local schoolteacher. The Lees were devout Quakers and well respected in their home community of Big Springs, south of Maryville. Two of Miss Lee’s ancestors had founded the Quaker boarding school, Friendsville Institute (later known as Friendsville Academy), in 1854. Another ancestor had drawn up the plans for the town of Friendsville. The Lee children attended public schools in the county. When Korola Lee and her younger sister Thelma finished high school, they were still too young to obtain teaching certificates, so they attended Maryville College for a year. Miss Lee began her teaching career at Mount Vernon Elementary School in southern Blount County. She and sister Thelma finished their college degrees by attending summer sessions at East Tennessee Teacher’s College (now East Tennessee State University), alternating summers so that one sister would always be home to help out on the farm. Korola Lee served a series of oneand two-room schools for a number of years before the consolidation of 64 Country Women Cope with Hard Times community schools into Friendsville Elementary. She taught three generations of Blount County children, including my father and his siblings, before retiring in the late 1960s. She and sister Thelma cared for their parents in old age and maintained a large garden. A number of years after their parents’ deaths, Thelma Lee moved in with a single nephew who had lost both his parents, leaving Korola Lee alone in the family home. Miss Lee remained active in the Friendsville Friends Church and the local home demonstration club. This interview took place on the front porch of Miss Lee’s rambling, white frame farmhouse, the home where she was born and where her parents lived until their deaths. We talked on August 10, 1994, and she corrected the transcript in October 1994. Her spoken dialect was typical of east Tennessee and contained syntactical and grammatical errors, but Miss Lee had not forgotten her schoolteacher’s training in standard English: she corrected her grammar in much of the transcript. I have made corrections as she indicated but left mistakes intact in portions of the transcript she did not correct. Although she was eighty-three when we talked, her memory and her wit were sharp. In her narrative, Miss Lee was meticulous about local geography, constantly placing people and events on the land. She shared a couple of her mother’s recipes, which are found at the end of the narrative.  I had two brothers older than me and two sisters younger than me. Then I had a half brother and a half sister, Macy Hartsell Lee and Myrtle Mae Lee. My half sister is ninety-five years old, and she lives in California. Macy’s daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret Nell, flew out for her birthday last year. And Macy lived to be ninety-two. Their mother [Korola’s father’s first wife] died when Macy was about eighteen months old. Macy went down and worked in the gristmill. [It was a] flour mill, flour and corn meal. Then he got to working at night at the marble quarry,1 and he was a perfectionist [about cutting marble]. He sawed the marble at night for the post office at Knoxville [built in the late 1930s] and also the Smithsonian Institute Museum in Washington, DC. [He sawed at night] because...

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