In 1915, my mother, Pattie May Johnson, came here as a bride. My father, Raymond Johnson Sr., was a farmer. He died when I was 8.

Mother had sharecroppers to keep the farm going. They lived in a separate house on the property. She furnished the housing, the mules (they didn't have tractors), plows, seed, fertilizer and the land. The tenants did all the work, and when they sold the crop, she got half and they got half. She also took in boarders, mostly teachers from the first Green Hope High School. She fed them their meals and they paid for room and board.

Mother raised us alone. I had four sisters. My older sister got blood poisoning playing kick-the-can and died when she was 12, and one sister didn't live but two or three months after birth.

The Edwards family lived close by. When their mother died, Mother took the Edwards girls in and raised them just like sisters to me.

The Woodall family lived here on the farm. When their mother died, she took on the two Woodall girls. She didn't take on the boys. They visited her as long as she lived, and she would treat them like they were her children.

Once grown, I bought my sisters out and took over running the farm. Emma Lou and I lived with Mother and her second husband for 30 years. She was 96 when she died, in 1989.

There were a lot of hobos on the railroad during the Depression. They would come here asking for food, and she fed them.

You didn't go to a grocery store. She raised everything she ate, from chickens and eggs to hogs and all the vegetables. She was a wonderful provider.

She cooked on an old woodstove. She got up on Sunday morning, go outside, get a chicken, kill it, cut its neck, hang it on the clothesline to bleed out, dip it in hot water and pick it clean of feathers, cut it up and soak it in saltwater. Then she would fry that chicken and put it on the table with rice, hot biscuits and vegetables. Then go to Sunday school and church.

Mama had fun with her cooking. Once, on April Fools' Day, when she had boarders, she fixed the evening meal, and filled all of the biscuits with cotton. When they started eating, their mouths got real pecky-like. That was her way of April Fools.

Then she met Mr. Herbert Askew, and they were married in 1942. He was a painter by profession. He was like a father to us. He was an associate of John Askew's paint store in Raleigh. Then Herbert got out of the store and came here to farm.

Later, uncle John took in his son-in-law, T.K. Taylor, and the store was renamed Askew-Taylor.