 |
|
|
|
|
|
Sin Alley Back during the Great Depression, there wasn’t any money to speak of. You had to either raise what you needed or trade for it. Cream was the only thing that you could sell for money. Every Saturday morning, every body loaded up their cream on a wagon or cart of some kind, and took it to Morgan town to sell. The cream factory had to test the cream to see how much butter fat and so forth was in your cream. Then about 3 o’clock they would start issuing “Cream Checks.” Every Saturday, preachers would go to town and grab a corner. They’d preach on that corner all day long. If you didn’t like what this preacher was saying, you just moved on down to the next corner. Wood whittling was another thing people did to pass the time while they were waiting on their cream check. If you was an amateur, you just picked up any kind of old stick to whittle on. But others took their wood whittling more serious. The top whittlers gathered in an alley called “Sin Alley.” To be in this group, you could only whittle on a piece of Cedar. People would ask you where you got your piece Cedar from? It couldn’t be just a piece of Cedar you found around the house. Oh no, it had to come from some place far off or hard to get to. Like the very top branch of Cedar tree hanging out over a cliff. Otherwise you had to whittle your stick someplace else. Sin Alley had certain standards to keep up. There was a certain way you had to whittle, you couldn’t just come in there and start hacking off a bunch of chips. You must start at one end of the stick and take a strip off the full length of the stick - which had to be a minimum of one foot, but couldn’t be longer than two. The sharper the knife- the more times the strip of wood would curl up when you shaved it off. Contests were often held, and who ever had the most curls in the strip they shaved off - won the contest. Sin Alley got its name after it was told; that two men struck a deal in that alley to trade wives. One man had a young pretty wife and the other one had a wife way up in years and not very good to look at. “One young pretty wife for one old ugly wife and a 22 riffle plus a good hunting dog and two boxes of shells.” Good Christian folks always stayed as far away from that alley as they possibly could. Even going near there was considered to be a sinful act. A stranger came to town one Saturday, he stopped on the corner and listened a while to that preacher. Then he slowly moved on down the street and listened to each of the others for a while. But what he really needed was a hair cut, so he asked directions to the nearest barber shop. On his way there he passed by an alley that smelled strongly of Cedar, thinking that maybe a big furniture factory was at the other end - he walked down the alley to take a look. At the end of the alley, he came across twelve men sitting around whittling. The stranger said; With all these wood shavings laying around, you’d think Noah was down here building another Ark or is this where Joseph the carpenter has his shop? The twelve men wasn’t very happy to see him and all they wanted him to do, was leave. But how do you get a preacher to leave, especially one bold enough to walk down this alley in the first place? One of them said; Your wasting your time down here preacher, go find yourself a nice corner with a good shade to preach on. The preacher said; Well I didn’t come down here to preach, but its nice to know you're all in good standing with the Lord and don’t need preached to. This gives me a chance to sit down and rest a while. I’ve been known to whittle a little myself from time to time. Then he pull out some little crosses that he had made by whittling.
|
