"The Mail Must Go Through,' By Horse, of Course" Muddy Roads of Yesteryear

There was a time when going someplace meant walking or using the kind of horsepower that used oats for fuel and went clip-clop down the street. Horses and mules were characters with minds of their own. Even the roads challenged the driver and the latest rig.

Ruby L. Snowden: Tyler Hunter, Interviewer

First, I can remember up here in Georgetown, they didn't even have paved streets, it was mud streets. And it got bad, too, I tell you. They had the horse wagons and buggies and things parked right around the square up there, and they had a place to tie them. Even cotton wagons, where they brought cotton to the gins. . . . We lived out, my dad and I and our family lived out, three miles south of Georgetown, and at Christmas time one year, he had to put four mules to the front wheels of the wagon to come in and get our groceries and Christmas things. He just had to come to get it . . . they bogged up to their knees in mud coming in on that Rabbit Hill Road.

Otha Horger Ullrich - Interviewer: Lea Ann Sikes

No streets were graveled or paved [when she came here in 1909. The streets were just plain black mud up to here when it rained a long spell. Somebody asked me how did you get around downtown when it rained? They had stepping stones, flat rocks from this corner to the next one, and instead of having sidewalks in front of the stores like they have now, they were built up from the ground with planks, up even with the door and then all this in here was filled with gravel. They took long rocks and set them down in the ground in a row on each side and would fill in between them with gravel. I can show you the remains of one of those sidewalks right at the end of this block.

That's where you ruined your new shoes. You couldn't walk in the mud without getting mud up above your high-top shoes and laced ones later, laced way up to here.

Tullia Ischy: John Martin, Interviewer

They had dirt roads, and when it was muddy, you couldn't go very far. Way back there, when I was just a kid, we'd come to town with the mules and the hack. It was two-seated, like a buggy with two seats. It would be so muddy, there would be ruts cut 'where you just have to stay in those ruts, and if you met somebody, they were hard to get out of...

We kids had more accidents with our buggy and horse than we ever had car accidents. We had to go about four or five miles to school and we had a horse that we drove to the buggy. One time we come home, it was snowing and awfully cold. It was hard for us to even see. It was snowing, and we were trying to keep the snow out of our faces, and this horse we always used, had one eye out. Every time he'd see anything, he'd shy and jump. There was a log, a tree, laying on the ditch side next to the fence. When we got along there by that thing, our horse shied and jumped and, when he did, the shafts came out from under the buggy he didn't turn us over that time he pulled loose from the buggy and, of course, he went on home. There were three of us. We weren't really hurt, so we just started walking home. After a while, some of the neighbors along the road called and told Dad they saw us walking and our horse going home. My Daddy and my sister's husband got on their horses and come to meet us. We were not hurt much, only scared to death.

Another time it happened, we hadn't got away from school very far, and the shafts come loose up there under the buggy, but my brother held onto the reins and didn't let our horse get away from us. He pulled the front wheels on, and, of course, my brother held on to the wheels and he wasn't hurt, but it just dropped down.

When it rained a lot we had to stay home as we had to cross Berry's Creek and there were no bridges in those days on the country roads.

Tommye B. Jefferson: Mike Lade, Interviewer

We had something fancy in those days. I don't know if you know anything about a surrey. It has two seats in it and had the tassels all around, and then we had the curtains that you could put in there. We had that. And we had a buggy and then a hack. It was a little like a pickup truck in the back of it. Then after that, we got a Model A.

Tillman Barron: Mark Graves, Interviewer

Of course, then, you either hoofed it or rode a horse or had the horse and buggy like Grandfather, who lived the other side of us. Grandfather Kolby, on Mother's side, was a Dane. He always kept a horse and buggy and everybody else would have a horse and buggy or a surrey.

I had an aunt and they were pretty well fixed, we thought. They had a nice surrey and always a good horse. If Mother had someplace to go, like to Ladies' Aid Society, Aunt Dell would come over and get Mother and they'd ride down to the church. That was the method of getting around.

The streets were all "macadamized," they called it, gravel and then run over by an iron wheel. There were no rubber tires. The farm wagons and buggies had iron wheels. Some of the buggies or surreys had what you called hard rubber, a wheel with a hard rubber tire on it no air. That would pack the streets down and they did have some type of roller. They didn't have grader blades or anything like that. They'd have a big shovel or something. They'd just manually spread it out, and they would run over it with this roller to kind of even it up and make it look like a street. We'd get some rain and that stuff would set up pretty good. It would be really hard.

In the summertime, when there'd be a whole lot of wagons this was big cotton country back in those days they would go to the cotton yard out here to store the cotton that they'd ginned, and these farm wagons would cut up this rock [street] and it'd be dry and be real dusty. I know as a kid, barefooted, we'd like to run down the street and get our feet in that dust.