Celebrating Sharpsburg's Bicentennial “A Time Remembered”

Downtown Sharpsburg 1910

One of Sharpsburg’s prominent families in the 19th and 20th centuries was the Knight Family.

Two brothers were progressive businessmen who brought many improvements to town. Mr. Ollie Knight operated a grocery well into the 1940s and Rufus owned a mill on Montgomery Street.

Rufus also owned the local phone company, the electric generating plant and the town’s only indoor theater.

In later years, Rufus’ son Woodson wrote a short story about what it was like to be a young boy in a town like Sharpsburg during the 1920s.

When Woodson was a teenager his father sold his business interest in Sharpsburg and bought the Carlisle Milling Company and moved the family to Nicholas County. Woodson graduated from Carlisle in 1930 and from the University of Kentucky four years later with a major in journalism. He married Winston Byron from Owingsville. Woodson worked as a news reporter for newspapers in Nashville and Cincinnati before serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Following the war, he was a Lt. Commander in the Naval Reserve in Philadelphia while he worked as assistant editor of the Atlantic Refining Company magazine.

From 1965 until his retirement he was the vice-president of public relations and the editor of the company magazine for the L& N Railroad in Louisville. Woodson died in 1992.

In the coming weeks, we will be printing selections from Woodson’s book, A Time Remembered”.

For those who call Sharpsburg home, the narrative will strike many chords of familiarity.

Perhaps, after reading the stories, those who are not from this quaint little village, will understand why it remains in the hearts of so many people.

~~~~

Chapter One

The Town

Sharpsburg, barely in the Bluegrass Region of Central Kentucky and not too far from the hill country beyond Mt. Sterling, some twelve miles away, was a sleepy, peaceful and pleasant little town of 400 in the mid-1920s.

As the years fly by, the memories of it and its delightful details of life and living there, dim amidst the din of the dynamic 1980s.

In summer, the village always lay half asleep and hot under the scorching August sun. Often the air was humid and light southerly breezes served only to spread the pungent odor of freshly sprinkled oil, applied the day before to allay the dust of the unpaved street.

It was main street, almost solidly lined on both sides by venerable maples planted by those who settled there long after Moses Sharp became one of the two founders of the town.

Beneath the trees there was a sidewalk made of yard-square slabs of limestone quarried at Salt Lick, some twenty-five miles east.

Fully two-inches thick and smooth, many of the slabs had sunken or been raised out of kilter by winters freeze and the Maple’s ambitious roots.

There were two other streets. One led down a hill near the town square to the school that sat perched on a second hill, and then on up to Newtown, or Taterville, where dozens of houses, newer than the original homesteads, absorbed the searing summer sun, or shivered in the cold winds of winter.

The other was Back Street, rough, muddy in times of rain, or dusty, for no oil was sprayed there.

It was on Back Street that the African American people lived, some neat, clapboard houses, others in rough weather-beaten, antiqued houses that served to whimper only of tales of poverty and year-on-end want.

One of the citizens that lived on Back Street was a man I remember as Nance, he would plod along the rock slabs on Main Street, a basket held in each arm as he delivered groceries from my uncle Ollie Knight’s store.

And never could I forget some of the others, Aunt Liz, who lived with my family for nineteen years, a cook, laundress, house-cleaner and teacher of table manners to my sister and me. She was a lovely woman of utmost integrity and deep religion.

Note: Woodson and his family lived in a house that was located where the former home of Mrs. Roberta Shrout now stands.

And there was John Garrett, a born carpenter who could do more with a sharp hatchet on a piece of lumber than most men could do with a saw and chisel and whose talents extended to tending to my father’s vegetable garden.

Uncle John never worked for time. He lived in a room on Back Street, his nourishment often came from our kitchen.

Peck, the easy-going husband of Maud, who built his own home on a lot on Back Street that was just behind our house. Always, when someone would ask, “how are you Peck”, he would reply, “slow”.

Jess, the one-time farm hand who worked for my dad at the mill, had but one arm but could shovel coal or sand with the best of them and could be the second man on a team stacking wheat sacks and who always to my amazement, tie up a sack of seed or feed with his one hand.

JoAnn, who cooked for Sue (my aunt) and whose songs I can still hear as she sang them going about her chores in the kitchen.

There were so many things that bubble up to the surface in the memories of my mind.

A frog is not a pretty thing, but the frogs in the public pond, that willow-lined sea of mystery that fascinated at least one pre-teen boy, sang ever so prettily when summer darkness settled softly over the town.

A turtle is not a pretty thing either, but the golden-brown pieces that fried in the big, black, iron skillet on Sue’s stove were indeed things of beauty to a boy with a growing appetite.

Some say that a hound dog is not a pretty creature, but hounds make a beautiful sound when as a pack on the run, they chase the fleet-footed fox across the hills and down the hollows on a moonlit autumn night.

Many might shudder at the thought of a hog, or any other animal being killed, but when the heavy frosts came and the ice crusted the ponds and watering pools on nearby farms, it was hot killing time.

Witnessing the procedure of slaughtering a well-fattened swine and the rendering of it into succulent portions of delightful meat was an exciting event.

Such an undertaking demanded cold weather, for in those days on the farms of Kentucky there was no refrigeration to preserve the meat until much of it could be cured.

So warmly clad in high shoes, heavy black stockings pulled up to knicker-bottoms, over the long cotton underwear that was a standard article of apparel until the first warm days of spring, a pull-over sweater under a mackinaw, and a fur cap, I would watch with excitement this rural meat-producing procedure.

It was part of the undertaking that the farmer and his helpers, with the large slain hog hanging nearby, would have a wood fire crackling under the huge black iron kettle where chunks of fat would be rendered into lard.

Skilled hands wielding razor-sharp knives in record time would go to work and shortly there where hams and shoulders, backbone and country ribs, crackling, the makings of delicious sausage and buckets of lard.

Hog-killing time at Sharpsburg was not the only winter sport, heavy snowfall meant sleigh riding and cold weather would allow ice thick enough for skating to form on the public pond and other small bodies of water.

Every boy and a few girls too, had a sled.

The envy of most was the super-long Flexible Flyer that Elgin White and Waller Sharp owned.

Why five fellows could pile onto that one and the more weight, the faster it went.

One favorite place to go sledding was the sidewalk down the hill by cousin Rosa Dee Crockets home.

It led to the bottom of the school yard hill. It was narrow and there were trees between the slate slabs and the street and at the level end of the run, there was a steep bank to the left.

You could tumble safely to the fence that bordered the Crockets barn lot.

Another much used site was the Blount’s hill at the east end of town that was a steep, grassy field near the Peck home.

Then there were the exciting occasional winter evenings when Elgin White would hook up one of the family’s several horses to a sleigh and tow you and other kids on the sleds, sometimes all the way to Bethel and back.

There were other horse-drawn sleighs to be seen too, on Main Street and on the roads leading to farm homes nearby.

You could hear them approaching and leaving a destination by the small bells attached to the horse’s harness. It was a fetching sound on a cold winter day.

There were larger farm sleds pulled by two-horse teams, used mainly to transport farm produce or provide rides for families living out in the country-side.

Stay tuned next week for Chapter Two.