Truckin' on the Western Branch

Janet and R. C. Lilley In 1918 when Rufus Lilley and his bride arrived in a horse-drawn wagon from North Carolina to farm along the Western Branch, the farmhouse was derelict with the windows as broken as the young bride’s spirit. “Rufus, I can’t do this,” she cried. Rufus answered—cope or leave.

According to R. C. Lilley, Then Tyre Neck Road paralleled the railroad track. The state awarded a contract to Lilley to build a new road. The railroad tracks ran right through the farm. There was a small house, a customs house, on Drum Point. Fertilizers were shipped in and crops shipped out. A footbridge and a boardwalk connected the farms along the water.

My dad used a scoop drawn by two mules to prepare the roadbed. He lost all his crops in the Depression in 1933. He raised 400 hogs or more. When the Ford plant opened, he went to work as a guard to supplement the farm income. In World War II the Navy took over the plant. My brother Ralph served at Pearl Harbor.

I was born in the old farmhouse, the youngest of four brothers— Ralph, James, Chester, R.C.—and one sister, Eloise.

Shortly after December 7, 1941, a troop truck drove on to the farm and told Dad they were commandeering part of his acreage to set up an anti-aircraft battery. The field was in what is now section two of Green Meadow Point. Soldiers set up tents, an anti-aircraft gun and a searchlight. Every night the searchlight would scan the skies. Finally the barracks were built. Eloise was 14 or 15 and wanted to see the troops, so I drove the tractor to the camp with Eloise. I’d been driving since I was 8 or 10 years old. Eloise was young and pretty. As soon as the soldiers surrounded the tractor, I left with Eloise, but that night the searchlights were trained on our farmhouse. My father hired German POWs to work on the farm just after we got the first combine in 1942–43. A hurricane blew through and knocked down the corn stalks so the combine could not harvest. The deal was you had to hire 10 POWs and one was guaranteed to speak English. The government furnished meals. On the first morning, my father drove a stake body truck onto the farm with the 10 prisoners standing up in the bed. I had seen pictures in the post office of Germans with piercing blue eyes and was terrified. As I walked out to the truck, I felt all their eyes were on me. Dad continued to hire up to 30 at a time into the winter. Ed Gaskins also used them on his dairy farm. The prisoners followed a tractor I drove into the field and the corn was flying—they were such hard workers. Dad said, “They are the hardest working people I ever saw.”

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