Ollie (Cole) Boone

Virgil and Ollie Boone

The following was written by my great-aunt Maxine Downing about her mother (my great-grandmother) Ollie Cole Boone.

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My mother Ollie Cole Boone was a very hard working person. She loved to plant flowers in her vegetable garden and always raised a really nice garden.

She always sang a lot while doing dishes or when she was along , some of her favorite religious songs were, In the Garden, Beautiful, Beautiful River, Golden Belle, Gather at the River or Beautiful River, Sweet Bye & Bye. She always liked the songs & music of the old Hank Williams.

Mom always sewed a lot for all her family. She made shirts for the boys and all sorts of things for us girls. It was always a thrill to get a new dress or anything. She even made mittens and coats for us, usually from some one elses old coats.

She done lots of canning and making preserves & jelly. She would take a walk to the woods areas and pick mushrooms in the spring. She would shake the mulberry trees in late spring and she would can them & also pick blackberries & gooseberries by the basket full.

In the fall we would pick up walnuts & hickory nuts for winter use. She & dad made lots of molasses in the fall and other people would bring their cane to our place and they would run it through a machine & squeeze the juice out, it had to be strained several times to get the pulp out before it was cooked down into molasses it took about 3 hours or maybe more to cook off a vat of molasses. She always had lots of molasses each winter and had pop corn or molasses taffy.

At Christmas Mom always made home made candy and she always had to hide it from us kids so we could have some for Christmas. She made the best date, nut roll.

Mom liked the out of doors, she seemed to really like to go out and take care of the chickens & milk the cows. They always sold cream & eggs in town to buy such treats as pineapple, salmon, peanut butter & lunch meat and “Bakers Bread”. She made bread every other day so the boughten was just like cake for us.

Mom liked to go barefoot and she would always take walks barefoot out doors after a nice rain and see if she could find any pennies we had lost.

Whenever anyone would come it seemed she was always barefooted and we would have to scramble around to find her shoes for her so she could go to the door. She wouldn’t go barefooted to the door.

She would always clean house on Saturday and bake a scratch cake for Sunday dinner. We were always supposed to save a piece of cake for our lunches on Monday.

One of her sayings was – A bird never flew so high that it didn’t have to come down to roost. I liked this saying and have repeated it many times to others.