| The Moore page |
Pond Run, Uncle Will Hart, Uncles John”Red” & Eck Phillips
I’ve written before about Pond Run and how it got its name because that area was a series of ponds that drained from one to another. It was very swampy, marshy ground with trees and brush. The first dredging was done when my Grandmother Maggie Phillips Kolb was a girl. She married Grandpa Joe Kolb in 1900, so she was probably no more than 10 when the first dredging took place which was 115 years ago. Grandma said the first dredging just connected the ponds to start the drainage.
She thought about 1921 the second dredging started, The second dredging did not follow the exactly the same route as the first and Uncle Chester said the second dredging began about the Sam Troutman Road. The Wolfe family lives on that road today.
The Dredge boat floated down throwing dirt and sand on both sides and was laid out in a more surveyed manner; this caused the channel to be changed in some areas. T he best example would be just behind The Phillips’ Home Place and behind where Jerry and Claudia Blanton live. There is a low place in the field indicating the original Pond Run may have run through that field. I can remember the third dredging, but can’t remember the year. The dredging was done by a dragline operating from the fields on either side. Lateral ditches were dredged that emptied into the Pond Run (Trippet) Ditch, these laterals probably had real names. The laterals I was familiar with were “Bear Branch” named for Bart “Bear” Turpin runs by Jeff & Karen Smith’s home and the “Little Ditch” which is right in the heart of the “Butter Milk Ground”.
Tiling was necessary to drain these adjoining fields and some the tiling was being done during my early days. I can remember that farming some parts of the “Buttermilk” meant planting late when the ground was dry and harvesting late when the ground was frozen. Part of the late harvest was due the rate of maturation of corn, corn often did not dry in the field to a level that it could be stored until much later in the fall than today’s “genetically engineered” seed corn. Having a dryer on the farm was unheard of and corn was stored as ear corn.
The area between the Pond Run and Little Ditches was one of the last wild swampy areas to be cleared up and drained. This area was somewhat inaccessible, but the story was that somewhere in the mix of thickets and ponds a shack was built. This shack was used as a “Den of Iniquity” according to some in the community. There were reports of card playing for money and drinking hard liquor.
On one occasion Uncle Will Hart, Uncle John “Red” Phillips and Uncle Eck Phillips happened to make their way to the shack in the swampy thicket along Pond Run. In later years when Uncle Will was questioned by my Dad and Uncle Chester about his trip to the shack he said “those fellows wouldn’t let them leave unless they took a drink so they couldn’t go tell on them for drinking”. When ask if they drank anything Uncle Will said “we took the cup and pretended to drink, but let the whiskey run off our chin”.
When questioned about who was at the shack Uncle Will would never say who was there. I can only assume it was none of my relatives.