Rural Heritage April/May 2026

The Smoke House TALES FROM CARTER COUNTY

such a small building. Coffee cans held nails, nuts and bolts, pocketknives and mouse nests. Box after box with such things as dismantled carburetors, broken wrenches, my grandmother's false teeth, and books my grandpa had found interesting for one reason or another. A children's reader on the sinking of the Titanic was not out of place stacked with Chilton manuals or weed eater warranties. The walls were covered from top to bottom. Old license plates, rotten bridles, a hatchet, a locket with a grandchild's picture, hoses, wires, and tubes festooned the board surfaces. The loft overhead held bed steads, crutches, walking sticks, odd boards, and fishing poles. An old refrigerator, long since defunct, served as a safe with a collection of old coins, sorted by denomination into mason jars, jugs and buckets. The old salting bench along the back wall was stacked high from flat surface to ceiling joists with boxes, baskets and buckets. Each containing its own wondrous treasures. Often, my pappaw sat in the open door of the smoke house, the one clear patch of floor in the front serving as a work bench, as he tinkered with some ailing implement. Sometimes I would set with him and point out oddities and ask, “What's that?” Pappaw would explain each item, and, if I were lucky, he would give me the back story of how and why it came to be there in the collection. The largest axe head I ever saw turned out to the head of the broad axe used by my pappaw's grandfather to square cabin logs. Pappaw's father, John Milt, had used the same broad axe to hew cross ties to be sold to the railroad. Pappaw told me about seeing a log building his father had built with this axe that was so well fitted that it needed no chinking. Grandpa John would align the logs, then squint as he tested the fit, and, if any light showed through, the log was flipped back over and the high spots knocked off until it fit perfectly.

by Jerry Hicks O n the farm where I grew up there were several buildings: • the house, of course • a coal house, it had been moved from the old schoolhouse down the road • a chicken house that had been moved up the hill by grandpa and uncles ( I remember standing and watching as they dragged it up the hill on poles using a big set of chain blocks. I was amazed that anyone could pull a building up hill by hand) • the barn • the cellar • a storage shed, built where the dwarf apple trees once stood along the garden fence. And, in the center of them all, stood the smoke house. The smoke house was a magical, mysterious place. It had long since ceased to be used to preserve meat and had been repurposed many times over. It was a storage shed. It was a bank. It was a museum. In some sense it was a temple with my grandpa as the high priest. He held the keys, and none could enter without his leave. We kids could not pass the smoke house and not look in if the door was open. Piled high and hung on walls was a jumble and assortment of odd tools and broken chainsaws. Nothing was incongruous and anything was possible and probable. The pink plastic flamingos, given to me by my Grandma Girty, were right at home beside an old hand corn planter, the double twist wire barrels of a disassembled shotgun, the headboard of a bed, and mammaw's old crutches. All visitors would stand in awe of the amount of stuff that could be held in

Rural Heritage

52