More old pics on Mom’s side of the family. Look at that bow! This is my Great Aunt (Audra Leonard Bates Grisham 1905-1988), my Mom’s Mom’s sister, with her little brother Charles Warren Bates (1908-1979).
They were #5 and #6 of 11 kids, 8 girls and 3 boys. The firstborn, Millie, was born in 1896 and died the same year, the last one, a boy never named, was born and died 25 years after the first one in 1921. The parents Charles Newton Bates (1873-1957) and Ethel Williams (1877-1946) ran a dairy east of Fayetteville where the kids grew up with extended family all around which was a good thing most of the time.
The Williamson family, Ethel’s sister’s people, and CN Bates did not get along. On Monday Feb 12 1906 when Audra was 13 months, a newspaper in Nashville reported that Mr Bates (my Great Grandfather) had a violent encounter with Ike Williamson, his Brother-in-Law, and Ike’s brother Sam Williamson. According to the paper CN had “thrashed” Cam Williamson, another brother, the previous Monday and there were bad feelings.
Bates was headed into town that Monday driving West along The Eldad Road accompanied by William Ashby, and George and Parker Stout in two wagons. The Williamson boys were headed East in a buggy and when they saw Bates they blocked the road insisting that he pull off and let them by. When Bates refused they climbed down from the buggy seat and grabbing Bate’s horse by the reins caused a commotion. When Sam Williamson, as the paper reports, reached into a pocket Bates assumed the object of the effort to be a gun and fired first. The shot killed Sam Williamson instantly. Ike was critically injured but lived, dying in 1940.
This was 9 years before my Grandmother Jorell Bates Sipes Howard (1915-1998) was born and two years before little CW in the photo was born. So this happened in between these two.
So did CN go to jail? Apparently not. A later article in the same paper reports that he was fined $50 for “carrying a pistol” but that the charge of murder was “ignored by the jury”. In another story, three weeks after the shooting on March 5th, the paper reports that Charles Bates and Luther McDaniel were fined “five dollars and cost” for “useing profane language”. I have also heard that he did not recognize the authority of stop signs or red lights.
I remember going to Aunt Aud’s house and dairy when I was a little kid. She lived on Grisham Road east of Fayetteville with her husband Marvin Vaughn Grisham, we called him Papoo and he was wonderful. Tall, thin, with big watery blue eyes, he was from a prosperous family in Decatur, the Son of Capt Jack Grisham. Capt Jack was something of a local hero. He was the son of Willis Peale Grisham and Elizabeth Lentz. Elizabeth was the daughter of one the most prominent families in the area, so prominent that the area was named for them: Lentzville. Her father, Solomon Lentz, moved from North Carolina with the earliest settlers into the area.
In the Summer of 1927 Audra moved into the home of a family in Lentzville as a just-graduated teacher. She was one of two teachers in a two-room schoolhouse the Lentz family build along with a church on their property. The school had a pot bellied stove and offered education during Cotton Vacation to Grades 1-8 where school ended. Since Marvin was the tall, handsome grandson of the family that started the school its safe to assume they met there. They were married the following year, 1928, back in Fayetteville.
Trips to their house were often after church on Sundays. I remember “helping” in the milking barn with Papoo while the ladies prepared lunch in the house. Fried chicken, country fried steak, mac and cheese, potatoes, and usually a jello mold, the tangy green one. Down in the barn Papoo patiently showed me how to lead the cows from the rocky pasture into the barn. Then how to clean the udders with a wet rag from a bucket near the door, clamp the legs, and carefully slip the stainless vacuum milkers on. It was fun to watch the milk, thin and white, snake up the tubes from the milkers and run down into the big tank at the end of the stalls.
Sitting squat in a stone room by itself like a great beast the stainless milk tank hummed low. An electric motor slowly turned big silver paddles in the milk to prevent separation. I remember Papoo letting me reach in, holding me by my belt so I would not fall, so I could use a just-washed finger to scoop a little butter from the back of one of the paddles. The motion of the paddles through the fresh milk caused butter to form like dust on a ceiling fan.
That was a special, core memory for me. They were such special people Janice Fowler raised Janice Fowler from about 1945 until she left for Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in far away Cookeville. That’s a story for another day.
https://www.newspapers.com/…/nashville-banner…/64455413
