Chapter Twenty Five

April 13, 1939

We go back now to the old Pine Mountain road and cross Roberson’s Creek just below Carson’s old mill. This road has been changed and now crosses the creek on a bridge just above the mill. This is a noted old mill. There has been many thousand bushels of grain ground at this place. There they ground both wheat and corn. Mr. William (Big Bill) Carson once tended this mill and I have heard it said that he carried six bushels of wheat up three flights of stairs to the top story of the building at one load. The building was four stories high. This mill was a great spot for picnics. People of the entire country around would come with well-filled baskets and everybody would eat till they were filled. I recall at one picnic here that two young men got into a scrap. One of them was a negro and it came very near being a serious affair as others were just ready to get into it. But some level-headed older men got it stopped without anyone being hurt.

It is about two miles from the old mill to Washburn’s Cross Roads.

…we would throw some pine brush in the hole or rut and throw a little dirt on it.The public roads were worked by free labor at this time so when I became eighteen years of age I had to do road work, so I had to help work this road from Carson’s mill to Washburn’s Cross Roads. Where there were mud holes or ruts in the road we would throw some pine brush in the hole or rut and throw a little dirt on it.

This road crossed a little hill that was called the Indian Hill, where, it was said, Indians were buried. Very often the road workers would dig in this mound, or grave, but they never found anything in the grave. You could hear people say there could be ghosts seen there at night but I never stayed around a night to see if that was true.

Washburn’s Cross Roads is where Mr. Rubin Washburn had a store. There has been a store there ever since I can remember, and there was one there a number of years before I was born. I have lived to see six different store buildings at this cross roads. The first one I remember was a log building right in front of the brick home that Nollie Washburn built and lived in. Mr. Washburn next built a little framed store building on the other side of the road just below the house he lived in. Then a few years later he built a two-story frame building on the southwest side of the Cross Roads and the studding in the building was hewn out of little pine poles. Then later when his son Nollie took over the store he built a brick building on the west side of the road just in front of the present store building. Then a number of years after this Nollie built the building that his son, E. N. Washburn, now occupies. But before he died he built another building on the southeast corner of the cross roads. This building is now being used by E. N. Washburn as a funeral home.