I live in Benton, Tennessee. It is in Polk County and is the extreme southeast corner of the state. Polk County adjoins North Carolina to the east and Georgia to the south. I am 25 miles from the N.C. state line and about 10 miles from the Georgia state line. I am about 65 miles from Knoxville and about 75 from Gatlinburg. I am about 15 miles east of Interstate 75 halfway between Cleveland and Athens, Tennessee.

I was raised in the mountains here without running water or electricity until I was about 12 years old. My nearest neighbor was a mile away. We had no car and walked where we wanted to go.

The general store was about a mile away also and the Church was almost a mile. We walked to church twice on Sundays and on Wednesday nights. I went to a 2 room school. There was the "Little" room which had grades 1-3 and the "Big" room which had 4-8.

The reason for more grades in the Big room was because most students quit before they reached 4th grade and others quit as they got into 5th, 6th, etc. My eighth  grade class had 7 people in it.

We had little and wore ragged clothes but they were always clean. Although we had little I don't remember ever going hungry. We had beans and taters and daddy hunted squirrels, rabbits, etc in season. We raised two hogs and butchered them every year so we had pork for much of the winter and spring. We had a milk cow so we had fresh milk and butter. We made a large garden and mama canned beans and numerous other vegetables.

At Christmas we usually got oranges and apples and a few nuts... maybe a bit of candy. Any gifts we got were very inexpensive.

The train came through our tiny community and about twice a year we would ride it to Etowah, Tennessee where daddy and mama would buy some of the things they needed that were unavailable in our little general store. I remember just being in awe of the sights in town. There was a dime store and I remember spending hours just walking through and looking at all the wonderful little "made in occupied Japan' items they had.

My early years we were never able to buy anything but when I was around 12 Daddy would give us 50 cents each and hours went by trying to figure which thing to buy. The movie theater was 25 cents and sometimes we would go to the movie. We had to spend all day in town because the train ran early in the morning and didn't return until late afternoon.

I was in awe of the fact that the town had electricity and sold ice cream. We seldom ever got ice cream. There was an ice truck that ran by our house once a week but the smallest piece of ice was a quarter. We seldom had the quarter but occasionally we did and would buy the chunk of ice and make ice cream in a little half gallon crank ice cream maker. Such a glorious event it was.

My older sister remembers once when Daddy was out of work. I was a baby and she was about five years old. She said he broke her piggy bank to get train fare to go check on a job. She remembers crying about her piggy bank and mama trying to reassure her that her bank and money would be replaced. Train fare was less than a dollar and her piggy bank probably had about a dollar's worth of change in it. Daddy got the job.

Most of the land around our community was owned by the U.S. Forest Service. I remember seeing their green trucks going by and when there was a woods fire they were quickly there. I went to work for the U.S. Forest Service on the Cherokee National Forest when I was 21 and spent the next 32 years in timber management and fire control.

So I was born, raised, made a career in and still live in these mountains. I guess I am a mountain man through and through. My dad came from Decaturville in the early 1930's as a member of Roosevelt's CCC (civilian conservation corps). He met my mother here and never returned to Decatur or Perry County except for a couple of visits in the 1960s and again in the 1980s.

He also moved my grandmother here. I grew up about 300 miles from Perry County. I have been there and have visited some of the relatives. I have been to the Parrish Cemetery at Mousetail but most of the stones were unmarked.

 My grandfather, Johnson, is buried there but I don't know which grave is his. If you will give me your regular postal address I will send you a cd with all the Parrish documents on it... there are just too many to send email and when I scanned them I used too high of a resolution making them bigger than documents needed to be. I scanned them as photographs and they didn't need that much resolution. I will also add the photos I think you might be interested in. I have some of Onie's sons and I have one of Minnie's daughter, Lessie with her husband Robert Ledbetter. I got it from Lema Dell Ledbetter through Terry Shelton.

 I have a few others that don't come to mind but I will look through the my pictures and add to the cd the ones I think might interest you.

By

Thurman Coy Parish, Jr.

Thank you so much for sharing!