More Memories from The Walker’s Chapel Reunion of the Matlock/Wise Family

I spent some time in July, National Family Reunion Month, looking through the History Center’s oral history collection for some recollections of, or from, Bossier Parish family reunions. On October 11, 2003, Bossier Parish Libraries History Center staff attended the Matlock/Wise family reunion in Walker’s Chapel and conducted oral history interviews. That reunion provided an amazing opportunity to gather family history, as well as learn more about everyday rural life in the first half of the 20th century. Last week we looked at the interviews conducted with Rex Matlock and his younger sister Jo Matlock Baker. This week we look at the stories provided by another reunion attendee, Mrs. Ernestine Martin Humphrey.

Walker’s Chapel is located about 12 miles east of the north Bossier Parish town of Plain Dealing. Perhaps evoked by the growing spread of food arriving at the reunion tables around her as Mrs. Humphrey talked, much of her stories involved food. She talked about her mother's cooking and recipes, and as the Matlock siblings had discussed, the family tried to buy very little at the one store in Walker’s Chapel (Winham’s). “Well, it was so much different back then.  You raised just about what you had [to eat] and we pumped our water.” 

Mrs. Humphrey said her mother, Eula Mae Hilburn Martin, used a wood stove and baked biscuits that they called "cat's head" biscuits because of their size. Her mother cooked squirrel, possum and other local game. They often went fishing and would cook buffalo fish.  She described butchering a hog and curing the meat in the family smoke house.  She also mentioned that ice was scarce during the 1930's and they kept blocks of ice in the smokehouse, covered in newspapers.  

They kept a garden and had some fruit trees, including mulberries, peaches, mayhaws and figs. Entertainment and supplying food sometimes went hand in hand for children: “…She [her mother] had a big old mulberry tree...We’d climb up in that and just pick off mulberries…and just eat ‘em.  It was about a mouth full, each little mulberry.  Sat up there in that big tree and ate the mulberries.  That was so good…And climbing up the tree, a big old tree, you know, with big old limbs out on it. That was half the fun and just getting out on that limb and picking ‘em as you go like a little bird…” 

She also had fond memories of big, local persimmon fruits. “The school bus sometime would come by and I think he owned his own school bus so he would stop and let us pick persimmons right beside the road…[then we would] get back on the bus with four or five persimmons, you know, and eat one.  We knew to behave ourselves; you know, don’t come back and throw persimmons and stuff.  They wouldn’t stop.  He wouldn’t stop the next time.”

Also for entertainment she remembered, “our toys were something that I played under the house many a times with, just a bottle, you know, that you push around.  That was your car, you know,” she said amidst laughter. “You made your little roads under there, many a good time.…it was cozy under there.

Mrs. Ernestine Martin Humphrey passed away in 2019 at the age of 88. She had worked many years as a bus driver for Caddo and Bossier Parish Schools, but I’m guessing, unlike her fondly-remembered school bus driver, she did not have the liberty to pull over for some persimmon picking! 

If you would like to see a transcript of his interview, or any other interviews in our oral history collection, please stop by or contact the History Center. We are located at 2206 Beckett St, Bossier City, LA and are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

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Images: 

 Three unidentified squirrel hunters with rifles and squirrels, north Bossier Parish c. 1910. From the History Center’s Beulah Findley collection of John Allen photos

Article by: Pam Carlisle