Thomas Kelly Ewing, my grandfather

born Aug 1896, Gwinnett County GA

by Stewart Ewing, from interviews with my father Thomas "Pap" Ewing

​

GOING “HOME”

My earliest memory of my Grandfather (I called him Grandpa) was in 1967, when I was only seven years old.  My Father, Mother, Brother and I had been living at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii since 1963 as my father was in the Air Force since the Korean War era. 

 

It was time for Dad to rotate from Hawaii back stateside in 1967.  He had an assignment at Scott AFB, but he wanted to stay and complete his college degree at Chaminade College, a Catholic college in Honolulu.  The colonel in charge at Scott AFB said that he wanted Dad to get there as soon as possible, that he had a job for him to do and didn’t care about education.  So, Dad went back to the education office and told them that he wouldn’t be able to complete his degree in Hawaii, that the guy at Scott AFB wouldn’t approve him to remain any longer.  The guy in the education office thought for a minute and said, “Well, let’s just put in for you to go to school at Omaha”.  Dad said, “Well he won’t approve it”.  The guy said, “Well he won’t have a choice”.  Dad said, “What do you mean he won’t have a choice?”  The guy said, “If I put you in for this education program, he won’t have a say whether you go there or not.  This is approved through an education channel that he can’t touch. And when it’s approved by the education channel, the supervisor will have no option but to let you go.”  Dad thought a moment and said, “OK, let’s do it.”  Later, that colonel called up Dad’s boss in Hawaii and chewed him out and said “I told you I wanted him here!”  Dad’s boss said, “I didn’t have anything to say about it.  And you don’t have anything to say about it, Colonel.”  The colonel said, “Well I’ll tell you one thing, you aren’t getting a replacement there in Hawaii until he reports here”.    Anyway, Dad went to Omaha with Mom, Steve, and I, to finish up his degree, graduating in 1968.  He as well as his niece Linda Lewis (Mildred and her Husband Winford’s daughter, and now Linda George), were the first in our family to earn college degrees. 

When he arrived in Scott AFB Headquarters to report for duty in 1968, the colonel that tried to stop him was in the process of transferring out.  Dad saw him in the hall, but never said a word to him and never heard from him again.  Colonel Thomson was taking his place, who would be instrumental later in helping Dad get to Georgia to be with his family. So, on the way back from Hawaii (before moving to Omaha) we decided to come “home”. 

 

I always heard Mom and Dad call Snellville and Stone Mountain “home”.  I always thought that odd because I had never experienced “home” being anything but a military base.  So, I remember having great anticipation about finding out what “home” really was as we traveled in an un-air-conditioned 1963 Chevrolet Biscayne across the desert southwest, across Texas, through the humid deep south, and finally into Georgia. 

​

THE BROWN HOUSE ON STATE ROAD 124

We finally arrived at the house of my Grandparents on State Road 124 just northeast of Snellville Georgia to visit with my Grandpa, Granny (Sytha Amanda Brownlee Ewing, often called “Sythy”), and any other relatives that happened to be around.  The dark brown wood-sided house sat elevated above the road about a hundred feet northeast of the present-day intersection of Ronald Reagan Pkwy and 124.  As of my writing there is a Starbucks coffee shop where the house once stood.  The LA Fitness behind the Starbucks was woods with an apple tree or two further back.  If memory serves, these apple trees yielded something called “Ewings” apples, a small hard green apple similar to a Granny Smith apple and suitable for cooking, yet very light yellow, crisp, and juicy when fully ripe.  I remember going back in those woods with my cousin Linda Lewis (now Linda George), and finding many of the fallen apples pecked by the chickens that roamed the yard.  I vaguely remember Grandpa leading me around with a basket or some other container (I was about 6 or 7) to find eggs that had been laid.  The way my Dad tells the story is that this “city kid” who had never been a country mile from a farm animal saw the chickens flocking around as we were hunting eggs, and in sheer terror I started throwing the eggs at the chickens.  Reportedly my grandfather got a good laugh about that.  For the record, I was not a city kid, but a military brat.  To that point, living on military bases was all I knew. 

 

While we were visiting, there was a need to go to town for something, so my father and I loaded up in my grandfather’s car and headed out.  It’s hard to imagine “Scenic Highway”, State Highway 124 between Snellville and Lawrenceville the way it was in 1967.  In those days it was a two-lane road, ditches on both sides, and an occasional house or farm, and truly “Scenic”.  Grace Baptist Church still stands just like it did back in 1967 just a few hundred yard south of the old house.  The change this Church has seen in the community and especially this section of highway is simply staggering and is really the last remaining artifact of that simpler time in “Scenic Highway’s” history.  As we neared town, a few small businesses heralded the approach to the intersection with U.S. 78, and the main crossroads of Snellville.  I remember granite rock buildings, a small gas station, and turning west on 78 toward Stone Mountain I remember a small grocery store on the right on top of a hill (there is a furniture store there now).  Going south on 78 there was the historic granite rock Snellville High School and the small and lovely Methodist Church on the right.  As we returned from Snellville northeast on 124, I remember my Aunt Edna’s house on the left (now Office Depot or some other store in a large shopping center), and just beyond the small white house that my Aunt Melba and cousins Bobby, Barry, and Ben (I called him Benji and he was a year younger than me). 

 

I’m not sure if it was the same trip or not, but I remember the whole family, aunts, uncles, and cousins all came to that old house on 124, and we had what amounted to a family reunion.  I remember little about it, except the older cousins got into a pine cone fight, and the younger cousins fought over this magical device inside the house that had a long tube attached to the TV that allowed you to change the channels from the next room, irritating whoever was watching it (Dad doesn’t remember it, but I bet my younger cousin Lyn Wilkinson might). 

​

GRANDPA’S STORY

My grandfather Thomas Kelly Ewing was born August 1896 near Norcross. GA where his father John Tyler Ewing and mother Ethie Nash Ewing were renting a farm.  There was a family named “Kelly” nearby and the Ewings got to know Dr. Kelly, and that’s where my grandpa’s middle name comes from.  The name “Kelly” stuck and many folks called him that or “TK”.  John Tyler Ewing (my Great Grandfather) was a sharecropper or rented farms until he bought a farm north of Snellville on what is now called Webb Gin House Road (more on that later).  Before he married Etha Mae Jefferson in December of 1890, he and his brother lived in the old Yellow River Post Office, still standing on Five Forks Trickum Road between Snellville and Lilburn, and on the National Register of Historic Places.  While living there he sharecropped on the Nash farm.

 

At some point the family then moved from Norcross to the south of Snellville, to the Hannah farm where my Great Uncle Carl was born (youngest brother to my grandpa).  In 1917 my Great Grandfather John Tyler bought the farm on Webb Gin House Road and moved there.  The farm was about 100 acres situated on the northeast corner of present-day Webb Gin House Road and Ronald Reagan Parkway.  Thomas Kelly was about 21 years old.  The farm didn’t have much cleared land at that time, so John Tyler went to work clearing forest.  The same brother that had lived with him in the Yellow River Post Office all those years ago then lived in Atlanta and was running a wood yard for people in the city that had wood stoves.  John Tyler cleared the trees and cut the wood into cord-wood.  Then my grandfather Thomas Kelly hauled the wood in a 2-horse wagon to the train depot in Gloster (a community on the Yellow River close to where Reagan Pkwy now crosses it).  There he loaded it onto a rail-car for delivery to the brother in Atlanta.

​

KELLY, SYTHA, AND BUILDING A LIFE

Thomas Kelly and Sytha Brownlee were both attending Snellville school at that time, and then my grandfather quit school some time just before 1917.  He continued to court Sytha until they married.  My Great Grandfather (John Tyler) built another house on the farm on Webb Gin House for Thomas Kelly and Sytha once they got married. John Tyler lived in what they called the big house.  Then there was a third house for sharecroppers, guests, and renters.  The big house that everyone grew up in was originally a 3-room house with one chimney.  My Great-Grandfather built the big house around that original house using timber off the farm.  He then built the house for Thomas Kelly and Sytha further SW down the road (present-day entrance-ramp to Reagan Pkwy going NW).  His first child Hollis (b. 1919), third child Mildred (1923), and my Dad (1930) were born there.  The third house was in the field and was lived in by my Great Uncle John and Great Aunt Jessie Blankenship (John Blankenship had been gassed in WWI and never was able to keep his life together, would start things and never finish it, and was poor).  My Great Aunt Lessie and Uncle Carl Wilkerson also lived there for a time.  Later, the third house was used for sharecroppers, who would pay grandpa or my great-grandfather rent, plus the family would get a share of their crop, whatever it was.

Grandpa wanted his own farm.  He bought a farm over on High Point road from the Hutchins (distant relatives of the Brownlee family) and that’s where Edna was born (1921).  Then he lost the farm.  A deed was never made out, or at least has never been found since.  But he was to pay a certain amount each year until the farm was paid for.  He made two crops there (the first crop was so good he bought a Model T Ford), then he had another crop, and then somehow due to crop failure or something lost the farm and the Model-T, and moved back to Webb Gin House in early 1923. 

​

THE MOVE TO EAST ATLANTA AND THEN TO THE BROWNLEE FARM

Mildred was born at that time (1923) with her feet-turned backwards (called club footed).  The took her to Scottish Rite Hospital in Atlanta where she had multiple surgeries and treatments to straighten them.  In 1925, they moved to Atlanta in part to be closer to the hospital for Mildred’s treatments.  Also, my Grandmother Sytha, who didn’t want to live at the Webb Gin House farm.  She had lived on that property with her father (Larkin Brownlee) when she was a girl as sharecroppers.  And Sytha never liked the Webb Gin House property.   

 

When they then moved to Atlanta, my Grandfather worked for Mays Laundry driving a Model-T laundry truck (picking up and delivering).  My Great Uncle Sam moved to Atlanta and lived in that house with them for a while.  Hollis, Edna, and Mildred started school when they were living in Atlanta near present-day Kirkwood and East Atlanta Village.  Dad has the addresses of four different houses they lived in, and most may be standing.  But soon after the family moved back to the Webb Gin House farm where my Dad was born in 1930.  Sytha, still wanting to move away from the Webb Gin House farm, then said she wanted to move over to “Papa’s” (Larkin Brownlee).  So, after my Dad was born, they moved from the Webb Gin House farm to the smaller of two houses of Sytha’s father’s property (1931) on McGee Road near Highpoint Road a couple of miles due west of Snellville.  Grandpa Brownlee had a dairy and My Grandpa Ewing bought the dairy (small – run on the back porch and small barn).  While there, his fifth child Melba (1936) was born, and then Great-Grandma Brownlee died, and Grandpa Brownlee married again in less than 90 days.  All the family was mad at him and my Granny Sytha told my Grandpa, “I want to move, I’m not staying here”.   

​

BACK TO WEBB GIN HOUSE FARM

About that time, my Great-Grandfather John Tyler decided he wanted to quit farming, so my Grandpa Ewing bought the Webb Gin House farm, built a milking house and dairy barn, and moved the dairy there in 1937.  His youngest child Delores was born there in 1939.  Much of the time, the two smaller houses were occupied by sharecroppers, but the oldest child Hollis and his new wife Ruth (McCart Ewing) lived in one of them when they first married, giving birth to their first daughter (my cousin) Brenda in 1942 (actually born in a nearby clinic). 

 

My Grandpa ran the dairy for a few years and wanted my Dad to stay and help him run the dairy and Dad didn’t want to.  The dairy business is an 8-hour per day, 365-day per year operation, and the cows must be tended to.  My Grandfather ran it until the State Government introduced laws governing the processing of milk after WWII.  Many small dairies went out of business at that point.  Up until that point, my Dad had seen the farm operations go from mule and plow to tractors and mechanization, gradually evolving from row-cropping (cotton, peas, corn) to grain and a few beef cows. 

​

LEAVING THE FARM

After my Dad left the farm (first working for his brother-in-law Winford Lewis in his small grocery in Union City, and then joining the Air Force in Jan 1951), my Grandpa planted a wheat crop in 1950 which died because the moisture from a freeze pushed up the wheat and killed it.  Grandpa’s oldest son (my Uncle) Hollis ran a Gas Station in town, and my Grandpa visited him about that time and mentioned that he didn’t know what to do because he had lost his wheat crop.  So, in 1951 My Grandfather Thomas Kelly Ewing decided to go sell insurance and went to work for Coastal States Insurance.  He sold insurance to farmers on a route for about $375 (He sold and collected premiums on low-cost burial and other life insurance policies) until they forced him out due to his age.  Delores in High School worked in his office.  When the company forced him out, they hired two people to take his insurance route.  While selling insurance in 1953, he decided to sell the Webb Gin House farm, and they bought the land on State Road 124 from Dolph Moon.  The brown house was then built in 1954 by Granny’s first cousin, Sterling Moore. 

 

When TK sold the farm, the agreement was that the Ewing family could stay there until the house on 124 was built and the last crop gathered.  The buyer agreed to that but then started making additional demands, and once came into the house without knocking, scaring my granny.  My grandpa came home at lunch, and about that time the guy came up to the well to draw water.  Grandpa got his 38 revolver and told him to get off the property and don’t come back.  The man said something about being the owner, and that he could come and go any time he wanted to.  At that point TK emptied the pistol in the roof of the well shelter.  The man went to Lawrenceville and had a warrant sworn out on him.  Later that day TK was in Lawrenceville and the Sheriff there saw him and said “Kelly, what have you done?  I have a warrant for your arrest”.  So, they arrested him, and he was released on a signature bond.  He was later tried and had the best lawyer in Lawrenceville.  The defense basically amounted to self-defense and defending his home, and the case was easily won. 

 

The sale of land went through, and they moved into the house on GA Hwy 124 in Aug 1954.  The guy that bought the farm hooked up several appliances in the big house, not knowing that it was only wired for lighting and simple devices.  Possibly as a result of overload, the big house burned down in late 1954.  Then a A.B Matthews from Tucker Georgia bought the farm, built a lake on it (Lake Matthews), and run a small resort for a while.  It changed hands a couple of more times before eventually becoming the present-day neighborhood of Bright Water. 

​

My Missing Years

As I mentioned in the introduction, there are a number of years that I missed in the lives of TK and Sytha as I was living in Hawaii.  However, thanks to my cousin, and son of my Aunt Melba, Barry Ethridge, we have a narrative of what life was like at the house on GA Hwy 124.

​

Barry: Me and my older brother Bobby were lucky enough to spend many days with Granny and Granddaddy.

 

By the time we were old enough to be around Granddaddy was selling insurance. When he was on the road working we were there with Granny most of the time.

 

Granny many times had a quilting frame up in the main room.  We would love to play under it while the ladies worked around the quilt.  It was a fort or cave or just a nice cool place to play with our toy cars.  She had a rope style rug that made for a great place to pretend they were roads. We would take an old shoe box and cut a garage door in it to pretend we had a gas station.

 

Granny had a great green thumb. She would enlist us in helping out around the yard. We  cut grass. Trimmed the bushes. We helped out “whitewashing “ the trunks of the trees.  I think that was supposed to keep the bugs out of them? She had beautiful red roses that lined the sidewalk to the front door.  The edge of the woods had azalea bushes. She also had a pomegranate tree that we called “plum grannies”.

 

We would rake leaves and pine straw in the woods beside the house and use them to create forts. I remember having pine cone battles. Nothing hurts more than a hard green pine cone up side the head!  Granny kept chickens around the yard. We would get in trouble with her when we pretended to be riding horses and the chickens were cows we were trying to round up for a cattle drive.  One time she had a mean rooster she said it was OK for us to chase. We had homemade bow and arrows and we decided we were going to hunt down that rooster.  Now these were just a green limb or probably willow limb for the bow with a piece of twine for a string. The arrows were just semi-straight sticks.  That rooster couldn’t have been safer. We never got close to him and most of the “arrows” fell about 2 feet away if they went that far.  Even with all of that we had lots of fun.

 

Saturday afternoon was a big event as we would go and buy groceries with her and granddaddy at the big IGA market in Lawrenceville.  I remember Granny always got a “Tab” soda out of the machine.  The supermarket gave out horse racing game cards with your groceries. Then we would watch a TV show that night called “Lets go to the races”.  The game card would have the name of your horse for each race. We would all sit around and cheer for our horse.  I don’t remember what you would win if your horse won.   It was big excitement even if we never won anything.

 

Saturday night was also a big TV night if I remember right. They had a Zenith console tv with a Zenith “space command” remote control.  We watched Andy Griffith, Gomer Pyle and Petticoat Junction.  We also would watch Gunsmoke.

 

Granddaddy was also a Justice of the Peace. We used to spend the night sleeping on a pallet in the front room. We would sometimes wake up to some one that showed up to see him. Some times they were there to swear out a warrant for some “scalawag” as Granddaddy would call them.  Other times it was a couple looking to get married.  I always picture Granddaddy in a white shirt and tie with a straw hat but he would be in his robe and slippers when we would wake up.

 

Granny taught me to love vanilla ice cream with saltine crackers! If you have never tried it don’t laugh. Salt and sweet together!  She also introduced me to Oyster Stew with a grilled cheese sandwich and green olives on the side.  I wish I could tell you about the traditional southern cooking but that is not what I remember.   I remember having a bologna and cheese sandwich on white-bread for lunch.

 

We would sometimes take a trip to Calloway Gardens and once to Panama City beach with them.  Granddaddy had these plastic cards he would give out with his insurance company name on them. One side was a calendar and the other side had the counties in the state. We would play a game trying to see how many counties we could spot on the car tags we saw.  Granny would always try and sneak a cutting from the plants at Calloway and Granddaddy would tell her she was going to get us all arrested!  

​

TROUBLED WATERS

In 1969, Grandpa and Granny separated.  Grandpa moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the home of a mail-carrier in Lawrenceville.  At the time my Grandpa and Granny separated, Dad was stationed in Scott AFB Illinois.  Considering the family challenges Dad felt that he needed to be closer to home.  So, he went to his boss Colonel Thomson and got help obtaining a reassignment to Warner Robins Georgia (middle Georgia, south of Macon) to be nearer to the family.   

 

After losing his job at Coastal States Insurance, my grandpa then became a night watchman for a couple of companies and liked the second one best (I believe it was Wells Fargo, but I’m not sure).  He visited our home once when we lived on Robins Air Force Base, and again when we moved off base into the town of Warner Robins sometime around the spring or summer of 1971.  He died of complications from cancer and melanoma in April of 1972 after a long stay at Emory Hospital in Decatur, and a brief time at the Lawrenceville Hospital.

 

I remember after the separation, my granny moved to a small apartment on Flat Shoals Road in the Candler Park area south of Decatur Georgia just in sight of Interstate 20.  Two of her children and their families lived in the same apartment complex, Hollis and Ruth, and Melba and her husband Floyd.  For a brief time, Granny had a puppy for company, but it grew too large for her to manage and a new home was found for it.  It was at this time I first became familiar with Granny’s green thumb.  Behind that small apartment she managed to grow flowers and some vegetables, I guess using flowerpots, and when we visited there after she would often have fresh vegetables that she had grown.  Further, I remember the tea cakes she always baked, small butter cookies. 

 

I remember about three years later, we moved her back to Snellville, To the northern unit of a duplex at the intersection of North Road and Pine Road.  The duplex is still there with a large hardwood tree in the front yard.  I remember when that tree was a sapling.  I remember she had a small garden on the north side of the duplex.  It probably measured 30 ft by 20 ft, but by my measure she seemed to get 100 acres of crops out of it.  It seems every time we visited, she had a freshly harvested mess of turnip greens or mustard greens, or beans, or squash or melons, or tomatoes.  I don’t believe I ever saw a garden that small bear so much.  She lived there until her passing in July of 1995.  There is much I remember about her, and I’ve written a few short stories about her posted in the stories section of the ewingsofgwinnett.org site. 

 

The people of the Bright Water neighborhood paid tribute to the Webb Gin House farm and the families that lived there through the years, contacting my father and other families to obtain first-hand accounts of life in that area over the years.  These stories are published in the chapter insets of “The Bright Water Cookbook” entitled “Recipes and Remembrances”.  Besides containing a handful of my father’s stories (also published in the “Stories” section of the ewingsofgwinnett.org site), there is one poignant section simply entitled “Plants”.  In that section it mentions that years after the Ewings left the Webb Gin House farm there was still evidence of our presence:

​

Between the two Ewing houses on the road, a profusion of native roses, planted generations before, climbed wooden fences built to enclose horses.  From late January until March quince bushes blossomed, then the roses, jonquils, tiger lilies, and other Georgia natives flowered along Webb Gin House Road, in the pastures and along the lane from early spring ‘til fall.  Persimmon trees and wild plum trees lined the lane.  Blackberry vines and muscadines sprang up in the un-mowed fields giving ripe berries ready for picking.

 

And like the old farm at Webb Gin House Road, the family continues to bloom and bear fruit.