Harvest Resident Hattie Freeman Recalls A Century

by Claudia Johnson

This story was printed in honor of the 100th birthday of Hattie Freeman, a resident of Harvest, Ala., who contributed a column called Harvest News to Your Community Shopper, a weekly newspaper for which I covered news and community events in 1997-1998.

In 1898 the American flag had 44 stars. McKinley was the newly elected president. The Spanish-American War was fought and won, making Teddy Roosevelt a hero. A gold rush in the Klondike attracted hoards to Alaska, including the author of Call of the Wild Jack London. Miami Beach was first settled, and New York City finally incorporated.

Scientists discovered neon and radium. A precursor of the tape recorder was invented. The professional basketball league was formed, and the first chiropractic school opened.

H. G. Wells frightened readers with publication of science fiction classic War of the Worlds.

Writer Lewis Carrol and artist Aubrey Beardsley died, and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, author C. S. Lewis and composer George Gershwin were born. And on May 31, 1898, within the Jackson County, Ala., mountains near the Garth community, Hattie McFarlan Freeman, the baby of 10 children, was born in a house bullet scarred some three decades earlier during the Civil War.

Two of her sisters were married when she was born, and Hattie’s oldest niece was six months older than she.

“My mother was embarrassed that she’d had a baby after her own daughter,” said Hattie, whose parents married 1876.

Surrounded by somber faced siblings, parents, an uncle and infant nieces, Hattie can be seen in a traditional Victorian family portrait at around age two with the same smiling countenance that is still visible on her pleasant face.

Despite a house full of siblings, Hattie says, “It was lonely growing up. I played with dolls, played house. They always let me have all the cats I wanted.”

“I played with live lizards,” she laughed. “There was a creek that ran by the house. I’d catch two of those lizards and get me some thread and tie them together. I had me a team and here we’d go. Now I can’t stand to touch them.

She said she was free to roam the hills surrounding their farm where she mostly played alone.

“I had a deaf friend my mother kept for a few months when her mother died,” she said. “We had our own sign language, not like they have now – one we made up so we could communicate.”

Hattie attended school in a one-room log school house, learning the basics that would later help her receive formal training as a nurse, work in a school cafeteria, raise two successful children and explore the world through her love of books. It was there that she first read about Paul Revere’s ride and the Old North Church in Boston. Decades later, Hattie traveled to Boston for a dream-come-true tour of sites that had seemed worlds away from Garth.

“In my life I’ve walked, rode on horseback, traveled by wagon, buggy, surrey, car, bus train, plane,” she listed, illustrating the changes she’s known for just getting around.

“We lived in an isolated place. It was half a mile to closest house, ten miles to the little town where we went to buy groceries,” she remembered. “We could hear the train. They kept saying they were going to ‘take Hattie to town to see the train’. One day when we were headed to town, we were in sight of the railroad when they stopped to give their team a drink. We heard the train coming. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was so disappointed in my first train.”

“I remember when the first car came. Everybody went out in their yard to see it,” she said. “I thought an airplane would be a great thrill, but it was just one of those things.”

In her travels Hattie has seen the Pacific and Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and has flown to several states to vacation or visit friends and relatives. She recounted the story of a particularly turbulent flight to Texas.

“I was nervous. I thought ‘what am I doing up here anyway? If I ever get home…” she trailed off, then added practically, “the thing I like about a plane is that it just gets you there faster.”

To Hattie the realm of communications as been the most fascinating.

“All of this gradually came in and we just accepted it,” she said. “There’s been the television and all these communications systems we have now. The most unusual thing to me is a computer. What you had then was just telephone line. We didn’t even have one at our house.”

“We didn’t have any communications with other countries until the war come up and the boys went over there,” she said, referring to World War I. “It doesn’t seem the thrill now to talk to somebody in another country that it would have way back yonder. Now that would have been something. But it seemed like when it happened, and I got to do it, it was just an every day thing. It wasn’t the thrill it would have been when I grew up."

She said most of their news was from the newspaper when she was a child. She remembers reading, at nearly 14, published accounts of the Titanic disaster, an event in which renewed interest has spawned an artifact exhibit, numerous television specials and epic movie.

Interestingly, her most vivid recollection is about millionaire John Jacob Astor, who secured his much younger, pregnant, second wife in a lifeboat, then sank with the ocean liner, bringing a dramatic close to a scandalous story of the era.

“It was so tragic,” Hattie remembered, “but his child unborn was saved.”

Hattie was soon to live her own story, which, though not scandalous, is filled with dramatic elements: war, unrequited love, broken hearts and happy endings.

“During the first World War, one of the neighbor young men was in the military,” she said. “I was so naive. We corresponded. I thought of him as a friend. I didn’t really see what was coming up. I answered his letters. Finally, when he let me know his intentions, I had already fallen in love with someone else.”

Years after his death, the man’s daughter from North Carolina found Hattie. Ironically, Hattie had saved all her friend’s postcards, which she gave to his daughter.

“I had been thinking I’d get married when my boyfriend got back from the War. Well, he let me down. When he got back, he decided he did not want to get married. That soured me for a while. I had to get over all that,” she said, explaining why she waited until she was 30 to marry Earl Freeman. “I robbed the cradle. I was older than the groom.”

She and her groom, a retired farmer and county employee, are still happily married and share the home at Harvest where they moved more than half a century ago. Their daughter, Nancy, lives with them to help out.

“I’m sure we give her a pain,” Hattie started, but Nancy, retired from a doctor’s office, interjected. “On their worst day they haven’t even chipped the iceberg of fighting with Medicare and Blue Cross.”

“My mother made dressing for me for Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Nancy stated, further proof that living with the couple is not a burden, though Earl has some health problems that keep him close to home.

“Now in my mind I don’t feel any different that I’ve always felt,” Hattie said. “I feel like I can get up and I can do. I love to work in the garden. I still enjoy reading. I can read and understand. It is just my physical body that has weakened a bit.”

Hattie, who has never had a broken bone or surgery, says she takes some medication for arthritis and wears dentures and bifocals.

What is the one thing Hattie wishes she had done that she didn’t?

Without hesitation, her answer is, “To go to college. That would have been a dream, and I could have gone when I got that diploma if I could just have driven, but I wouldn’t ask Earl to carry me.”

She admitted that she let Earl carry her every time to Ardmore for her GED classes so that she could obtain her high school diploma in 1976 at age 78.

“I was always a ’friady cat. I was always afraid to push to go ahead. It kept me from going forward,” she said with just a tinge of regret. “A lot of people call it guts. If I’d just had the guts, I would have made a good nurse or a good teacher.”

In fact, with her perfect grammar and pronunciation and nimble mind, conversing with Hattie feels like talking to a retired teacher.

Her explanation: “After a hundred years, you’re bound to learn some things just from observation.”

Post Script: Mrs. Freeman died Nov. 28, 2002.