John T. Hicks

Find A Grave

I was born in 1880 and grew up a happy kid on part of my family's plantation in Spotsylvainia County, Virginia. As I grew older, I knew I wasn't cut out for the faming life, so I headed to Richmond, Va where I got a great job as a trolly conductor. I was very happy to be single and I thought myself quite the ladie's man and a darn good "catch".

But then it happened, I met a beautiful girl, twenty years younger, and I couldn't run any longer. Her name was Alma Esther Galyen... she was a dark haired beauty and a "Tar-Heel" to boot.

She came from a large family who had come up by train to Teman and settled in Caroline County. We shared a love of family and the fun of big "get-togethers"....and of course, good home cooking....country style....and being from North Carolina, she KNEW how to cook!

I brought my young bride back to the family farm and we started our own family. We had a nice piece of land right at the corner of what is now Robert E. Lee Drive and the old mill pond road. "
My dad, who had survived the " War of Northern Aggression", as we like to call it here in Virginia, lived up in the old home place that he'd shared with his dad who's buried in our family cemetery. He said that life, as they knew it, sure had changed since the War....but everyone was in the same boat...you do what you can with what you've got.

With battles fought all around the farm here, it made a big mess of things.....our wooden fences used for fire wood, our trees blasted out of the ground, our barns burned.......all the cows were gone and there wasn't a horse in the neighborhood. All live stock had been either stolen by the Yanks or taken by our troops..... my daddy had to pretty much start over with just about nothing.

He didn't even get the chance to say goodbye to his own daddy because he had died mid June of 1865... before he'd got back from the surrender. He'd been suffering with consumption and my grandma had to have the servants bury him pretty quick because of all the fighting still going on all around us.....it wasn't even safe to be walking around outside the house.

I used to love all the old stories, but he didn't like to talk much about the War and the suffering. Guess they didn't want to rehash what they'd seen and been through .......can't much blame him.

Life was going to be better for my boys.....Emory and Warren. These two were real handsome boys and good workers. They worked hard around our farm and they did their part, that's for sure. They didn't mind giving up their bedroom when the migrant help came around and needed a place to stay for a few nights.....and we needed those migrant workers.....they were always welcomed....we fed them and put em up for however long they could stay or for however long we needed them.

Emory and Warren were always a bit superstitious....while rounding up our cows down in the back field late at night they'd be scared of their own shadows.....especially when they went by a neighbor's barn one evening...it was filled with discarded mannequins....they thought they were dead bodies...ran like hell...they'd never seen a mannequin before.

They'd heard me tell the stories of the mysterious lights I'd see across our road on the neighboring farm.....I'd see them right often coming in from my evening chores....nobody much believed me unless they were lucky enough to see them too... .Alma would be out on the porch shelling peas, she'd see them once in a while........those crazy lights........they looked like balls of fire flying around our neighbor's house.....going into and out of the windows.....That was pretty frightening....one night Alma said they were circling the house and then all of a sudden one lights went up above the tree line and then it went down behind the trees in the shape of a cross.....no fooling. There's no telling what you might see out in the country after dark!

On any given sweltering summer day, I knew where I'd find my Emory......whenever he got the chance he'd run off and find himself a cool spot at the ice house.... there, under the ground.... inside the old ice house, he'd be just a keeping cool....there was no way to beat the heat in those days.....

I worked real hard back then.....did a lot of farming and a lot of timbering. With only two boys in the family though, that made it hard. My three girls helped out as much as they could, but a farm needs farm hands......the land and the boys kinda go together.

I loved my church, Shady Grove Methodist......my boy, Emory, said nobody could sing a hymn like I could.....I sat in the back every Sunday....just so people could turn around and wonder who it was who was singing so good.......I sang with a nice, deep bass voice ....loved to show off my voice......I loved to sing. Emory said I had the best voice that he had ever heard.

I had a good life and a good family, but then one day in October of 1938, I had a bad accident. I ended up in the Mary Washington Hospital down on Water Street, now Sophia. Now, I had almost died that same year.....I was in a hospital in Richmond for several weeks with a bad infection.....

Now, here I was just driving my load of timber down the driveway of Oakley. All of a sudden the load shifted and the whole thing slid forward and knocked me off the wagon. Unfortunately, I fell right under the wheel. My leg was crushed and I lost a lot of blood.

I thought I was getting on pretty good, but then we found that gangrene had set in. I was going to have to lose that leg. I hung in there for a few days, but finally, with the whole family there in my hospital room, I succumbed to my fate.

Emory was due to go off to the CC camp the week I died....he had to postpone his leaving until after my funeral on that Monday. Real sad. Poor little Ina, my youngest girl, why she had hardly gotten to know me......real sad.