2020 Life Logs, Day 106: Ollie and Hayes
Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Weather: Overcast and Rainy; High 49 degrees, Low 36 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
If my parents were still alive, they would be celebrating their 96th wedding anniversary today. So, I decided to spend part of my day writing about them. I share that story below. In addition, I spent a couple of hours continuing the packing up of 60 Vidal and prepared for my Memoir Writing class tomorrow. That was it for my day. Now here’s my tribute to my parents.
96th Wedding Anniversary Tribute to Ollie and Hayes
If my parents were still alive, they would have celebrated their 96th wedding anniversary today. I am the youngest of their seven children. The first two children died, one at birth and one at age 3 of whooping cough, but five of us survived. By the time I came along, one sister was already married and the others were teenagers. Only two of us are still living and I have it as one of ‘missions’ in life to share some of the family stories with the younger generations—grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren of Ollie and Hayes. So, on this, their anniversary day, I share a little background information and the story of their meeting and wedding day. It is a story of country people from southern West Virginia in the early part of the 20th century. What I cherish about recounting these family stories is that they tell the story of the building of this country, one family at a time. Each family has its own unique story and I want to do my part to pass the stories of my family on to the younger generations.
On Tuesday, April 15, 1924, Ollie Lillian Biggs married Hayes Winfred Martin in Laurel Branch, West Virginia. There was never a town named Laurel Branch. It was just an area with a few farms. Today locals in the little town of Paint Bank, Virginia, only six miles to the east of Laurel Branch, can’t tell you where it is. But the home Hayes grew up in, where Ollie and Hayes were married, is still there in the curve of Monroe County Road 17 where Potts Creek makes a gentle turn from running west to the south.
In 1924, my grandfather owned the land on both sides of Potts Creek. Fred Martin’s home and farm were on one side of the road. His sawmill on the other. My grandmother died in 1910 of what was called consumption at that time, tuberculosis now. Hayes was not quite seven years old when his mother died. He once told me that he dropped out of school to take care of his mother and his little brother. And as far as I know, he never had any further formal education. His father remarried and he viewed his stepmother as a wicked witch. Her name was Willie and from my dad’s point of view, she used her two stepsons as servants. My dad never, ever talked about his past, but according to information I gleaned from my mother, my dad left home when he was 13 and went to work in the mines. I always assumed she meant in the coal mines, but the closest coal mine would have been at least 75 miles away. I learned in recent years that there were iron ore mines in Paint Bank, only six miles from home, so it is more likely that as a very young teenager, this is where he fled. Again, according to my mother, he was injured in a mining incident when he was 19 and moved back home to Laurel Branch in the summer of 1923. That is when they met.
Laurel Branch is in Monroe County which occupies the southeast corner West Virginia. Along the southern border of Monroe County is Peters Mountain. It is the dividing line between West Virginia and Virginia, and it looms over most of Monroe County. Laurel Branch is on the Virginia side of the Peters Mountain in an area that was maintained by the new state of West Virginia when it separated from Virginia in 1863. The nearest little town to Laurel Branch is Paint Bank, Virginia which is six miles to the east. The area once known as Laurel Branch and a narrow strip of land going about six miles further south to Waitville, is all there is of Monroe County on the south side of Peters Mountain. My mother’s family was from the larger land area of Monroe County to the north of Peters Mountain. She was the only girl in a family of the six children that survived infancy. Her father made a living by hauling things, mainly timber, with his horses. As a family, they moved to where her father could find work. In the summer of 1923, the family was living in Laurel Branch, West Virginia, where Ollie’s father was hauling timber to my grandfather’s sawmill. One summer day, my mother and her girlfriend, Nellie Lane, went to the store at Fred Martin’s place. Fred was my grandfather. As I stated earlier, Hayes was home due to a work injury. He was stirring apple butter in a shed next to the house when Ollie and Nellie walked by. Hayes tried to get them to help him stir, but they were in a hurry to get to the store to see their boyfriends. Ollie’s boyfriend was Tom Martin who helped run the store and Nellie was interested in his older brother Junior. Hayes got someone to stir for him and followed the girls around the house to the store. That night they all went to silent movie that was shown in my grandfather’s barn. By the way, that barn is still standing. In later years, my mom said, “During the movie, Hayes got up on a bale of hay and kept teasing us.” He asked to walk Ollie home, but her brothers said no. But by the next April, they were married.
The next part of the story is almost unbelievable, but my mother told a convincing story. First of all, the wedding was to be a double ceremony. Barely 16-year-old Ollie Lillian Biggs was to marry 20-year-old Hayes Winfred Martin at the same that Ollie’s brother Lee Poindexter Biggs was to marry Hayes’ first cousin, Gladys Porterfield. My father at age 20 was the oldest of the four. The night before the wedding, my mother and my Aunt Gladys decided they should cut their long hair. They used a bowl which they put on their heads while the other did the cutting. In their minds, the result was a stylish and very popular 1920’s bob. But the next day when Hayes and Lee saw their wives-to-be, they almost called off the wedding. It did go ahead, but when it came time for my father to say, “I do”, he stubbornly just stood there staring at my mother’s hair. My Uncle Lee said “I do” for him and my mother was never sure if she legally married my father or her brother! Then comes the really unbelievable part. As Ollie told the story, “The boys (Hayes and Lee) only had enough money to get one tick (mattress cover) stuffed with hay, so we planned to share one bed with the four of us in an empty house known to be haunted.” Why not? After all, it was free. As a joke, the man who stuffed the tick overstuffed it, so when they all four tried to get in bed, they kept rolling off. According to my mother, they simply giggled that first night away until my father swore he saw a headless horseman riding around the house. Thinking it was a ghost, they all ran home as fast as they could. No one had ever talked to Ollie about the facts of life and she swore until the day she died that on that wedding day, she had no idea where babies came from. Regardless, nine months later, she had the first of her seven children. I guess she quickly figured that one out.
