I chose the Alabama Wiregrass as the main locale for my books because my mother’s people have lived there since 1829. Her stories of life on the farm in her youth resonated with me as I began writing the series.
I have always lived in urban settings, have always had indoor plumbing, electricity, and every modern convenience. My visits to the farms of relatives when I was growing up acquainted me with the use of an outhouse and a back porch pump, along with the fun of feasting on a plethora of watermelons, figs, scuppernongs, and fresh-from–the-vine-vegetables; chewing on sugar cane stalks; petting the baby pigs and the biddies and the mules; and trying to get used to the taste of unpasturized milk straight from the cow’s udder. What I did not get a taste of was farm work.
When I was five years old and my family traveled from Daytona to Dothan for a visit,
Cousin Henry (my mother’s generation) suggested that I was now old enough to work in the fields. My mother had picked cotton from the age of five until she left the farm at the age of twenty-two. I was itching to touch the soft, squishy cotton bolls bursting forth on every bush, but my mother only allowed me to pick one. Then she said to Henry, “that is the last cotton my daughter will ever pick.” And that was true, except for the bolls I picked at Westville Living History Museum in Georgia decades later in preparation for the writing of my books.
The stories my mother and aunts told me about farm life in the Wiregrass ranged from a heartbreaking account of a baby sister’s death from a disease now long eradicated; to the amusing tale of a teenaged sister literally “throwing the bull” – impatiently tossing a stubborn bull calf over a fence gate; to ghost stories like that of a farm wife repeatedly seen after her death perched on her favorite spot, a fence post, still wearing her sunbonnet and clasping her parasol. All of these stories and more found their way into the Wiregrass Chronicles.
WIREGRASS CHRONICLES ~ Your Road Map to the Wiregrass
Glenda Stroud-Peace, author of The Wiregrass Chronicles, a four-book series, is a former English teacher and descendant of Alabama Wiregrass pioneers who enjoys sharing her heritage and expanding her knowledge of this region. In the first book in the series, Long Rows to Hoe, she writes about the early Wiregrass settlers and their descendants, as well as indigenous people, from the Creek Wars through World War I.
Be sure to read Wiregrass Chronicles -- Long Rows to Hoe, to learn more about the Wiregrass and the colorful history of its inhabitants. Buy your copy today by clicking the Buy Books button above!
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