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 Ethel Davis Ethel Davis1 was born in 1905 on a general farm in Loudon County, Tennessee . One of seven children, she attended a local two-room school until the upper grades when she moved to a secondary school in the nearby village of Philadelphia. In 1926, she married Earl Davis, a local dairy farmer. The couple struggled to survive the Depression. Mrs. Davis’s husband’s brother, John, lived with them until his marriage. Ethel and Earl Davis had one son, Sam, who went on to expand the family dairy into a large commercial operation that he still runs today. As the Jones family did at a later time, the Davis family took advantage of expanding markets to enter commercial dairy farming. Mrs. Davis died in 1999. Eighty-nine years old when she was interviewed, Mrs. Davis’s memory of farm life was fragmented. She remembered the details of daily life quite clearly, but she was foggy on some events. In old age, she lived with her son and his wife at their ranch home on the farm. I spoke with Ethel Davis on July 19, 1994, at the Davis home. Also present was Mrs. Davis’s daughter-inlaw and her sister-in-law, who had arranged the interview. They occasionally jogged her memory about the past. Mrs. Davis’s daughter-in-law helped Mrs. Davis review the transcript and sent the editor hand-written corrections on May 30, 1995. Together, the Davis women answered my additional questions in writing. I have corrected the edited interview and added details based on their written corrections and comments.  I was born in nineteen and five. Been here a long time. We was poor and all of our neighbors were. [laughs] There were seven children in my family. I don’t know how they raised that many. We raised our food. We always fattened our hogs and had hog meat all the time. We had chickens all the time and eggs all the time so you didn’t have to go to town for anything but soda and salt. [laughter] My father was a miller. He made the cornmeal and the flour and had a sawmill. We were never hungry. 104 Country Women Cope with Hard Times One year we didn’t have any shoes all year. Because of hard times, I reckon. They [her parents] said we couldn’t get any money for them. Everybody got their shoes by trading in their corn and peas. Most of the time we bought them [the shoes] from a peddler. We sold chickens and eggs. Then we did sell some butter and a little milk from time to time. I went to school in two different places. I went to Paint Rock [School] a few years. That had two teachers. Then I went to Cook School, which was one room. Cook School was in Philadelphia.2 Back then in my younger days, we just had five or six months [of school]. But then when we went to Philadelphia it was longer. We walked to school. Now we always helped the teachers . The teacher might be in the back with one group and we’s up front with the little ones. The older girls and boys helped. My father taught school for a while. I don’t remember how long. He didn’t like it much. I married in 1926. We had it kindly rough. My husband’s daddy was a dairyman,3 but he died when we had been married about two years. John, my brother-in-law, lived with us then, and he helped us [on the farm]. After times had gotten better, it was worse with us.4 Yeah, hard times before for everybody else. We thought we was going to lose the farm at one time. One of the neighbors loaned us money. I don’t know where he heard it [that they were about to lose the farm to foreclosure]. He just had money and he wanted to loan it so we could hang on to it [the farm]. [laughs] I said a dollar was worth a dollar and fifty cents then. But them was the hardest times for us. I just had one child [son Sam], but he was a good one. We had dairy cows there on the farm. I don’t know how many we milked. It varied. We would have to cull out some sometimes, and sometimes we’d get a new bunch.5 I had once...

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