Alice Bradley

From a newspaper Article in the Liberty MS paper:

Do it yourself? Alice Bradley's family lived it. Raised on County Farm road Mrs. Bradley and family butchered their own cattle and dried the beef and slaughtered and smoked hogs. Did their own blacksmithing and made their own soap. They raised virtually everything they used except flour and sugar. Actually it was Alice's father Crawford (CW) McKnight who was in charge of most of the family chores. When he was blacksmithing young Alice did little more than pump bellows sometimes. CW was also responsible for founding the Home Mission Society in which he established lodges all around the state of MS. Lodge members paid 10 cent per month "when someone died if they were a member of the lodge they'd make a coffin for them," says Alice adding that the society is still in operation she still has her father's old ledger book dating back to it's inception, with lodge and blacksmithing records. CW got the ideal for the lodge after a former county farm road inmate died penniless and friendless. The County Farm was a type of jail located up the road from the family. "When folks did evil things they didn't send them to the penetentary. They sent them to the County Farm and made them work it out," says Alice. CW constructed a pine coffin and the next night had a dream. Alice doesn't remember what it was about, but it inspired her father to form this society which would provide coffins for folks who might not otherwise be able to aford them. The society compromised 98 lodges as far away as Cleveland, MS.

Alice was the eleventh of twelve children the only one now living she was born in a log house with pine not torches and kerosene lanterns for light. "There were large rooms we put two or three beds in a room," she says. They cooked on a fireplace using a Dutch oven on legs, put the skillet down in the fire and put the lid on it, and put the hot coals on top and it would brown the bread on top," she explaines. In addition to blacksmithing, her father raised cotton, corn, garden vegetable and even rice. Rice seems an odd crop for piney hills country, Alice said her father grew up in a swampy bottom near the creek. She remembers harvesting the rice and pounding it with mortar and pestle. Her daughters Annie Mae and Mary Lilly recalls, "Mother would boil her some sow belly on the fireplace and pour it on rice." Hog meat was smoked and left hanging or packed in a meat box or among corn shucks in the smoke house, same with beef. "We'd have meat all year long," says Alice with pork you need hominy of course or what Alice called lye-com." "We'd shell the corn, put it in a wash pot and put strong ashes in the pot boil it with the corn and the husks came off. It'd be so good. To make grits, she'd sift the husk from the dry corn meal and put the husk in a pot of water. The grits would settle to the bottom of the pot. "All the husk would rise to the top," says daughter Mary.

They had to buy white sugar but could make brown sugar by cooking sugar cane until it melted to syrup. Soap was made by draining water through a barrell of oak ashes, collected during the winter then boiling it with Hog grease. "It would get hard just like white bars of soap," says Alice. By raising cotton, doing blacksmith work, and making coffins, the family earned enough for essentials and some luxuries, like sardines and cheese. There was no dating of course. "Boys came to the house and we'd sit down and talk but no going out," she says laughing. "We used to go to church in the wagon, those were happy times then. We'd just visit neighbors and sit and talk and laugh, that was our entertainment. The arrival of the first motor car in the community was big news. " We were amazed," she recalls we heard a car running and we ran to see, we wondered where are the horses and mules that are pulling it. The car was so far beyond one child's comprehension he described it as someone riding a rocking chair.

Alice was Babtized in Tanyard Creek when she was 17 and married at 20 now at 91 she still cooks and does for herself, even drives to Oak Grove Baptist Church a long stones throw across the road. "I get around and do little things," says Alice. "I just keep going."