"I was born in a small house on my grandparents’ farm in 1913. I was the second born of 13 children and my father Vernon Wilson worked in the coal mines. We used to watch for Papa to come home from the mines. We would meet him way over the hill to get his lunch bucket and divide up some of his lunch that he had saved for us. It tasted like cake, or at least it seemed to. We would eat and walk home with Papa, talking our little heads off. He always enjoyed everything we had to tell him. That was the highlight of his day and our day. He went to work so early in the morning that we did not get to see him before he went to work. But one day the black coal miners were told that they no longer had jobs in the mines. This caused near panic, because lots of miners had families and were buying homes. I don’t know the actual date of the mass firing. In 1987 Mr. Fred Brown, a reporter from the Knoxville News Sentinel, came to interview me and hear about some of the history of my family. When I told him about the black men being put out of the mines, he checked the records and stated that the time was around the end of World War I. He said that they were making room for white soldiers returning from the war. I did not know the reason for the mass firing, but I did know about the effects. The mass firing was…"

"The school that was the most memorable to me was the school that was built in Coal Creek, in Hornsby’s Additon. We had two rooms and it was nice. It was easier to learn at this school because, during study time, the upper grades were in one room while the younger were in the other. Inside the door was a stage, with the "blackboard" across the wall behind it. The "blackboard" was just that…the boards of the wall in back of the stage were painted black! The teacher’s desk and chair were on the stage. Below the stage, in front of it, were two long benches where the students went to recite. The students’ desks were homemade. Each one seated two pupils and there were four rows of these desks from front to back. The boys and the girls didn’t sit together. Two rows of seats were for boys, and two were for girls. A large pot bellied stove gave us heat when the weather was cold. Our drinking water supply was kept in tin buckets on a shelf at the back of the room. We all drank from the same tin dippers in the buckets. The water came from a spring about a quarter of a mile away. The larger students took turns going for water. In real warm weather the teacher would sometimes let two students pass water around to the thirsty pupils. There was no inside plumbing, and no outside toilets. The woods sufficed. In this school we were taught…"

Laura Gary presenting congressman Zach Wamp with a copy of the book at Coal Creek Discovery Day 2000 8/22/00

Genene Smith with a copy of the book.

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