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 Mabel Love Mabel Love1 was born in 1910 in the farming community of Philadelphia, Tennessee, ten miles from Loudon, seat of the county with the same name. Her birth family worked as tenant farmers except for a five-year period when her father moved the family to Montana, where he managed a grain operation. Mrs. Love married into a landowning family and had two sons. In the middle years of the twentieth century, many farmers in the Philadelphia community and throughout the county built commercial dairy operations.2 Mrs. Love and her husband began large-scale dairy production in partnership with his brother. During World War II, the Loves bought the brother’s share of the land they inherited from his parents and began to expand their herd. Gradually they accumulated additional acreage. Mrs. Love considered herself an active partner in the farming operation and participated in decisions to expand and to mechanize. The farm is still operated by Mrs. Love’s son and grandsons and is one of the largest dairies in the county. In the 1980s, Mrs. Love retired. She moved to Florida, where she lived in a travel trailer near another son. She brought the trailer to Tennessee each summer. She parked in a son’s yard, visited with family, and worked the vegetable garden for the warm months, returning to Florida as the leaves began to turn in east Tennessee. Mrs. Love died in 1996. This interview took place on July 19, 1994, on the lawn outside Mrs. Love’s travel trailer. A friend of Mrs. Love’s who arranged the interview was also present, and occasionally she jogged Mrs. Love’s memory. The editor sent Mrs. Love a transcript, but she made no changes.  Well, I can tell you about my life if I don’t get tangled up a-trying to. [laughter ] Sometimes I have problems with that. I was born in 1910, May of 1910. There was about two in my family, me and my sister. And of course my mother and dad; long back that time they was still living. Our family never knowed nothing but farming. Our farm had crops; they never dairy farmed. 108 Country Women Cope with Hard Times You had to sell eggs and stuff. You sold your chickens and eggs and bought your groceries. That’s how my mother bought her sugar, salt, and coffee. We had lard. Makes you sick. I mean makes you sick to think of lard now. Well, there’s altogether difference in cooking now from the way we cooked back then. We didn’t know any better. But, law, we had good food. I never have been too good about remembering dates or anything. When I went to school that was my worst subject, remembering dates on anything. I went to school right out here at Philadelphia; I went there the first year I went to school. Then we moved to Montana, and I went to school out there. This man was wanting my dad to come out there to his farm and work for him out there, and we spent, I think it must have been about five years that we was there, and I went to school there. Then when we came back, he decided he wanted to work over here in Sweetwater, and we lived there a year or so, and then we moved back down here to Philadelphia. I never did like to go to school out there at Philadelphia. I was just a little kid; well that was my first year in school. And I didn’t like it out there, I just didn’t like the people, and I guess they didn’t like me either. But anyway, I’d do everything I could to keep from going to school, and they finally let me quit school before I finished the eighth grade. I was still going to school in the eighth grade. And they let me quit. I didn’t like to go to school there, I didn’t like it one bit. And it’s funny because the people I know out there now, I like them, but I didn’t like any of them then. We married about 1927. Now these dates, I may get them wrong. We set up housekeeping across the road over there. That was the first place we lived. Then we moved down here to the house down here. It was a story and a half high. I married...

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