Tales From 316 Depot Street

As a child, I used to spend most of my summers with, and later we lived with Mr. John Raymond and Mrs. Ruth Erlene Shedd, lovingly known to all as Mama and Papa Shedd.

Mama and Papa lived in the small, community of Abbeville, Georgia, which to this day is about as country as you can get.  About the only historical claim to fame that Abbeville Georgia ever had was that the first all-female university in the state was founded there in the late 1800’s.

When me, my Mother and my two brothers went to live with them in the summer of 1965, Mama, Papa, two of my aunts and one of my uncles, lived in a little house on a plot of land that belonged to Papa and three of his siblings.

Although I have very fond memories of the time we spent in that little red-shingled house, it wasn’t very long before Papa realized that the house was much too small to accommodate us all.

Without anyone else suspecting what he was up to, Papa went house hunting and it wasn’t very long before he made the announcement that we would be moving.  The place we were moving into was a big old, two-story house at 316 Depot Street, which was about two miles closer to downtown Abbeville than where we were.

The house was the old dormitory building for the women’s college, which had been located right across the street back at the turn of the century, and provided plenty of room for a typical, large Southern family.

316 Depot Street was a big southern style house, with eight bedrooms, four downstairs and four upstairs.  There were long, wide hallways that ran the length of the house and all of the rooms were large, with great, high ceilings, and a stone fireplace in every one.  There was a porch on the ground level, as well as a big balcony porch on the second floor.

Both of the porches ran the full width of the front of the house.  My bedroom window opened out onto the upper porch and along with a large pecan tree growing strategically at the corner of the house, served as an entry and exit escape route for my friends and me during our late night forays through the streets of Abbeville. 

Although the college had burned to the ground decades before, the metal room numbers were still on the doors of all of the bedrooms when we moved in, so we just left them there.

To this day, Abbeville is the county seat of Wilcox county Georgia, but is still not much more than a hole in the road when traveling south on US route 129.

Some of my fondest memories are the times that I spent getting up early in the morning, “before the chickens is woked up”, as Mama Shedd would say, to go and ‘help’ Papa at whatever carpentry job he was doing at the time.

Papa was an extremely handy man around town, and at some time or other had done all kinds of work for just about everyone in Wilcox county.  Everybody knew that if you had any type of carpentry job that you wanted done the right way, and for a fair price, my Papa was the man to call.

One thing I remember Papa saying to me, time and time again when we were on the job was; “A crowbar is a carpenters best friend”.  It wasn’t very long before I realized exactly what he was talking about.

Papa showed me how to use a crowbar for just about every task imaginable on a carpentry job.  I’ve used it for demolition work, lifting, hammering, pulling nails, notching out dove-tail fittings, helping me on and off of roofs, and for killing snakes, rats, and various other undesirable critters, underneath and around the places we were working.  I also came to realize that a crowbar was a pretty good equalizer when it came to business dealings.

Now as far as I know, in all the time that Papa Shedd made a living as a carpenter, he never signed any type of contract with anyone.  Papa always told us that if you couldn’t trust a man’s word, and a handshake in a business deal, then the deal probably wasn’t worth doing.

Papa didn’t talk a lot about the money he earned, and he told me that only on a few occasions did he ever have any problems in collecting his due.  One of those times I was witness to.

It was the time that Papa Shedd had made a deal, and shook hands, and he and I had done some work for old Mr. Woolfe.  After the work was finished, Mr. Woolfe tried to pull a deal change on Papa.  That, as it turned out, was not a good idea at all.

Mr. Woolfe, among other things, was the county truancy officer.  If Mr. Woolfe ever came to your house, you could bet that he was there to find out why one of the younguns was not at school. 

Everybody that I knew feared Mr. Woolfe and dreaded a visit from him.  He was a big man; an imposing figure that exuded a larger than life authority and down right meanness.