Monthly Archives: May 2015

Coley Gully

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by Nelda Rachels

Some of us think of Palmersville’s once famous local landmark, Coley Gully, as the Grand Canyon in miniature, but then maybe those of us who have never actually seen the Grand Canyon are just easily impressed.   Perhaps at one long ago and ancient point in time, Coley Gully was much larger than it is now and under the ocean at that.  According to UTM Professor William McCutchen, this area was once part of the Gulf of Mexico.  He seemed happy to display his geological maps of sedimentary deposits and shelves showing the once-upon-a-time shoreline, which stretched as far north as Southern Illinois and as far east as the Tennessee River.  Gradually, the Gulf has been filling in with sediment, leaving the area as it is today.  In fact, on my visit fifteen years ago the Gully was much deeper and impressive than it is now.  Current landowners have sped the process of stopping the massive erosion problem and of filling in the Gully by planting pine seedlings.  These trees are now massive entities in themselves and are doing their job nicely…too nicely for those of us who like to explore big ditches.

On a recent visit to Coley Gully, I was struck by the beauty of the white sandy “beaches” in the gully’s depths.  Chickasaw and other area Indians probably admired that same sandy basin, perhaps using the sandstone rocks with their ironstone concretions at the gully’s bottom as color for facial or pictorial paintings.  McCutchen demonstrated this by licking his index finger, lightly touching the rock I had brought, and smearing his “dirty” finger casually across a bit of scrap paper.  The miracle of color—a pretty reddish brown—skated across the white page.

Jumping ahead a few hundred years to the 1930s and 40s, I’m told that Coley Gully at that time was the playground for another culture, teenagers of European descent.  Many of those same teenagers, though older now, still remember when Coley Gully was the “happenin’” place.  Hubert McKelvey, Hubert Smethwick, Mason Kemp, and other Palmersville residents shared a hodge-podge of memories about the area with me.

Hubert Smethwick remembers that school field trips and picnics were often held at Coley Gully.  He says students roasted marshmallows and hot dogs for picnics.  Other innocent fun included nighttime bonfires, storytelling, and sandstone rocks piled high and heated up in order to watch them explode like loud firecrackers.  Mason Kemp remembers that seniors usually went to Coley Gully in the latter part of the thirties but that Kentucky Lake took over as the field trip of choice by 1941.  However, Palmersville Seniors weren’t the only “jet-setters” to visit Coley Gully. Young people from all over West Tennessee and Kentucky knew about this big ditch and frequented it in their old Model Ts, or as Mr. McKelvey remembers—an old Studebaker.  Some of these visitors remember playing a game called “Perhaps.”   Young boys and men would slide down the steep sandy sides of the gully.  “Perhaps” they’d skin their bottoms or “perhaps” they wouldn’t.

Hubert McKelvey remembers sand in the pockets of teenagers and in the shovels of do-it-yourselfers that came to the gully to collect the lovely, pristine sand for mortar.    He also remembers the name of the owner from which the gully gets its name.  A man by the name of Coley (the spelling is in dispute by locals, though a deed search could settle that question once and for all) Adkins lived near the gully a bit before Mr. McKelvey’s time, perhaps during the early 1900s.  Mr. Adkins’ home was located between two gullies and near a stream.  Other locals hint at a moonshine still on the site (whether before, during, or after Coley Adkins’ lived there, no one seems to know) where whisky flowed perhaps swifter than the Gulf waters could swirl around those sandstone cliffs.  Today, it isn’t moonshine that residents nearby worry about, but the rumored big cat or panther that haunts the area, preying upon the sheep and cattle.

Pine trees now obscure the two gullies (only the larger one is “famous”) and their depths are not nearly as impressive as they were a few short years ago.  Teenagers now have their computer screens, fast cars, and bustling malls to keep them occupied though Mack’s Grove Baptist Church does go to Coley Gully for occasional cookouts.  They must not mind going to a little trouble.  These days, one must locate gracious property owners, ask for gate keys, climb boundary fences, fend off cows, ticks, and poison ivy, all while looking over one shoulder for that big cat.  It’s probably easier to get to the Grand Canyon.  I’ve heard it’s a really big ditch!

from http://www.utm.edu/staff/leeb/fair/gully.htm

Part II: The Rise and Decline of Austin Springs

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by Nelda Rachels

A town never dies as long as there are people who remember it, and people who are willing to record and read about those memories.  Vivian Rickman, a Palmersville resident, remembers her visits to Austin Springs back when it was still a thriving community.

When Mrs. Rickman was a child, tourists were no longer coming for the healing effects of the mineral spring, but locals still went there to shop.  Mrs. Rickman says that going to the larger and farther away town of Dresden was a real treat, which usually only happened when relative Charlie Stephenson took her and her family in his Model T.  Since she lived at Fairview, only about five miles from Austin Springs, it was closer to go there in the family wagon.

George Harris owned one of the two general mercantile stores popular during Mrs. Rickman’s day.  The Johnson brothers, Clyde and Chap owned the other.   A 1931 article written by local correspondent Ela Frields mentions the Harris Brothers laying the foundation for a general merchandise store.  Residents remember it as being the larger of the two stores.  Mrs. Rickman liked buying a soda pop for five cents or buying clothes in the Harris store.  One year, her parents bought her a fur coat with shiny brass buttons. Sometimes the family would walk on the boardwalk over to Sam Dudley’s place to buy some healing salve.

Howard Harris, former postmaster at Dukedom and a relative of the now deceased George Harris, remembers that George had quite a sense of humor.  Mr. Harris told me this story: One day, a woman sent her child to George’s store to buy some sugar.  The sugar was in a barrel, so some had to be scooped out, weighed, and packaged.  As a joke, Harris packaged sand instead of sugar and sent it home by way of the child.  Later, the woman came back in with her “sugar” and stated that she had decided she didn’t want any sugar after all.  And before George could stop her, she had dumped her package of sand back into his barrel of sugar. The joke was on him!  Mr. Harris told other delightful tales on George.  It must have been a fun place to shop.  No wonder Mrs. Rickman liked to go there.

Ela Frields reported in a February 3, 1931 article in the Dresden Enterprise and Sharon Tribune that the Johnson General Store had been burglarized on the previous Sunday.  The thieves had stolen overalls, shirts, cigars, cigarettes, cheese, and money.  In this same article, Mrs. Frields reported that the old Austin Springs Hotel (mentioned in the last article) built “some forty years” before had burned down due to a kitchen flue fire.  By this time, tourists were no longer using the hotel as a place to stay.  The campground near the Springs, too, was no longer in use.  Instead, the hotel had been converted into a dwelling.  Luckily, the then current residents Dewey Ainley and family escaped and were later installed in Mrs. Lottie Cantrell’s tenant house.  Howard Harris remembers watching the hotel burn from a window of his home when he was just five years old.

There continued to be stores and businesses after the hotel’s burning.  Perhaps a “hall of fame” of a few of the former owners and residents should be remembered here.  Clarence Berryman, and later, Bant Hall, owned a blacksmith shop.  Carey Frields owned a sawmill, Charlie Vincent cut hair in 1946 for twenty-five cents, and George Harris and the Johnson Brothers owned the two mercantiles.  There was also a beer-joint, cream station, gristmill, switchboard, and probably several other businesses.  There was also a string band consisting of Carey Frields and Charlie Vincent, violinists; Delmas Copeland and Bant Hall, guitarists; and Chap Johnson on harmonica.  Other early residents of the area had last names like Acree, Murrell, Austin, McGuire, Bynum, Dunn, Gargis, Farmer, and Stunson.

The Decline of Austin Springs probably began when the last tourist came and put his or her jug down into the spring.  After that, the decline was steady.  With the advent of cars and the ensuing mobility, small towns could no longer compete with larger nearby towns that had better buying and job opportunities for the public.  One by one the stores and businesses dwindled away as the population began traveling away to do their shopping elsewhere.  In addition, as Mrs. Rickman said, “The people just faded away and so did the town.”

Even the mineral spring is no longer there.  It is buried somewhere under the bridge structure nearby. Community members remember that the highway department reworked the road and bridge several years back and covered it up.  Some still aren’t happy about that event.  Even the road, which cut through the main part of town, is no longer there.  Only the trail in tall grass marks the spot where Mrs. Rickman used to walk the boardwalk to Sam Dudley’s place.  However, there are still several homes clustered nearby, along with an empty store, built in the sixties.  Austin Springs may have declined from what it once was, but it hasn’t fallen.  The community still exists in the people who live there and in the memories they share about the past.

Read Part I here.

from http://www.utm.edu/staff/leeb/Austin%20Springs/Part%20I.htm

Part I: The Rise of Austin Springs

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by Nelda Rachels (First published in Hometown)

The obsessions, the history, the survival of any small town usually depend somewhat on the total national or world picture. Somehow, the fevered obsessions of a nation can settle in even the smallest of its communities. One such fever was the 1800s health-craze for mineral water. The obsession for a health cure for ailments as diverse as female weakness, arthritis, gout, neuralgia, stomach upset, and asthma spread from Saratoga Springs in New York to Ojo Caliente Springs in New Mexico and all points in between, including Northwest Tennessee’s Austin Springs, located in the first district of Weakley County.

It’s hard to say how or where this fever started, but somewhere, someone decided that mineral water could cure almost anything. In fact, springs had long been sacred places of healing for Native Americans. In the early 1800s, many doctors, not a few quacks, and several real estate developers touted the mineral water cure through newspaper advertisements, brochures, and word-of-mouth.

Springs of all types were able to lay claim to cures from the ensuing testimonials of “cured” visitors no matter the type of mineral contained in the waters.  Most springs contained either salt, silica, sulphur, potassium, iron, manganese, alum, iodide, etc., or a combination of several of these elements.  As these springs became crowded with visitors (which increased with rail travel), the social aspects of the visit may have had as curative an effect on visitors (perhaps more so) than the waters themselves. Eventually, what would later become known as Austin Springs also attracted a heavy volume of tourists.

It’s difficult to say when the spring first became an attraction; however, by piecing together oral histories of the locals with newspaper accounts and Virginia C. Vaughan’s book, Weakley County, we can safely place the timeframe in the latter 1800s when Christopher Columbus Austin (better known as Chris), a farmer, owned land on Powell Creek. When Chris discovered a mineral spring on the creek’s bank, he walled it in with stone or brick curbing.

How people found out about the spring is a mystery, but by about 1888 the community sported a hotel to accommodate the many tourists who came for the spring’s healing effects. And rail travel did help. Oral histories from the community say that surreys full of visitors would come from the local train stations of Mayfield or Fulton. People who came in their own individual wagons would reside in tent cities in the campground set up near the spring; some stayed in the hotel, but all came with empty jugs to the spring’s mouth.

Most locals say that the spring water’s curative powers came from drinking it, not from bathing in it. It is likely, however, that a few folks drew up enough water to heat up and to bathe in because some felt that it took both methods to obtain the greatest benefit. Nearly everyone who has had personal knowledge of the water describe it as looking bad, smelling bad (like bad eggs), and tasting bad (like iron). It took a brave soul to drink it.

By 1889, Austin Springs had applied for a post office. Because there was already an Austin Springs, Tennessee, the post office took the name of “Unity.” The first postmaster was A.M. McQuire (1889-1893), followed by Aaron W. Duke (1893-1902) and David A. Frields (1902-1905). At various points in time, the town also contained general stores, a blacksmith shop, saloon, lock-up (jail), two gristmills, a cream station, barbershop, switchboard, restaurant, livery stable, sawmill, churches, and nearby schools. Tom Johnson built the first general merchandise store which his sons, Chap and Clyde, later continued to operate. Font Gibson (pronounced “Fount”) owned another. During the 1930s, George Harris, uncle to Howard Harris (who lives near Austin Springs and the source of much of my information), ran a general merchandise store, which contained groceries and millinery full of hats, shoes, and clothing.

Palmersville resident Vivian Rickman well remembers this store and how much she enjoyed shopping for clothes there.

Here is Part Two

from http://www.utm.edu/staff/leeb/Austin%20Springs/Part%20I.htm

Palmersville Man ‘Attacked’

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From The Weakley County Press

November 1, 2001

Palmersville man ‘attacked’ by 600 gallon water bed mattress
By KAREN HELGESON

Staff Reporter

When James Cook of Palmersville opened his bedroom door last week, he received the shock of a lifetime his new waterbed mattress filled the entire room.

Cook began to fill up his new water bed mattress Monday, Oct. 22 and was driving into town when he suddenly remembered he had forgotten to turn off the water.

Rushing home to his trailer, he opened the bedroom door to find that the mattress now filled the entire room.  According to a Weakley County Sheriff’s Department report, Cook promptly called 911 to announce that the mattress was “about seven feet tall and much wider than the actual bed frame.”

Cook requested help from the fire department in bracing the sides of the bed, and said that if the mattress exploded, it would destroy the outside wall of his home.

Weakley County 911 in turn advised the Palmersville Fire Department that there was a 600-gallon water bomb inside Cook’s residence.

But before the PFD could respond, Cook called 911 a second time to report that the bed frame had just “exploded and collapsed.”  When the frame crumpled, several screws poked through the mattress, causing massive leaks.  The Cook family began to evacuate the trailer.

Minutes later, Cook called 911 a third time, stating that water was pouring from underneath the trailer, and that he believed the floor was going to give way.  Emergency dispatchers advised Cook to stand by until the fire department arrived.

PFD firefighters soon arrived shortly and they drained the mattress.

The home was not flooded, although the bed and bedroom were both damaged.

The Cook family was able to return the trailer that evening.