Christine Nordan grew up near Apex. She talked about an incident that happened in her childhood involving chickens, her mother and a great big snake:

“[I was born in 1912, and when I was a girl,] our neighbor, Miss Fanny, when both of us had chickens, she’d miss a chicken now and then, and she’d say to my mother, ‘Sadie, I believe you got my chicken and killed it for dinner.’ That may have been [said] through neighborly love or joking, but it didn’t set well with me.

“We had a garden. You were allowed to have one cow and chickens and a garden, if your place was big enough. The land we built on give us that privilege. I watched out for the cow and the chickens. After I was big enough to handle an ax, I was taught well how to split the stove wood. I didn’t saw the logs, but my father showed me how to split the wood without it being dangerous to me. Of course, I tended to the chickens. I loved to hear the rooster crow in the mornings.

“Between Uncle Charlie’s house on the railroad and our house I could graze a cow. [Through] the place of grazing, there was a little ditch stream of water. I could jump it. It always had water for the cow.

One day, I went to get the cow and bring her up to the barn, and when I jumped the ditch she wouldn’t jump it. I pulled her and pulled her, but she wouldn’t jump it. I looked down the ditch a little ways, and it looked like an old automobile tire in the ditch. I looked at it [again,] and it was a great big snake! I left that cow stand there, because I knew she wasn’t going to jump, and I went and called my mother and Miss Fanny. About that time, it was sundown, my father came home and Miss Fanny’s husband was there, so they came down and got the cow and killed the snake. And there were the chickens that Miss Fanny had accused my mother of taking, inside the snake. It must be very rare. They called it a chicken snake. They swallowed them whole. There were three of the little chicken biddies. Chickens were not grown chickens, they would always get the smallest.”

Cary’s Heritage is taken from the book, “Just a Horse-Stopping Place, an Oral History of Cary, North Carolina,” which is on sale at the Page-Walker Arts & History Center in downtown Cary. The book is a collection of oral history interviews conducted between local citizens and Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel. Proceeds from the sale of the book support the preservation of Cary’s history through the Cary Heritage Museum.