by Jac Chambliss At Age 99
posted July 2, 2009
I was born Oct. 21, 1910 on Bluff View in Chattanooga. Because I was seen as an ailing child, about six months later I was moved by my young parents to a house on East Brow Road on Lookout Mountain, where I grew up.
I was the first of six children . . four boys and two girls.
A family friend took a picture of me standing in the front yard when I was about four years old.
There was no running water in the house, or indoor plumbing, though we did have a cistern to hold water.
We also had an outhouse.
There was no telephone, no furnace and no electricity. Our only heat was from a fireplace burning coal or wood, and the only lights were lanterns and lamps or candles.
Our cooking was done on an iron stove that burned coal.
We had an icebox to keep things cool . . and the melting of the ice in the box ran through a pipe to the outside of the house.
In winter we had to stand in front of the fireplace with our pajamas on until they were warm, then run and jump into bed and pull up the covers.
We ate at a table in the dining room where each of us had a seat and where our father always asked the blessing before we started. He sat at one end of the table and our mother on the other end.
Colored servants worked in the kitchen and laundry.
There was no radio . . no TV . . no cell phones.
The most important room in many ways was the library, where there were bookshelves full of wonderful books. Our father used to read to us and he would get us to take part in the reading of such things as plays by Shakespeare.
We memorized poems, looked at illustrations in the books. Mother played the piano, and our father read us poems and stories . . and as we grew older we read to ourselves.
We had two cows and each of us boys had to learn how to milk cows.
We had horses . . but no automobile.
The road that ran past our house was unpaved.
A streetcar track was west of our house through the woods about 200 or 300 feet away and on it a streetcar ran all the way from the city of Chattanooga out to St. Elmo then up by the winding track to the top of the mountain and finally stopped at the top of the Incline. It took about 40 minutes to make the trip from the top of the Incline back down into town . . and vice versa.
The Incline which ran straight up the mountain was a cable car and to get down to St. Elmo to come up it took about eight minutes. People who went to high school or the private schools in town would have to ride the Incline down and then ride a streetcar to where they were going.
Only a few hundred people lived on the mountain at that time. And there were not many houses. If we needed a doctor, we were not taken to the doctor but the doctor came by the house.
We had a garden in which we grew all kinds of vegetables . . corn, okra, asparagus, green beans, lettuce, tomatoes and onions. We also had grapes and I particularly remember that we had gooseberry bushes. When we wanted ice cream, we would have to make it ourselves. We would put the ingredients in an ice cream freezer where you turn the handle, and where you had ice around the container and you put salt on the ice to make it melt.
Many people raised pigs so as to have ham, had chickens to have eggs and also to eat, kippered herring, and fruits such as watermelons, peaches, grapes . . and we had cakes that were homemade.
We children went barefoot in summer.
On Sundays we would walk to the little Presbyterian Church about 100 yards through the woods from our house and adjoining the school. We all went to school at that schoolhouse which had been built about 1902.
On the summertime weekends, our father would occasionally hitch a horse to the wagon and the whole family would get in the wagon and he would drive us about six miles on top of the mountain to Lula Lake, where we would spend the day playing in the stream there which was located by the railroad that went up and down the mountain to Durham, where there was a coal mine.
Our father acquired a small farm area where the Lookout Mountain Golf Club is now located when I was about eight or ten years old. We had a colored man who worked for us named Charlie Dean, and he and my father tried farming back there. I would go there with Charlie Dean and he taught me how to plow and harrow. In the mid 1920s that land was acquired when Fairland Subdivision was created by the Carter family, and when the Lookout Mountain Hotel was built.
I had a girl’s bicycle secondhand which I rode around the mountain.
When I was about four or five years old I began going to kindergarten at the Gaston Raoul house on the West Brow across the top of the mountain from us. It was then that William Raoul and I became friends . . and he remained a close friend of mine until his death about 80 years later.
Chief Bill Stoner was the chief of the mountain police. He and his wife had come here from Canada in the early part of the century and he was the head bellman at the Lookout Mountain Hotel that was on the hill at the top of the Incline . . that burned down. On one occasion one of my brothers started a fire in the hay in our barn . . and Chief Stoner came down with the fire engine and tried to put it out but not successfully.
When I was still a small boy we had a cow that was having a problem delivering a calf . . and so my father sent for Uncle Manuel, a colored man, who rode up to our place on a horse and helped the cow deliver the calf.
The most colorful black man on the mountain for a long time was called Columbus, who thought he was a train. He would go up and down the mountain road like a train, sometimes backing up . . and blowing his whistle to let everybody know that he was a train.
The mountain did not become “modernized” until in the 1930s and ‘40s. It was then that we got the roads paved, and the Ochs Highway took the place of the old Johnson Pike, while the Whiteside Pike became our principal road up the mountain.
I remember how on New Year’s Eve at midnight we would hear all the whistles in all the factories in the Chattanooga area blowing . . and it was the signal that the New Year had begun.
All through the year, though, as we lay in our beds at night we could hear the sound of the trains coming up from the West Valley . . and the throbbing sound of the Incline operation.
And at the Lookout Mountain Club, near the Raoul house, they would have dances on Saturday night, and we would hear the music of the dance band until it ended at midnight, when they always ended it by playing “3 O'clock In the Morning”!
October, 2009, I will begin my 100th year.
Best of all, we were blessed with a strong sense of family security.
And I’m glad that I lived when I did . . rather than in this present world of “make believe”!
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