Reflections3

After devoting a posting to my Berg grandparents, I’d better balance things by saying a word or two about my maternal grandmother - Laura (Drew) Croft. My earliest memories of "Nanny" were at her home in Dade City, Florida. By 1936 she had been a widow for 12 years. She was a nurse and took in boarders to support herself. She raised chickens, selling the eggs and the fryers, and she had a garden. Her house was right across the street from her youngest son, Wade. She was an excellent cook and made all her own clothes. Once when we were visiting her, she had a big batch of doughnuts made. It was my first exposure to doughnuts, and I thought they were great - couldn’t stop eating them until I got my hand slapped.

Her family moved to Florida around 1890 when she was sixteen years old. They walked the entire distance from Barwick, Georgia to Dade City, sleeping under a horsedrawn wagon at night. The trip took three weeks. Though her life was hard, especially after losing her husband, she remained faithful to her church, never missing a chance to tell about her faith in God.

After a few years, she gave up her house in town and moved into a little house in the country, built for her by her son Drew, next to his home. In ways it was a step backward - no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no bathroom. I spent a week with her one time, pumping water by hand, bathing in a tub on the porch, and frequenting the outhouse when the need arose. When I complained about the stink, they assigned me the job of throwing lime into the pit under the outhouse, but I couldn't tell that it did any good. Was that the good old days?

One nice thing about Nanny's little house though, it was on the edge of a lake, and Nanny loved to fish. She would spend hours sitting on a board at the end of a narrow, rickety dock that extended into the lake. She’d go out with two cane poles - one long, and one short - and a loaf of bread. She’d use the bread and the little pole to catch shiners for bait (she called them silvers), then fish for bass (which she called trout), and it was seldom that she didn’t catch fish. She’d fish every day, weather permitting, except Sunday. There was a little row boat tied to the end of the dock in which that she taught me how to row - pulling on one side to turn the other way. She wouldn’t go out in the boat alone, but with me there to man the oars, she would love to go out to some favorite fishing spots.

Nanny lived to be 87 years old. She died two days before Christmas in 1961.

I never knew my grandfather - Henry Bradham Croft. All I know about him is what my mother told me. He was a hard working farmer, devoted to his family. Early in December, 1924, he rode out on his horse to check some fencing around one of the pastures. When the horse came back to the house without its rider, the saddle hanging upside down underneath, his son Wade, then just barely 10 years old, went out looking for him. He found his father underneath a tree unconscious. Somehow Wade, carrying or dragging, got his father home, but his neck was broken. They had no phone back then, no car - no way to call or go for help. Had he been handled gentler and been able to get help, it may have turned out different, but he only lived for a few hours. He was 53 years old. This is one of the few pictures that we have of him, taken shortly before the accident. He didn’t like to be photographed. That’s my grandmother with him, and son Wade.