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Aunt Pearl was born in either Madison County, NC or Spartanburg County, SC in 1907 to parents who were from the Appalachian Mts of NC, her father John Rinehart was much older than her mother and had left his 1st wife & younger children to be with Mary Etta Lindsey, a much younger woman & sister-in-law to his daughter Cordelia, he took Mary Lindsey over the mountain to Cocke County, TN and she lived there for about 10 yrs. John evidently divorced his 1st wife sometime in the 1890's because he married Mary in Aug 1894 in Cocke County,...
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Aunt Pearl was born in either Madison County, NC or Spartanburg County, SC in 1907 to parents who were from the Appalachian Mts of NC, her father John Rinehart was much older than her mother and had left his 1st wife & younger children to be with Mary Etta Lindsey, a much younger woman & sister-in-law to his daughter Cordelia, he took Mary Lindsey over the mountain to Cocke County, TN and she lived there for about 10 yrs. John evidently divorced his 1st wife sometime in the 1890's because he married Mary in Aug 1894 in Cocke County, TN. Tennessee supposedly allowed divorce at this time though I have found no records (I'm told they're in the county courthouses), but NC didn't allow divorces until 1958. Pearl's father brought his new growing family down to the cotton mills of Spartanburg County, SC in the late 1890's, and then again in the early 1900's, each time taking the money his children earned back to Madison County, NC and buying land. Evidently John planned on staying in Madison County, but then he suddenly died 19 Oct 1908 at the stated age of 80 of a stroke, leaving no will, and after the probate his young wife brought her children back to Spartanburg, SC. (John was probably 70 yrs old based on the earliest records.)
Pearl's mother was a beautiful and kind woman, but Pearl told me her mother Mary was unable to take care of herself or her children, she could neither cook nor sew, and she was illiterate, Pearl said she never worked outside the home. And Mary was also very religious, evidently she did not realize how important money was to herself or her children's futures because after her father sold her husband's 2 plots of land in Madison County, she donated all the money during a church building in Spartanburg to the preacher, as well as her big family bible. Her children were rightly furious, her elder son Melvin went to the preacher & demanded he return the money, but the preacher refused. Melvin did go back & took his father's bible off the podium, but he never got back their money. The fatherless family was now destitute.
In 1910, Pearl was 3 yrs old on the census living in Whitney mill village with her mother Mary & older brothers Eddie and Dewey; Eddie, who was 14, was listed as the only breadwinner, working as a spinner in the mill. Her 2 older sisters Samantha and Mina had both married the preceding year. Her brother Melvin had returned to the mountains (in anger?) & was living with his cousins the Forresters (Will Forrester was the buyer of his father's land, according to Will's son Dewey). And brother Dow was living with his uncle & aunt Jim & Cordelia Lindsey in Inman & working at the Inman Mill. I wonder if they moved away because of their disgust at their mother giving away all their hard-earned money. (At this time there were no child labor laws and Pearl's father John had put his children to work in the textile mills, so much of that money was earned by them. Children were not legally adults until age 21 then, so the money was not legally theirs.)
When I asked Pearl what life was like growing up, she paused, and thought about it a while. When she spoke, she said in a low slow voice, "Life was very hard then, people today don't realize how hard it was to survive. Things are so different now." Pearl told me that she had to stay with relatives many times because she & her mother could not get enough food to eat. Her sister Samantha had died of malnutrition in 1913, Eddie married & moved away in 1917. Dewey was killed in a gunshot accident in 1918. On the 1920 census, Pearl was listed as 14 (she was 13) & living with her mother. Pearl told me that by this time she had taught herself to sew very well and was making all their clothes, she showed me a portrait of herself & her mother Mary, said she made their dresses. Mary was wearing a black dress with a ruched and pleated bodice, very flattering and elaborate, Pearl said she could recreate any style of clothes she saw in a magazine by just looking at the picture, without using patterns; she was obviously proud of her talent.
Pearl married at age 13 in 1920 to Gilbert Pye, he was 19 and the son of a large mill-working family in Spartanburg. Pearl had 4 children by the time she was 20 yrs old. I asked her if she had it to do over again would she marry so young, she only paused a second & then said quietly, "No. I was too young." When I asked why her mother allowed her to marry so young, she said they had decided to get married, and when she decided to do something she did it, her mother knew her and so she agreed to the marriage. Pearl said she was a fiery person when she was young, she used to get so upset "at the drop of a hat", she sounded amazed that she had ever been like that. "Now", she said (meaning in her 80's), she didn't do that anymore.
I met Pearl for the 1st time when she was in her 70's and I had started asking questions about the history of the family. I wanted to know more about her father John Rinehart. She didn't tell me. She refused. When I pressed her several times, she finally said, "I was raised to not talk ill about people. If I can't say something good about someone, I won't say anything." That was all she would say. I know she had heard adults talking about her father, even though she was too young when he died to remember him, but she wouldn't tell me what they said. (I wonder if she told anyone else.)
I asked Pearl about her father's parents, she didn't know anything about them. But she did know a local cousin who could tell me, and I visited her a couple of years before she died. Ms Mason told me she & Pearl had played together when they were children in Spartanburg, Pearl and her mother Mary had been taken in by Preston & Estella Hill Mason for a while as charity (one of many families who helped them out). Mary's grandmother Harriet Rinehart Hill Delogia had told them that Pearl's father John Rinehart was her older brother. Ms Mason said she remembered many stories her grandmother told the children about growing up while her father's family was moving around the lower states, Harriet said her father went all the way to Texas once, but he didn't like it down there and returned. When I looked them up, their birthplaces are a record of their travels. Evidently John's father took them from TN about 1837-8 through NC to GA, then to Mississippi by 1850. In 1860 they were close to the Miss border in TN and the children's births show they had gone back to GA & then on to Missouri in that time period. Mrs Mason said that when the Civil War started, John's father was in the northern states near Illinois without his family, he was a Confederate sympathizer caught behind enemy lines so he joined a Union troop that was being deployed to TN and made it back to his home state of TN & deserted. His family hid him in the woods & Harriet told of taking food to him on foot & encountering a group of Indian men, she hid out in a hollow log and she said they stopped & sat to eat on the log while she was inside. She had several such stories to tell, including another of her capsizing in the Mississippi River and almost drowning because she couldn't swim, she said she had on so many petticoats that they held pockets of air & kept her afloat while she was being rescued. Harriet first married a Dr. McIntyre during the Civil War.
I wonder now what kind of work John's father was doing, if perhaps he was working on a riverboat when the war started, he was listed as operating a grist mill in both 1860 and 1870 which means he was mechanically-minded, so I suspect he could've once had a job like Mark Twain's on a riverboat, that would explain why he was in the north when the war started.
After the end of the Civil War, many of Pearl's father John's father's family came to live in his area of Madison County, NC where he had married a local girl in 1858 and settled down. John's father had left his wife & children & married a younger woman in 1866 named Miss Margaret Jane Hixon/Hickson who had children of her own, they moved from Knox County to Greene County, TN, his birthplace, where he died in 1871, leaving several young children behind. Like father like son. Many of Pearl's father's siblings from both his father's marriages later settled in Madison County, NC near him.
In Madison County, like in many southern states, there were mixed feelings about the Civil War, most of the towns were Confederate while many of the rural people had no desire to secede; most Madison people were rural farmers who had no slaves. Pearl's father John Rinehart had joined the Confederate Army early in the war, but later in the war he left & joined a group of disgruntled locals in Madison County who got together a troop & enlisted in the Union Army. They were angry with the way the Confederate side was treating local men, shanghaiing them into the army by force. In Jan 1863, a group of local Madison County men, some of whom had deserted the Confederate Army & returned home, had broken into a store in the county seat of Marshall to get salt, a necessary nutrient, which local Confederate sympathizers had been refusing to sell them. A Confederate doctor and Lieutenant Colonel named Keith led a gang of men there and rounded up men and women, he put ropes around the necks and whipped some of the women and mistreated them for four days before he massacred 13 people from ages 13-54, only eight of them had broken into the store, some of them killed in front of their wives and families, he dumped all their bodies in a mass grave in Shelton Laurel. The Shelton Laurel Massacre in 1863 turned many people in the area against the Confederate side, especially after Keith was not punished.
After the war, Pearl's father John returned home & took up the mercantile business, according to one of his grandsons, Dewey Foster, he said John at one time owned 4 general stores in the county that he knew of. John was considered a prosperous man. So when John left his 1st wife & children & ran off with Mary Lindsey, he left all that behind. Dewey told me that John partitioned out his land as individual farms to all his children from the first marriage before he left, but most of them lost the farms when they did not pay the taxes. In 1894, a lawsuit by 2 Gudger lawyers gained possession of most of the Duckett land.
When John returned to Madison County in the early 1900's and bought land using the money his youngest children were earning in the cotton mills, it seems to me that he was trying to restart his business life and gain a financial foothold for his new family. But his death cut short his efforts. On his deathbed, John tried to get his wife Mary to get his 1st wife Jane Duckett Rinehart to come visit him, but Mary either didn't understand or refused. John kept telling her to get Jane, but she didn't. And John died cursing Mary. (Jane later said she would have come if she had known. In the same year 1908, John & Jane's daughter Odessa also died suddenly in her sleep in Spartanburg, leaving behind 5 young children, Jane was on the 1910 census in Spartanburg living with 2 of Dess's children at Beaumont Mill, so I wonder if Jane was in Spartanburg when John died.)
By 1910, Pearl's mother Mary had brought her family back to the Spartanburg mills to live permanently. She and her siblings took care of her widowed mother until she died in 1936. Pearl lived the remainder of her long life in Spartanburg County, raising four children, two boys and two girls. When she died she was 95 years old.
--Jennie Rhinehart (updated 10/28/2018) |
