Virgil Lupton - Proud to Call Goose Creek Island Home

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE RIVER is an anthology of the late Nancy Winfrey's human interest stories that she wrote as a correspondent for the Pamlico News, a local paper in Pamlico County, North Carolina that she owned and published. Published in 1995, Nancy interviewed Mr. Virgil Lupton of Hobucken, and recounted his story in her book.  Below is excerpt of his story.

Reprinted with permission of The Pamlico News. Photos courtesy Nancy Winfrey (C)

  

Virgil Morris Lupton, February 27, 1900 - August 9, 1998

      "I've done very little traveling," said Virgil Morris Lupton of Hobucken, "and Virginia is about as far as I have ever been."  And, he added he hasn't missed it one bit.  "Goose Creek Island is 'Home Sweet Home' to me...there's no place like it and I'm not satisfied anywhere else but here," he said with a very assuring tone in his voice.
     He is a "true-blue" born and raised Goose Creek Island, as were his parents and grandparents before him.  Mr. Lupton was born February 27, 1900, son of Josiah "Jo-Sire" S. Lupton and Lodenea Spencer.
     Virgil was one of two sons and two daughters.

Good Life But Not Always Easy

     Living in Hobucken, Mr. Lupton's father farmed and fished.  "When I was a boy growing up, everybody pitched in to help...you're doggone right they did," he said.  "Papa did all his farming with only one team and you had to walk that mule every day and my daddy also tended about twenty acres like that.  When we were old enough, we helped out," commented Mr. Virgil.

     He also said that his father cleared land and built their house and, "I reckon he got he logs for his house off his land."

     When his parents built their home, there were no fireplaces and the house was heated with a woodstove, a source of heat Mr. Lupton prefers even today.  "My mother," said Virgil, "cooked on a woodstove.  We ate a lot of cornbread in those days.  There were mills nearby where we would take the corn we raised and have it ground.  We never went hungry, ever.  It may not have been exactly what you wanted, but it was good for us."

     Mr. Virgil told of how his mother would make soap in a large pot out in the yard.  As he shook his head from side to side, he said, "Boy, that was some soap.  You couldn't hardly get it to lather to save your life!"

     Those were also days of the wonderful feather beds.  As a child, the Lupton family all slept on feather mattresses or ticks, as they were often called.  "To get the feathers to make the mattresses, my mother raised her own geese and would pick the soft down from them...she wouldn't have the stiff feathers because they would poke through the covering," he explained.  "When Violet and I were married, our parents gave us a feather mattress," he noted.

     There was no such thing as boredom in those days because there was very little spare time.  He said his mother made all the clothes for the family.  "Back then," he continued, "you didn't throw anything away 'cause it was too hard to come by.  When we would wear out clothes, we would use them for wash cloths and things like that."

     Since work days were long, he said that what little socializing there was, was centered mostly around church activities.  They did have nice Christmases, he added, spending that day with family.  "We would go into the woods and cut a big cedar tree...and I'm still doing that."  Continuing, Mr. Lupton said, "We would hang our stockings up but never got much but an orange or apple and a little piece of candy, but we were excited as we could be...it was Christmas just the same."

     Life wasn't always easy before paved roads, cars, telephones or other modern inventions.  Since weather forecasting was non-existent, great storms struck with little or no warning.  "I know of one storm that came early one morning," said Virgil, "and we left our house and went to stay with grandmother.  Water was all over the place."  He said that when it did look like bad weather was brewing up, they would "just keep a close eye on the tide and keep checking and that's about all you could do."

     He told of how lucky he and his family were to escape a bad flu epidemic that wiped out a lot of people on the Island when he was a youngster.  "We were really lucky," he sighed.

Accidents Did Happen

     Mr. Lupton said when he was growing up he had a couple of bad experiences.  "I got my hand almost ground-up when I was about 12 years old and had to go to Mesic to stay with my aunt to be closer to the doctor," he recollected.  "I got my hand caught between the cog and chain when I was thrashing field peas and wasn't looking at what I was doing.  I was watching some children play and slapped my hand right in there!  It almost cut one of my fingers right off and broke another one."

     Then, Virgil told of another stroke of bad luck when he was 15 years old.  "This time," he said, "I got my leg broken when I was riding a horse and the horse fell on my leg...It really started swelling up and I still remember that it happened on a Saturday.  It was Monday before the doctor was able to come from Bayboro.  Dr. Dees what his name.  Sure enough, I had broken my leg and he had to set it and I was flat on my back for a while."

First Horse

     When Virgil was quite young, he got the first horse he ever owned.  As he told the story, he said, "It was given to me by an old man.  The horse was sick all the time and would, without any warning, lie down on the ground and refuse to get up," he said.  One day, Virgil said the man was harnessing the horse up and he looked at me and asked if I wanted the animal.  "I went home and asked Papa if I could have it and he said yes."  Virgil said he took the horse home and fed him and looked after him real good.  "Then," Lupton continued, "the horse got down on the ground and wouldn't get up."  He said he went and asked the old man if he could help him get the horse up.  The man told him that he had gotten rid of the horse when he had given it to him, but that he would help him this one time.

     Virgil said his father decided to harness the horse up one day and "I worked him hard in the fields all day long," said Lupton,  "and then took him back and fed him."  From that time on, he said he didn't have any more trouble with that horse.

     "Shortly after that, a neighbor's mule died," he said, "and the man needed a team to finish his crop.  I traded him the horse for a cotton patch.  I picked the cotton and sold it and got enough money to buy my first bicycle...it had a little red and yellow on it and I was a proud somebody over that thing!"

     Mr. Virgil said a freight boat would leave Goose Creek Island every week and he gave the money to the captain and asked him to buy a bicycle for him when he reached Washington.

     Virgil's eyes lit up when he began talking about seeing a car for the very first time.  "I had not even heard tell of them."  One day, he said, a Model-T was chugging along and that's when he and couple of his friends first saw a car bumping down the road.  He said they were so alarmed that they darted into the woods.  "That was a funny looking sight coming down the road making a loud noise like chugga, chugga, chugga.  It stopped at a store just down the road and we went there to look it over real good," he commented.

Early Marriage

     When Virgil and Violet were married on December 25, 1927, his new bride was only sixteen years old and Virgil was a young 21.  Violet Mae Leary was born and raised on Goose Creek Island.

     Mr. Lupton said when he and Violet were first married, they lived in a small bungalow just a short way from where they later settled.  "When we first started out, we were given a few things to help us furnish our small house."

Those Island Mosquitoes!

     Virgil said his and Violet's bungalow had no screens in the windows or doors, so at night time they had to put tobacco cloth over the bed in order to sleep.  "And," he said smiling, "you just hoped you didn't have a mosquito inside with you.  If you did, you couldn't sleep at all."

     "I've seen so many mosquitoes you had to beat them off the mules to keep them working and to keep them from lying down on the ground and rolling over," he said.

     "When I was growing up," he remarked, "I used to hear talk that the mosquitoes got so thick that when they got between you and the sun, they would block it out.  I've never seen that myself, but I have heard talk about it."

     Trying to battle mosquitoes was an ongoing challenge.  "We used to make a fire in a wash pot and smother it so it would smolder and smoke.  We did this late in the evening and then placed the smoldering pot near the door to our house."  Laughing," Mr. Virgil said, "It would smoke your eyes right out of your head near about."  While working in the fields, he said they would mostly just 'swat a lot.'

Breaking Ground

     Three years after Virgil and Violet were married, he began clearing a thick wooded are where would build their home.  "I also began breaking out some land to farm.  It was thick as could be," he said, " I cleared lots of land around where the house was to be built, enough to also build a smoke house and barn."

     "My father-in-law gave me seven big pine trees growing on his land to help build my house if I'd go cut them."  Virgil said that with the help of his uncle, Roger Spencer, they downed the huge trees by using a lot of muscle and a cross-cut saw and then hauled them out on a mule drawn cart.  After that, they carried the trees to have them sawed.  "Then," told Virgil, "we racked the boards up to dry."

     "It took a long time to clear that land 'cause I didn't have anything to work with but an ax, saw and shovel...no power saw and those things," he noted.  "I also did all the ditching around the farm and house by hand...covering an area of 21 acres, all having to be ditched.  But not like my daddy did, he did a lot his ditching by the light of a lantern during night time."

     Mr Virgil said they lived in their small house until  they had their home far enough along to move into it and ended up with eight rooms.

Waterway and Alligators

     In the latter part of the 1920's, work was ongoing cutting a waterway through, which would become part of the Intracoastal Waterway.  Virgil well remembers the waterway being dug.  He said he went to work helping when they first stated.  Prior to that time, he said that could just walk through the woods where the waterway is now.  "They had a bunch of people working on that job," he commented.  The canal was dredged out with a dredging machine and "I worked on the pipe line.  The pipes were large enough for a person to crawl through."

     Virgil was the rejects were carried through the big pipes and deposited in the marsh.  "We had to move the pipes on ahead as the dredging continued."  He noted that when the pipes became loose, they had to be tightened.  "You could hear the oyster and clam shells and other stuff, along with big rocks, hitting and clanking as they went through," he spoke.  He said that oftentimes big stumps would get jammed up in them.  And, he noted, "it even spit alligators out of the pipe into the marsh."

     "When I was growing up, there used to be lots of alligators in the boggy, marshy areas here," he recalled.  "I have, a time or two, found some alligator nests.  Some of the alligators were good size too, about 16-feet long, but I haven't seen any in a long, long time though."

Predictions Come True

     When Virgil was a young child, he would often be treated to a few "words of wisdom" by his grandfather...words he never forgot.

     Mr. Lupton said that numerous times his grandfather would tell him that "there would come a day when people would be about to fly through the air like and bird and you will see a waterway cut through this area."

     He said his grandfather told him he wouldn't live long enough to see it happen, "but you children will!"  Virgil added that his grandfather also told him some tales when they were young that would scare them to death.

Wells Cisterns and Ice

     Today, we take an ice cube out of our freezers and don't give it a second thought.  Well, as Mr. Virgil would attest, there was a day when ice was hard to come by.

     "We didn't have ice when I was a boy, except for what you could find around when it got cold enough to freeze," he said.

     And before the days of ice boxes, Mr. Lupton said they would drop their milk down into the well to keep it cool.

     Speaking of wells, he said he dug his own well.  "The well opening was level with the ground," he explained, "and was just a deep hole in the earth.  I kept a cover over the top to help keep insects and things like that out," he added.

     He also told of an interesting and popular gathering place called a Savannah well, a well that was dug there before his time.  Mr. Virgil said the well was just east of his home.  "People used to come from all over Goose Creek Island to wash their clothes here," he recollected.  "It was a gathering place and people used to even fill a barrel and load it in the wagon to take home with them," he added.  "Someone did some digging, because it was really a big well," he spoke.  As a young boy, Lupton said he remembered drinking from the well and that it was really good water.  Like other wells in that area, the Savannah well was ground level and people would just lower their buckets down to fill them.

     Soon many wells were replaced by cisterns.  A while after he and Violet were married and well settled into their home, he built a cistern.  Later, he was able to put a pump in the kitchen to pull the water in from the cistern.  Before, the water had to be brought from the well in the yard up to the house.

     "It was a good while after we were married before we could get ice, though," Lupton noted.  "A truck would come around about once a week and you could get a big chunk for a quarter."

     He also said he made a wooden box where the ice and food, milk, etc. were placed to keep it cold.

     Mr. Lupton celebrated his 90th birthday February 27, 1990.  He is a gentleman who wears kind face and he said, "There's been a lot of water under the bridge since I was a boy," and "I've seen it all."