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Hattie Gentry was the oldest surviving child and daughter of the 2-term Sheriff of Spartanburg County, one term during & one term after the Civil War. Her parents, Sheriff Landon Miles Gentry of Spartanburg & Julia Anna Camp of Limestone, are also buried in West Oakwood Cemetery nearby.
Hattie was a well-educated upper-class Southern woman of her day, she had graduated from the newly-named Cooper Limestone Institute in 1883, later renamed Limestone College, in the 1st graduating class, I have a copy of the graduation speech she gave. Hattie proved herself a good manager with...
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Hattie Gentry was the oldest surviving child and daughter of the 2-term Sheriff of Spartanburg County, one term during & one term after the Civil War. Her parents, Sheriff Landon Miles Gentry of Spartanburg & Julia Anna Camp of Limestone, are also buried in West Oakwood Cemetery nearby.
Hattie was a well-educated upper-class Southern woman of her day, she had graduated from the newly-named Cooper Limestone Institute in 1883, later renamed Limestone College, in the 1st graduating class, I have a copy of the graduation speech she gave. Hattie proved herself a good manager with an eye for the future and her forward-thinking attitude was apparent in her early life. In her graduation speech, Hattie spoke of what she thought was to come, and said what we know today will disappear the same way as what had come before has already passed away. Much of what she predicted did come true.
Hattie's father Miles disapproved of her marriage to J. Weste Harris, but Hattie did not give in, Weste Harris had little of formal education or worldly possessions to recommend him, but she had met Weste when they were both baptized on the same day into the large Baptist Church on Main St Spartanburg and she knew he was a good man from a Christian family who did not drink. Hattie's beautiful, passionate mother had died under troubling circumstances during her last childbirth while being attended by an alcoholic doctor a year after Hattie graduated and a couple of years before Hattie married, probably causing a scandal as well as leaving Hattie the oldest girl in charge of the household of the Sheriff. Miles Gentry was a fairly wealthy man, he owned a large amount of land by this time, and eventually Hattie persuaded him to give the newlyweds a tract of rich land to farm near the Southern Shops railway repair yards where she & her husband raised 9 out of 10 children and many grandchildren. Her father Miles was living with them when he died in 1914, as were Weste Harris's mother Emily in 1899 & her husband's widowed sister Laura Harris in 1922.
The Harris home, nicknamed "The Beehive", was a place full of laughter & visitors, according to their youngest daughter Mella who said her mother was a conscientious & generous hostess who always made sure everyone who came had plenty to eat, both friend and stranger; they took in drifters off the railroad several times during the Depression and fed them, boarding & sending 2 of the young homeless men to school with their own grandchildren for over a year, one of whom became a preacher. They had a very successful farm, the land there has very black & rich soil, though unfortunately it is no longer being used for farming today, and Hattie & Weste grew most of what they ate. Weste was a self-taught farmer, having had little professional schooling, but his mother was a highly educated woman who had taught her children well at home and Weste had grown up on his father David's farm in the rural farming community of Golightly, learning planting from both his father & mother Emily; Emily had raised vegetables and kept a fruit orchard while David had focused on the large acreage money-crops like wheat and corn and oats before the Civil War. Despite lacking a college education, Weste kept up with the latest farming methods through constant reading & was considered a highly progressive farmer, being chosen as the 1st County Demonstration Agent for Spartanburg County in 1908, a prestigious new position he held for 4 yrs. During his tenure as the first County Agent, he judged agricultural contests and instituted a new agricultural competition at the annual Fall County Fair in October, an event the locals looked forward to every year, he started a contest for local farmers and their wives to bring in the best products of their farms to be awarded money prizes and ribbons, and to get their names in the newspaper.
While her husband ran the farm, Hattie ran her household with a strong hand, she was a very well organized woman who had mottoes for everything; one of her favorite was: "Have a place for everything, and keep everything in its place." She admonished her grandchildren never to sit on a bed, beds were for lying, not for sitting. Growing up in an era without store-bought clothes, Hattie made sure her family always had appropriate clothes to wear for the occasion, even if she had to sit up past midnight by candlelight tatting lace for daughter Emily in college so the wealthier college girls wouldn't make fun of her clothes. The daughters were taught how to sew, to crochet & knit, to tat lace, how to cook & clean, to milk cows & breed chickens, they were told they had to be useful & productive and to always go to church on Sunday's. Nothing was wasted, if a dress became frayed, it was cut down & made into a smaller dress or put into a patchwork quilt or made into rags. Her daughter Hattie Weste said they were taught never to throw away anything, because the mark of a good manager was to make efficient use of everything; And they were always admonished to keep busy; "Idle hands are the devil's playground."
Hattie was quick to anger & quick to punish, her daughter Hattie Weste told me her mother would often whip her with a hickory switch which she made her go outside & cut herself for mistakes such as dropping a dish, something which was evidently rather commonplace with Hattie Weste but never intentional. By contrast, her husband Weste was a very calm-natured man, a peacemaker, never raising his voice & never getting angry, he was said by a granddaughter to have once gently admonished his wife, "Hattie, there was no set time for that dish to break." Hattie firmly believed in the Biblical dictum "Spare the rod, spoil the child."
Hattie was careful with money, frugal to a fault in some things. Her granddaughter Polly said that while shopping, Hattie once told her that "Poor people have to be extravagant" because their durable goods had to last a long time & therefore had to be top quality. It must've been hard for Hattie, living on a subsistence farm after having been brought up in city life in comfortable circumstances, she had to make do with much less than she was used to, but after her father died she did inherit some of his land & rental houses which provided them with extra income. Her daughter Hattie Weste said they were taught to be very thrifty, they never threw things away like we do today, they recycled everything.
Hattie was contemptuous of her husband's business sense, she managed the money in the household. When her husband came home from a fiddler's convention one day saying how a man had pressed him to sell his fiddle several times & then offered him a blank check which he refused, she responded succinctly, "Today, two fools met." Money was tight with 9 children to feed & clothe & send to school & college.
Hattie was very involved in local women's organizations. In the 1920's, Hattie was voted the President of her local women's Masonic Lodge group the Order of the Eastern Star, she was very active in local Christian women's groups & a staunch member of the Women's Christian Temperance League.
Hattie was strongly opposed to serving alcohol in her home; she had personal experience with the damage it did to people but she understood the difference between the sinner & the sin, when her alcoholic brother Saul Gentry showed up at the door, her granddaughter Polly said Hattie met him with the words, "Saul, you are always welcome to visit, but the bottle is not."
Her husband Weste was a Mason, and they were members of the KKK in the 1920's when the membership of the KKK was at its highest in history; I know this because my cousin told me she saw Weste at a KKK meeting on the podium & recognized him under his white shroud by a bent finger that had once been broken & healed crooked; she never asked about it & nobody ever told her, but she later found his white shroud in the bottom of a drawer in the house. Their beliefs were consistent with the white southern landowners of the time, that white mental abilities were superior to Negroes and that Negroes should be kept from running amok & ruining society. I never got the impression they hated black people, but they definitely did not believe the races were equal. My mother said that her grandmother Hattie gave a cake to a black woman & later asked her if she liked it, the woman told her it was fine except she first had to pick all the "flies" out of it; the cake had raisins in it and mama assumed the black woman had never seen a raisin before. This was the kind of thing that reinforced their belief that Negroes were stupid. (My mother was also raised to believe that blacks were inferior to whites, I asked my mother once if black people would go to heaven, she looked confused & never answered my question directly, she said they were different from us but they were all God's creatures, too.)
Hattie raised 9 out of 10 children, having buried the second one as an infant in her parents' West Oakwood plot in 1890. All her children were given the opportunity to go to college, all but one graduated. All but one became teachers at least once in their lives. Most made their homes in the county in which they were born. All but one married. All but one were upstanding citizens with good public reputations.
Children:
Gentry was a graduate of Wofford College, the Principal of West End school, President of the Federal Land Bank, a noted lawyer listed in "Who's Who in SC" in 1933-4, he was a busy and productive and outwardly successful man, but my grandmother said Hattie put too much responsibility on Gentry's young shoulders at too young an age. My mother said her mother said Gentry was Hattie's "right hand man", when she needed rents collected from her father's rental houses, she'd send Gentry alone even when he was just a young teen. Gentry had a vision disability, Amblyopia, caused by an eye misalignment, his being blind in one eye caused him to not be drafted during the "Great War", even though he was very eager to follow in his older brothers' footsteps; his sister Mella said eventually the local war camp commandant at Camp Wadsworth was persuaded to allow Gentry to do work around the camp and be their water boy, which pleased him greatly. Gentry graduated from Wofford College & then law school and became a noted Spartanburg lawyer who was said by my cousin to have had the enviable ability to sway a jury in his client's favor. He married & had 3 children before he killed himself in 1935 in his law office on Morgan Square. He left a suicide note that began: "I am tired, tired, tired, and I want to rest."
Her son Dr. John Weste Harris, Jr taught school at Wofford College immediately after graduating there, a noteworthy event because he was the 1st (and perhaps only) graduate to be immediately hired to teach there the next year after graduation. John had served in military intelligence during the war, according to his sister Mella, and he attended Columbia Univ. Law school in NY with his brother Carlos. He became a teacher, lawyer, businessman. John attained national acclaim by creating the National Beta Club to reward high school children who maintained a "B" average in school (prior to this, only the "A" students got notice). My mother said her mother Hattie Weste was his favorite sibling when they were growing up, John had told her he wanted to pick out a husband for her from among his friends and he was very unhappy when he learned that she had married a country farmer's son in 1918 while he was away. In the 1920's Hattie Weste wrote her sister that John strongly disapproved of her undisciplined method of raising her children, letting them run through their parents' house screaming & chasing each other in games, it was very different from the way they were raised in that same house under the dictum that "Children should be seen and not heard." After she married, Hattie Weste & John had very little contact, she told her sister that she would not let her own children be exposed to John's anger & criticism. She wanted her children to feel happy & loved, not like she had felt as a child. John married the daughter of a state judge and had three children.
Hattie Weste was sent to Greenville Women's College and later Winthrop Univ and became a private governess & an elementary school teacher, teaching 6 grades in a one-room school at Poplar Springs south of Reidville until she became too involved in being a mother herself; she was religiously passionate and wanted to follow in her brother Lyles's footsteps & become a missionary to Korea, but she married & had 7 children instead.
Emily also graduated from college and became an elementary school teacher & later a writer of children's stories, and mother of 3 sons, one of whom became the President of High Point College.
Julia graduated from college and became a history teacher, genealogist & mother of 4, & Mella graduated from Winthrop University and became first a physical ed teacher & then an English teacher who took in and raised 2 nieces during the Great Depression but never had any children of her own.
Carlos graduated from Clemson Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1917 like his older brother Lyles, then went to the "Great War" in 1918 & was shot by a cannon ball which shattered his hip, he later recounted to his father how he woke up naked on the battlefield, all his clothes having been stolen & had to threaten an ambulance driver with a gun to make him take them on to the hospital after he stopped at a tavern & did not come out. Carlos spent a year & a half in hospitals first in France & then in New York, receiving a titanium hip replacement from one of the best orthopedists in Europe, but eventually dying 8 yrs later from infection caused by breathing in mustard gas on the battlefield & septicemia from infection in his hip & femur. He never married but graduated from Columbia University Law in NY in 1925 & then went to work for a department store in Iowa. His sister said he & a nurse had fallen in love while he was in the NY military hospital, but he knew his time was short on this earth so he did not marry her. His nephew Edwin said when he died, the high turnout for his funeral at First Baptist on Main caused the street to be shut down.
Lyles the oldest son graduated from Clemson in June of 1909 with degrees in Agriculture & Chemistry, he went to Africa with a Baptist church group in 1912, then chose not to return with them two years later, instead staying overseas working in various jobs including as an engineer building the transcontinental railroad across Africa & later farming cotton in the British Colony of Kenya. He enlisted & served in France in The Great War on the British side before the US entered the war. Lyles wrote his parents in the early 1920's that he wanted to return home to the US because he now had a British wife & a child was on the way but he didn't have enough money; they mortgaged their home to bring him back in October 1923; he returned himself first and then brought his British wife Jan & their 1st son here in 1925. Lyles became the manager to a hotel, editor of a Franklin, NC newspaper and manager of several farms in NC, which is what he was doing when his heart failed in 1956; he was 69. Lyles was said to have had a quick temper, just like his mother.
Joe, the youngest son, worked for the Southern Railways after graduating from Clemson, he married twice but could not have children due to a physical defect. My mother was very close to her uncle Joe, he & his first childless wife had taken care of her when she was little. Joe was a sugar addict, gorging on sweets, when Mella asked his 2nd wife why he was getting so fat, she said she often cooked cakes for him because she wanted him to be happy & eating made him happy. In later years Joe experimented with many different religions, going from one to another to another when his health was failing. He had developed a strange skin ailment near the end of his life that my mother believed was caused by lead poisoning from the paint he was using on boxcars at the Southern Railway yard, she said he lived out of his automobile after his wife died and slept in it in the railway yard, breathing in the fumes 24 hrs a day, he once recounted to us how he woke in the middle of one night with a rat nibbling on his toes which were sticking out of his open car window; my mother was appalled. When I met him near the end of his life, Joe was a tall, heavy, very jolly man who reminded me of Santa Claus, when he visited us he refused to sit in mama's upholstered chair, he said he was afraid of breaking it. My mother was very glad to see him, and when she told him about an unexpected event, his sudden deep, unexpectedly strong laugh literally shook the whole house; all his siblings had deep and authoritative voices too, even the women, which is probably one reason why they made good teachers, and singers, the Harris family education included music with piano and voice and violin lessons.
All Hattie's children were raised with an emphasis on being good Christian people with the highest ethical and social standards, to be productive, honest and charitable.
Hattie lost her husband in 1933 of senility and a heart ailment at age 79, but she was not alone, three of her daughters lived with her during the Depression and their husbands and children kept the Beehive bustling, and they took in two of daughter Hattie Weste's oldest children as well as two homeless young men who were riding the rails. Hattie got a small veterans' pension of $15 a month from the death of her son Carlos due to his war injuries and lived out the remainder of her life as the matriarch of her extended family, teaching her grandchildren the same values she had taught her own children. Hattie died in 1939 soon after a stroke, surrounded by her children & grandchildren in the home she & her husband had built together.
--Jeni
9/2017 |
