Memories of South Sherburne and Bethel

Left to right are Lena, Siebel, Imogene and Audrey next to the truck that helped make a decent living for the William’s family in the late 1930s.

In the fall of 1932, Dr. Bellamy rode his horse out to the home of Emery and Lena Russell Perry Williams, where he delivered a baby girl on the eleventh day of November.

For the first seven years of her life, Audrey Love Williams lived in the little farm house where she was born but the family moved when she was in the second grade.

“I was born in a clapboard house on what was known then as the Barbee hollow farm, just off highway 11 in the northern section of Bethel. Dr. Bellamy delivered me and he also delivered my sisters Imogene and Siebel. There were two houses on that farm and papaw Earnest and mamaw Maggie Williams lived in one and we lived in the other,” Audrey recalled. “We raised chickens and bartered with eggs, cream and milk, we had cows and sheep too. Mother canned from her garden, and daddy killed a hog for us to have food in the winter and hunted in the winter. Mother made all our clothes. I never learned to make clothes, but I did learn to quilt on my own,” Audrey said.

“When I was in the second grade at Bethel, daddy moved us to a farm that was owned by Summers Day and daddy became a sharecropper. The Day farm was situated on the banks of the Licking River which was on the Bath County side of the Sherburne Bridge and known as South Sherburne to the locals. Daddy tried to make a living as a sharecropper for a good two years, but he was just barely making ends meet,” Audrey said.

“After talking to Mr. Day about not being able to make a living from farming on shares, Mr. Day told daddy he should see about getting a loan to buy a farm that was for sale nearby. Daddy went to see Marion Rhodes, who was the president of the Peoples Bank at the time and he loaned him 3,000 dollars to buy what we called the John House home and five acres of farm land.

Dad plowed the hillside with a horse and raised tobacco for three years to pay off the loan. He also bought an old truck that he could haul sheep and cattle and tobacco to the warehouse for himself and others and he began to make a decent living. My dad offered to pay interest on the loan but Mr. Rhodes told him if he would help someone else in need he wouldn’t need to pay any interest. Sometime later my father’s uncle, Lucien Boyd, who was a brother to grandma Maggie, came down from Ohio and needed 500 dollars to start a restaurant. And that’s how Boyd’s little restaurant in Owingsville was born,” Audrey said.

“When we bought the House farm, some of our neighbors were Minnie and Elgin Buckler, Dorothy Daily, Evelyn and Summers Day. Evelyn was an Evans, and I think it was her family that ran the store that sat on the corner of East Fork road, right next to the bridge. Bill Watkins and his brother lived on up the road towards Bethel, back behind where the Mt. Gilead Cemetery is now. At that time, there were a few houses back that road,” Audrey recalled.

Audrey’s great grandfather, George Perry and her grandmother, Jane Stewart Perry lived in the old brick house that was in South Sherburne and she remembers that at one time the bottom part of the brick building was used as a saloon and a second-hand furniture store. The late, Dorothy Williams Robertson bought the red brick and moved it to Bethel several years ago and it still stands today.

Across the bridge on the Fleming County side of the river, Audrey remembers when Eli Roberts and his wife Mary operated the grocery store.

“Eli’s wife, Mary, was a sister to Mrs. McClure, when the McClure’s retired Eli took over the store, but later moved to Sharpsburg to open Roberts Grocery, then Cliff Stephens, Jane Adams father, ran the store, they lived upstairs, then George Stephens ran the store. In later years the Sherburne store was owned and operated by Lawrence and Carolyn Jones,” Audrey said.

Audrey Love Williams graduated from Bethel High School in 1952 along with her classmates and close friends, Lucy Williams, J.H. Dicken, Ann Myers, E.B. Stewart and Wilma Vice. After graduation, she entered nursing school at Good Samaritan Hospital and became a registered nurse. She met her first husband, Charles Burgin at Sherburne Christian Church and the couple married in 1956 and their son Robert was born three years later.

In later years Audrey married Irvin Lee Whitton and moved to Fleming County.

Although life as a sharecropper’s daughter and growing up on a farm was often a difficult life, Audrey has many fond memories of growing up in the tiny hamlet of South Sherburne.