A Riddle That Saved A Life
Told on Oct. 12, 1941, by Mandy Kilgore, Wise, VA and
given by
James Taylor Adams, Big Laurel, VA Courtesy of a Record
Copy Made By
The Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum, Virginia, April 1991
Now I’ll tell you one I know is the truth. My mother
told hit to me. Hit happened right down thar in North
Carolina somers close where she was raised. Said one
time they was a man goin’ to be hung. He wasn’t guilty,
but he couldn’t prove he was not. So they told him ‘f
he’d make up a riddle that the judge couldn’t unriddle
that the governor would pardon ‘im. So he studied an’ he
studied. At last he told the judge he was ready.
Said he gave the judge the riddle like this:
Good mornin’, good mornin’, Mr. King,
I had a drink from your mornin’ spring.
Through gold hit run, from earth hit sprung,
If you’ll unriddle this I agree to be hung.
The judge tried an’ he tried but never could unriddle
hit an’ the governor pardoned the feller. Then he told
them the answer. He’d drunk water that run through his
gold ring.
I know this is so. My mother told hit to me.
Editor’s Note: In this transcription of an oral folk
tale, the word “it” appears as if it were “hit.” This
phenomenon in English speech is called an “aspirated
‘h.’” Aspirated means the “h” was breathed, making the
sound “h” before the “i.” This, we had “hit” instead of
the modern “it.” The aspirated h is a direct carryover
from how English was spoken in Britain long ago. When my
husband was growing up in West Virginia coal country in
the 1920’s and 1930’s he remembered schoolchildren
speaking with the aspirated “h” and being punished and
ridiculed by teachers who thought the children were dumb
and not trying hard enough. The teachers, clearly, were
unfamiliar with the very rural Southern and much older
English usage and sound.
Fort Hill, a
combination home and fort built between 1740 and 1750 by
Robert Hill thought to be Franklin County's first
settler, was a blockhouse located on a hill. Of his five
sons, one of them was shot by an Indian arrow in the
door of the blockhouse, another was tomahawked and
scalped near Bald Knob and a third was killed by a
panther. The ruins of this blockhouse are being restored
through efforts of the Franklin County Historical
Society and the Virginia's Old Carolina Road Chapter of
the Daughters of the American Revolution. The ruins are
on the property of Christian Heritage Academy in Rocky
Mount, Virginia.
Information courtesy “Genesis
of a Virginia Frontier: The Origins of Franklin County,
Virginia,
1740-1785”
(buy it here) by T.
Keister Greer, History House Press, 2005.
A wooden
miniature will soon be available for sale at Blue Lady
Bookshop in Rocky Mount and
on this website. Some proceeds will go to the
restoration project. Photo by Ibby Greer.
This is a picture of the Lewis Freight
Wagon now in the Eastern Tennessee Historical Society Museum in Knoxville, Tenn. The
wagon was formerly owned by the family of the first settler in the Staunton area of Augusta County. Col. John Lewis came to Augusta County in 1732; he and his wife had five sons, all of whom served in the Revolutionary War. Son, William, was the likely owner of the vehicle. My search indicates the
wagon may have been built around 1780. Photo and excerpt courtesy of Franklin A.
Zirkle.
North Carolina without tobacco barns would be like Holland without windmills. Tobacco has been an essential part of the state's economic and social history for three centuries. The leaf supported thousands of families for many generations and helped create cities, support universities, and build hospitals across the state. The traditional tobacco barn has long been symbolic of the crop's significance in Tar Heel life.
The last quarter of the 20th century has brought enormous changes in North Carolina's tobacco industry. One major change has been in the ways that farmers cure their tobacco. Modern bulk curing systems have made virtually every traditional flue-cure tobacco barn in the state obsolete, and the abandoned barns are rapidly disappearing.
Click
here to visit the Celebrate Tobacco Barns web site.
