A glimpse into the past: Growing up in Lamont

Submitted by Rebekah Sheats

A glimpse into the life of the Thomas Scott family offers a fascinating picture of what life was like in Lamont during the 1940s and 1950s.
Thomas was the second son of Sam Scott and his wife Viola Timmons. Born in 1944, Thomas doesn’t remember WWII, but he has vivid memories of growing up in Lamont’s rural farming community.
As a young child, Thomas began helping his mother in the kitchen. “Whatever needed to be done, I did it,” he noted. He shelled peas, cut greens, washed dishes and even assisted with canning.
The kitchen was always a place of bustle and energy. Viola prepared three cooked meals a day for her hungry family. Breakfast consisted of grits, fried eggs, bacon and oatmeal. Beans, pork chops, chicken, etc. were served at the evening meal. The leftovers would be reheated for the next day’s lunch. Thomas recalled, “The procedure was that you cooked enough for supper so you had sufficient left over from the night before to eat for lunch.” Whatever the meal, it would be accompanied by cornbread or biscuits baked fresh that day.
As mother and housewife, Viola always had an abundance of tasks to keep herself busy. Besides her work in the kitchen, she assisted with the field work and other farm chores. She also milked the family cow, using the milk to make cheese and butter.
Sam Thomas grew corn, cotton and peanuts, and he worked the land with a mule-drawn plow. Young Thomas began plowing at eight or nine years old. “It wasn’t difficult,” he noted. If the mule was properly trained, Thomas explained, the animal wasn’t hard to work with, “But a mule is something you have to train. The tone of voice you use with that mule, it meant a lot. And how you treated it was important.”
Thomas continued: “I plowed with a mule. Mom plowed with a mule. And my older brother plowed with a mule.” The family depended entirely on mules for planting until Sam Scott purchased a tractor in the mid-1950s.
The first cold snap of winter each year heralded the beginnings of “hog killin’ time” in the Lamont community. Extended family came together to help each other on this busy but joyous occasion. Abraham and Clifford Scott (two of Thomas’ uncles) lived on the family farm and joined with Thomas’ father Sam every year to butcher each other’s hogs. Each Saturday, they’d work at one of the brother’s farms until all the hogs for that season had been processed.
Cane grinding was another annual activity. Men and boys would chop down the cane, load it on a wagon, and haul it to the mill on the farm. The mill was mule-powered. The machinery was operated by hitching a mule to the mill and having the beast walk circles around it. As a young boy, Thomas helped by feeding the cane into the mill. “I wish somebody would give me a dollar for every stalk of cane I stuck in that mill!” he exclaimed seventy years later. “I wouldn’t have to be out here farming now!”
The mill crushed the cane, squeezing the juice into a large vat. The juice was then cooked for several hours over an open fire until it turned into syrup.
Farm life meant long hours and hard work, but it also had its lighter moments. When work for the day was completed, neighborhood boys would gather for a game of horseshoes or football. Fishing was also a coveted pastime. Thomas recalled: “We went fishing every chance we got. We’d go out to the creeks in the woods and find any good fishing hole we could.”
Thomas and his friends used worms and sawyers for bait. (A sawyer is the larva of a large longhorn beetle. It bores tunnels in recently felled trees and can be located by its audible chewing sound.) With these tasty creatures and store-bought hooks, Thomas caught catfish, mudfish, pike, and anything else that would bite.
Summing it up, Thomas noted, “I had a normal life. My parents taught us the Bible to the best of their ability. They tried to give us some good doctrine. And they taught us how to sustain life. They taught us to work.”
Thomas is grateful for the upbringing he was given in the small Lamont community. He lives there to this day, with his wife of fifty-three years, where he farms the land and continues to enjoy the delicious home cooking he knows and loves.