John Tyler Ewing - My Great-Grandfather,

born 1868, Gwinnett Co. GA

by Stewart Ewing, from interviews with my father Thomas "Pap" Ewing and my Aunts Deloris, Melba, and Edna

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I don't remember my Great-Grandfather.  He passed away three and a half months before I was born.  My father has many stories about him, but the most memorable to me is not even a story.  My Dad has always said, "I wish I had asked my grandfather about our family's history before he died.  He would have been able to tell me so much."  My father was not always into Genealogy.  Growing up he had heard stories from different family members that suggested we were from Scotland, and that we had come from Virginia before we came to Georgia.  But Dad was not in a questioning mood as a kid and never pursued these thoughts.  It was on a fateful business trip to Washington DC that caused Dad to get "bit by the genealogy bug".  More on that when we talk about John Tyler's father, Sam Jones Ewing.

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So much of this is directly from my father's memories, plus my Aunts Deloris, Melba, and Edna, and appropriately so as they lived with him and knew him day to day as he really was. I provide genealogical detail and source information, but in John Tyler’s case, the stories probably give a greater picture of who he was.

 

John Tyler was born in 1868, just three years after the Civil War in Harbins District, Gwinnett County Georgia.  This time frame and well into his childhood he would have experienced the full effect of the reconstruction period in the south, the hardship of the farms, the stories of rebuilding and renewal in and around Atlanta, and perhaps some of the bitterness that followed the war in that area.  It is difficult to know what his childhood would have been like because no one is around that knew him in that time. 

But that man he came to be in later life is well-known even today, and is probably best shared and expressed by my father Thomas Harvis “Pap” Ewing, my Aunt Edna, Aunt Melba, and Aunt Deloris.

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The following is meant to read like it is an interview between myself, my Dad, and my Aunts, all in one room.  In fact all four interviews were conducted independently and rearranged to fit in this context because I think that when you read these interviews together, they paint a vibrant portrait of a well-loved and important ancestor.  His nature and character clearly made a mark on our modern-day Ewings of Gwinnett.

 

Pap (b. 1930): Before 1890, he lived in the Yellow River Post Office with his brother Robert (Bob).  I never knew Bob, but my older brothers and sisters knew him.  The Yellow River Post Office was associated with the Nash Family at that time, and that is where he met his first wife Etha Mae (“Ethie”) Nash, and they married in 1890.  From there he moved first to the Craig farm up close to Lawrenceville (up Five Forks-Trickum Road) about 4 miles from Lawrenceville… a subdivision and shopping center are there now, across from the Craig Plantation from the Civil War era that is still maintained to this day - Craig Plantation History) and then moved near Norcross as a sharecropper.

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From there, he moved to the Hannah farm on GA Hwy 124 about a mile and a half southwest of Snellville (SE corner of GA Hwy 124 and Britt Road) for a few years, and then Dec 31, 1917 he bought the Webb Gin House Road farm from James A. Hutchins.  Before he bought this farm, he and his wife Etha Mae had birthed 9 children, Thomas Kelly “TK”, Lola Mary Ann, Ida Lucille, Jessie Mae, Lessa “Lessie” L. Daisy, Samuel “Sam” Jones, Jossa “Jossie” Nancy Elizabeth, John Tyler “JT”, and Carl Leroy.  Three of these children would serve in the U.S. Army in World War 2, and Carl in particular would see significant action near Pearl Harbor and in the engineers of Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe (recounted in a live interview with my Uncle Carl here). 

 

Stewart (son of Pap and author of this site): Somewhere in this time period he bought and owned a Model-T Ford, colorfully recounted in Dad’s story “Grandpa’s Last Drive”.

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Edna (b. 1921): I guess my earliest memory of Grandpa was before we moved to Atlanta.  It broke my heart to move away from them and the house at Webb Gin House Rd.  Grandpa made an oversize swing and it was heavy built and we'd swing hard and swing high.  One of my first and fondest memories was being there and doing things Mama and Daddy wouldn't let us do.

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He'd walk with us to the field with him and get roasting ears of corn for Grandma to cook. 

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I remember him having a Colt 45 (revolver).  People had guns then because people would come and steal hens from the chicken pen/house.  I don't know if he'd shoot a person, but he'd shoot up in the air.  He'd hear something outside, and he'd say "I think so-and-so is trying to break into my hen house.  And he'd go outside and shoot that gun straight out.  Everybody knew to leave him alone.  He had that and he had a shotgun.  It didn't scare grandpa to shoot that gun.  

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Hay-gathering time was fun because they'd let me ride on the wagon after they got the wagon loaded with hay.  Grandpa would let me ride on the back, but said "Now don't move off where you are and fall off.  You stay where I put you".  He put me up about middle ways in the hay.  That was fun.  

 

My grandparents had lots of time, unlike people today, and they spent lots of time with me, cooking, sewing, quilting.  Quilts were made out of whatever kind of scrap material that we had.   

He was also a handyman.  Someone had a walking cane that he whittled one time that had a reflector on it.  He made toys and stuff.  He'd go to the store and he'd get peanut butter sticks for me, JT, and Carl.  He also had an apple cider machine out in back of the house, and he'd have us wash the apples and he'd put them through the machine and make Apple Cider. (Note from author: In 17th and 18th centuries apples were more likely to end up cider than pie filling.  Cider was often times the replacement for coffee, tea, beer, juice, and even water).

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Pap:  A cider press, I remember it on the farm. Mom and Dad never made cider that I remember. The cider press deteriorated and was thrown out.

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Edna: He had a pit dug with steps that went down in it, store the apple cider in fruit jars, and he'd have me bring those jugs down the steps into that pit saying "now don't you fall coming down those steps".  That pit was right deep and it was cool enough to keep the cider good and when he'd kill the hogs he'd have Grandma fry and can it in half-gallon jars and keep it down there in that pit. 

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Pap: I remember the pit.  It functioned as a root-cellar and it had collapsed when we moved to the farm in 1937, we never used it.  I stepped in it a couple of times.  I always thought it was snaky.

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Edna: I remember my Grandmother Etha Mae, she died when I was 6 years old.  We lived in East Atlanta on Florida Ave. They called Daddy out several days before she passed away.  Daddy was a laundryman and he could get off if he needed to. So he went on out there (to the house on Web Ginn House Road) and left me, Hollis (2 years older than me) and Mildred with Mama.  

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I think we had a car and Daddy must have gone there in the car. And then my uncles JT and Carl, his two baby brothers lived at home, me and Mama didn't go out there until she passed away for the service and everything.  I remember how bad the weather was.  Ice was deep.  

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Pap: I was told by Hollis that Uncle Clyde Williams came to Atlanta for Mom, Hollis, Edna and Mildred, 

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Edna: She was a heavy built woman and she'd always cook for us. And you always knew you were going to get tea cakes.  She had a big cabinet with drawers, and if you were there and she went to the drawer you always knew you were going to get tea cakes (cookies we'd call them now).  But she made them and kept them in that drawer in a thick cloth sack, because there wasn't such thing as refrigeration in those days.

She was a sweet person and a good grandmother, I was the oldest and she sort of petted me. She was faithful to her church (Yellow River Baptist).  Grandpa was faithful to attend too, but he never joined that I know of.  

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Pap:  Webb Gin House Road runs east-to-west.  The big house sat about a hundred yards east of the present-day intersection of Webb Gin House Road and Ronald Reagan Parkway.  The big house was originally a three-room house with a fireplace that was modified to relocate the fireplace, and to add another fireplace and other rooms and two porches.  John Tyler later built a smaller house about a hundred feet west of the big house for his oldest son Thomas Kelly “TK” and his new wife Sytha “Sythy” Amanda Brownlee later used to house sharecroppers.  A third house was built about ¼ mile down the farm road between the big house and the field for Uncle John Blankenship (WW1 veteran) and Aunt Jessie, Uncle Carl Wilkerson and Aunt Lessie, and the rest of the time sharecroppers or to store fertilizer or grain.

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Pap: My earliest memories of my Grandpa Ewing was visiting Webb Gin House when we lived at Grandpa Brownlee’s farm.  He was a farmer, busy, and didn’t pay too much attention to children. 

 

I got the story thru Mama that due to the depression, Daddy (Thomas Kelly Ewing) was worried about his job and Mama wanted to move back, so they first moved to Webb Gin House, then to Grandpa Brownlee’s farm (see details in the story of Thomas Kelly Ewing). 

 

Grandpa (John Tyler Ewing) may have had a heart problem before they moved back from Atlanta because he was getting to the point that he couldn’t run the farm.  And then when Grandpa was living in the little house on Webb Gin House Road and he was plowing in the garden with a mule and he had a heatstroke and Doctor Kelly told him not to let him do that anymore, and so after that he didn’t.  So, in 1937 Daddy (Thomas Kelly Ewing) came and took over the farm.  Besides that, Mama was mad at her Daddy because he remarried right after her grandma died. 

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So we moved back to Webb Gin House Road in 1937 (when I was 7), and I got to know him personally.  I then knew him then as a retired farmer of 69 years old who had moved into the house that he first built for his son and my daddy Thomas Kelly.  He moved there with his second wife Sofronia (“Fronie”).  I would go over from the big house to his small one and we’d sit on the porch and talk, and sometimes he would still come to the fields and work, perhaps dipping fertilizer and pouring it into the hopper for whoever was driving.  He maintained his own vegetable garden with a hoe and rake, sometimes using a mule to plow.  As time went on he got to know me better and he once built me a toy “flutter” mill on the spring branch, damming up the branch, running water over a paddle wheel to turn a pully that I could use to operate little things.  He made it out of scrap wood as a little toy, but he went through the trouble to go down to the creek and set all this up for me, and I never forgot that.  I played with that thing a lot, but I think a big rain came and washed it away. 

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Later after I got a little older and I would occasionally play cow-pasture baseball, I didn’t have a bat.  So I told grandpa what I wanted and he looked at one, and then he went out and found a good piece of hickory wood that you’d normally burn in the fireplace and using a draw-knife, a wood rasp, and pieces of broken glass, he fashioned me a baseball bat.  In the end he used a little sandpaper on the end.  It was a couple of inches longer than a normal bat, and it was heavy because it was hickory.  I’d take the bat to school and the older boys would want to borrow it because it was so heavy.  I played a lot of ball with that bat.  In the city they called it sandlot baseball.  In the country we called it cow pasture ball because the pasture was ideal for a game provided you watched where you stepped.

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I never knew his first wife because she died before I was born, so his second wife Miss. Fronie was my grandmother, who he married in 1931 when he was 63. 

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After she died, he moved into the big house in the front bedroom (around 1943). I was sleeping in the back bedroom at the time.  Mama wanted to give the back bedroom to the girls Melba and Delores), so I had the option of sleeping in the hall or sleeping with grandpa, so I slept with him for a couple of years.  He had a feather topper on his mattress that was really soft, and the pillows were made of feathers. You could take it all outside in the warm sun and it would fluff up. 

 

Edna: I remember when Grandma (Etha Mae) died, Aunt Josse came and stayed with him because she was the youngest girl. I'd come and stay with them for two weeks at the time and I remember he'd tell Josse "We need to take Edna to Lawrenceville and buy her something".  Well, I remember they bought me a straw hat that had little balls all around it.  But grandpa was a person with his own way of doing things and he wanted them carried out.  And we lived there until he got married to Miss Fronie again.  

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The porch on the big house at Webb Gin House road went around the back, L-shaped.  He became disabled with a heart problem and they called Daddy back to run the farm. 

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He'd set on the back porch with a pipe since he had quit working on the farm with doctors’ orders.  J.T and Carl would work on the farm some then.  Grandpa was kind of hard to make happy about the farm.  When JT and Carl plowed the cotton the wrong way Grandpa would sit on the porch and fuss, and he'd come and complain to everyone that JT and Carl did it wrong.  He was hard to please.  He wanted it done like he did it.  They were just young boys and they just kind of found their own way.  He was a good grandfather, but he wanted it done his way. He'd often complain that people had made a mess out of plowing.
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Melba (b. 1936): I remember getting to know Grandpa when I was about 9 years old, about the time mom broke her leg and was in the hospital a lot and I was the oldest girl at home.  I’d have to do a lot of the cooking and he would sit next to the stove wood box and keep the fire going so I could cook.  I was so small I'd have to stand on a stool to do so and he would watch me to make sure I didn't fall.  I would get the vegetables in the garden and he would help her get the vegetables ready and prepared to be cooked the next morning.  He’d help string beans and snap them and prep the veggies.  In fact, he taught me a lot about gardening and cooking.  

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I spend a lot of time around the house because I couldn't run and play like the others because of my knees.  So I would end up doing a lot of house cleaning and chores.  I would go in his room some times to clean his room and would sit in his rocker and he’d tell me stories like when he was young he and his friends would turn out the horses to pasture and then for fun would run them and would have to put them away early because they’d been run to much.

I remember Miss Fronie very well.  I’d go to visit with her, and Mama said not too tell her I was hungry, but she would offer teacakes or biscuits anyway.  Deloris and I would punch holes in the biscuits and put syrup in it.  

 

She collected bottles and spoons and such for me and Deloris to use as toys.  They’d play on the back porch of the little house and get their toys out and play.  When she died, they had the toys in the hall and some cousins found the box of toys and broke them, throwing them and using them for target practice.  It broke our hearts that those were gone.  

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Deloris (b. 1939): My earliest memories of Grandpa Ewing around 1942 or 43 when I was 3 or 4 years old.

After grandpa had given up the big house, he and Miss Fronie (she was the only grandmother that Thomas (Pap), Melba, and Deloris knew, as Etha Mae passed in 1927) and lived in the white house.

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I remember Ms. Fronie liked for me to come and stay with her and Grandpa.  Miss Fronie would go to the back porch and yell yoo-hoo!  Mama would do the same from her house, and then Miss. Fronie would say send Deloris over I have something to show her, so Mama would walk her to the edge of the yard to a path that went to the small house.  Miss. Fronie once made me a dress made from her own dress. 

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Edna: I married in 1938 and moved out before getting to know her much.  She was good to Melba and Deloris a lot better.  When I visited  I'd ask who she was making something for (a dress or something) and she'd say "who you think I'm making it for?".  She made lots of things for Melba and Deloris because they lived right there.  She couldn't do that for all her grandchildren but she did it for them.  

 

Mama was glad for Grandpa and Miss Fronie to get married because he'd been living with us. Mama would make something for dinner that we didn't like and we'd ask her "Mama, why'd you make that", and she'd say "Listen, if you don't want to eat it, OK, but I made it for your Grandpa".  You see he just about lived on home-made hot syrup, biscuits, and butter, and he'd pour the syrup out in the plate and put that butter in and stirred it with that hot syrup until it melted and he'd eat it with a hot biscuit.  So don't tell me that it wasn't healthy because he lived to ninety-two.  Mama made that and she made the kind of Jelly he liked.  He'd have us get fruit off the ground and throw out the bad ones for making Jelly. 

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Melba: I remember Grandpa making stuff for us, whittling toys out of wood.  He made flips which was another name for a slingshot.  He also made tables and chairs for me and Deloris to play with.  Then Fronie made dolls from socks by stuffing them and sewing them together.  She also made balls from socks and rolled up twine.

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He carved walking canes/sticks and he’d walk with me and Deloris down to the field to take water to the men in the field.  He taught me the difference in all the tools, how to use them, take care of them, sharpen them and such. 

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Deloris: If I needed a playhouse or furniture to go in it or something, grandpa would go get some scrap wood and maybe make me something to put my dishes in, or a table or something for my playhouse.  One Christmas I got a little broom from Mama (probably cost 10 or 20-cent), a doll, and grandpa made cradles for me and Melba.  Another year for Christmas he made a doll bed for each of us 

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One of my jobs was to gather the eggs, and when a hen was setting on an egg to hatch it, mama said reach under the hen and get the egg.  To keep from getting bit or pecked I would ask grandpa to get the egg and he would quietly do that for me.

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Grandpa had a goat on the farm. That goat would chase me all over and butt me down.  Pap would stand back and die laughing until Mama would make Pap get the goat off me and lock it up. 

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Pap: Actually it was my goat.  I don't remember where I got it or how I got rid of it - it was a Billy and it was a nuisance.

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Deloris: Pap likes to tell the tractor story.  Anytime he went out of the house to do something, mama would send me or Melba with him places so she wasn’t bothered with us. 

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One day I was chasing Pap (he had something of mine), we flew into the house and Melba had just cleaned the house and we came running all through the house in their field shoes.  I had jumped on a quilt stack on a table in my field shoes.  Pap also jumped on top behind me.  All 15-20 quilts fell in the floor, and Melba was crying that the house was messed up.  Sure enough older sister Mildred came in to find the house a mess. 

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Melba and I weren’t taught how to milk a cow for fear that the cow would go dry, so much of this type of work was left to Pap or some of the older ones.

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Grandpa was quiet and unassuming, and loved to talk and tell old stories, would do anything asked.  But he almost never laughed.  He often smoked a pipe, and his room had a constant odor of tobacco smoke.  Melba would often mop with pine sol or whatever she could to get the pipe odor down, but it was hard. 

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If Grandpa saw that mama needed help in the garden, he would go out and holler “Sythy is there anything I can help you to do", and she might give him something to do.  He would sometimes help Gather beans, and other crops.  Sometimes he would help with indoor work, such as pealing apples to dry, or shelling peas, or preparing food for the cannery in Snellville, but most of the time he’d just watch.

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Grandpa at the Webb Gin House place, they would peel the apple to dry them on the tin building (horse barn) and one of mama’s chicken houses (they both had tin roofs), and he would hold the ladder while I took the sacks of washed apples and spread them out on the tin roof on bedspreads or cloths to dry.  I had to do this day after day.  It would sometimes take as long as 7 or 8 days in a row, hopefully without rain or they had to be gathered.  After, they would be put in gallon glass jugs to keep through the winter and use to make moon-shaped fried apple pies.  They might last over one season unless frozen and then she said that freezing ruined the taste. 

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Melba: We had Feed Sack dresses.  Back in our day, sacks used to buy feed, flour, and other things would often be printed with dress patterns so the sacks could be used to make clothing.  It was printed in a nice way so the resulting clothes would look good.  I remember Mama laundered and folded them and put them on the shelf for future use.  Sometimes if she was trying to make a dress she'd send a sample with Daddy to the feed store to match it when he went for feed.  And as they gathered enough matching patterns, Mama and Miss Fronie would make for them and the girls, and would sometimes make aprons out of the odd sacks.  If they got a lot of white sacks, they would bleach them and try to make sheets for the beds (but they were rough) or linings for quilts.  I remember wearing them until High School when I finally got some store-bought clothes.  Some coats, bonnets and hats made from men’s old suits.  They would also make doilies, table cloths, dish towels, curtains, and other things.  My first set of kitchen curtains  in her first house after my husband Bill got out of the service was made from feed sacks.

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Edna: I remember flour sack dresses.  Mama was a seamstress from the word go.  Dresses and curtains and anything else was made out of flour and seed sacks.  They'd put patterns and designs on these sacks so the material could be recycled into clothes and things.  I remember chicken feed sacks and I'd run to see the sacks to pick out a dress pattern I wanted Mama to make, and I'd tell her about it and she'd make it when she could.

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Deloris: I remember Miss Fronie dying and her being brought back to the little house and everyone sitting up with her.  Daddy got me ready and we walked across the path and field to the house.  At 3 pm all the lights were out except for one light hanging above the casket.  We walked in and Grandpa (John Tyler) clapped his hands and opened his arms for me to join him (he always called me “Doodle”). 

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Grandpa then moved into a front bedroom in the big white house and the small house was used for sharecroppers.  Pap slept in the same room with him.  But as me and Melba got older, grandpa was moved to the back bedroom.  Grandpa had his own back porch and he loved to sit on it. 

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In the summertime Grandpa did no work at that point in his life.  He once sat down (people sometimes said he had a heart issue and wasn’t supposed to do anything).  Pap ran the tractor and combine to harvest grain for bread and fodder.  When they were gathering the wheat, Pap had to have someone to sit on the combine to hold the burlap bag.  That was a fun thing for me, and I could get my friends to join me riding the combine, each with a burlap bag for wheat.  Me, my friends and probably Brenda (oldest daughter of Hollis and Ruth) would sit on the wheat and grandpa would hit the lever to make a slide to slide down.  Then we would run to catch up with the combine all the way home.

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He often acted like a weatherman “a storm’s coming from the west and we’re going to get rain in a few min”.  Then he’d sit in his rocker watching the storm.

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He’d sit on the front porch on the big house in his rocker and watch people go down the dirt road and then come in for dinner and tell about everyone who passed by and waved that day. 

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At both houses, grandpa usually came out on the porches or sitting room when they had company.  Otherwise he’d stay in his room with his pipe, listen to the 12 o’clock news on the radio

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He did go to church on occasion.  And on Sunday if the preachers from Friendship Primitive Baptist Church came in for lunch (sometimes Uncle Crawford Moore, Grandma Brownlee’s brother and Uncle Oscar Moore), they would have them eat first with the adults, and often grandpa would wait and eat with the children later after the preachers left.  This happened more often later after 1954 at the little brown house on GA Hwy 124. 

 

Pap: My uncles Sam and Carl joined the army during World War 2, and my grandpa would get letters from them overseas.  He didn’t write, and Mama would tell me to go write a letter to them for grandpa.  So, I’d go tell him, and I’d start writing, and he’d say tell them this and that, and then at the end he’d sign it. 

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When I was in high school, I took agriculture in the FFA program (Future Farmers of America), I rented some land across the road from our farm (10 or 12 acres), and he could sit on the front porch and see it.  I prepared the land in the spring, and he came out and said, “you’ve got those rows too close together”.  I said “grandpa, I know they’re closer than we usually do it, but I’m trying something I learned in school”.  He said “well you can’t learn much about farming in school.  You got to learn it working on the farm”.  So I sent the order off to Ohio for the seed, a hybrid corn, and I planted it in rows closer than normal, so I had probably 1/3 more plants per acre than the normal field that size.  And he came out to the field and said, “you’re not going to make any corn there, it’s just going to shoot and miss”.  I fertilized it real heavy and got a lot of good rain that season, and it turned out that I made more corn per acre that year than anyone in the county had known about.  Grandpa was astounded that the corn had done that good because he had never used hybrid corn, planting that close, and fertilizing that way.  But I got lucky from having the right kind of rain that year.

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After World War 2, row crops gradually gave way to more grain, oats mostly for work animals, and wheat for bread.

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He was still living on the farm when I left to go live with Mildred and Winfred, and then joined the Air Force.  When I game home to visit he was usually in his room but would come out when I arrived to speak with me every time.

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When Steve (Pap's first son) was born and we came home with him from Lake Charles, he’d come out and say, “I want to see that baby boy”.  So he sit down and held him a little bit, and then he’d get up and say “that’s a fine boy” and go back to his room.  That’s the way he was, he stayed in his room most of the time.

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In 1954, his oldest son Thomas Kelly decided to sell the farm and move to land purchased from the Moon family, and a house built by Sterling Moore.  At the house on 124 he has his own separate room on the back with his own porch and private entrance.  And he lived there until he got sick and died. 

 

Deloris: At the house on Hwy 124 Grandpa adjusted well.  He had his own room with his own porch and his own outside door, and even had a potbelly stove.  He’d go on the back porch (planned with his room having a porch).  His shaving cabinet was on the back porch over a sink where he did his bathing and shaving.  When he was called to meals he went to that sink and then came in the other door for meals.  I remember for breakfast he always had 2 of mama’s biscuits with butter and sorghum syrup and drank coffee from a saucer. 

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At the Webb Gin House farm, there was 3 or 4 of the 9 siblings that would come get him and take him to stay with them over a weekend.  Lessie, sometimes Ida, Jossie, Jessie, JT, occasionally Sam.  By the time we were at the house on Hwy 124, only Jossie and JT would offer to pick him up for the weekend.  But by that time it was harder for him to move around and quite often he’d not feel up to it and suggest they just come by to visit him. 

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Melba:  My oldest son Bobby remembered his old tobacco sacks and pouring tobacco into his pipe and making a mess, and he’d save those sacks for Bob and Berry to play with.  Then he’d empty out his pipe into his spittoon and me and Deloris had the job of cleaning it out.

Daddy was a notary public, and would notarize warrants, marriages, and other things, so people were always stopping by.  My sons Bobby and Barry saw a lot of that from 1963 to 1967 when I was working a lot. 

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Deloris: Grandpa got in the habit of having a “Toddy” every night using “white lightening” (moonshine).  Folks in the woods would make it and get caught, have their stills destroyed and any that was bottled or jarred was confiscated by the Sheriff.  Sometimes Grandpa would get it from the sheriff using a prescription from Dr. Williams in Lawrenceville.  On rare occasion late in Grandpa’s life, Daddy would obtain a prescription from Dr. Williams and then take it to the Sheriff’s office to get it for him.

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I remember when he passed away, they brought him back to the house on 124, and in those days someone had to sit up fully awake with him (called a "wake"), so I remember my husband Jim and I sat up with him all night.