Jewel Jones Letters
Letters written to Jewell Jones from her mother, Callie Adcock
All of the files below are scans of documents hand-written and mailed through the US Postal Service during the period 1957-1969. These are letters written from Callie Mae Adcock (Smithville, TN) to her daughter, Jewel T. Jones (Battle Creek, MI). We know there were more letters but unfortunately this is all that was preserved.
These written communications are between Callie Bain Adcock and Jewel T. Jones after Jewel and her husband Emerson had permanently moved to Michigan. The longing words between a mother and daughter as a daughter starts her own family and is taking steps into the realms of adulthood. This was also before the period when telephones were present in many homes. Grandma and grandpa had a phone in their home pretty quickly after they moved to their permanent residence on Halbert Road in Battle Creek, Michigan in the 1950s. But, I believe my great grandparents in rural Tennessee didn't have a phone at any point. Even if a family was fortunate enough to have a phone in their home, making a long-distance phone call was very expensive and considered an extreme luxury reserved only for those times when an emergency of some type made the call a necessity. It was often more economical to literally drive to another town to deliver news rather than make a long-distance call. To receive a phone call from a person in another state meant that there was most likely a death, a dire illness, or a horrible accident where speed of communication was critical. It was a dreaded occurrence for life or death situations, not a delightful unexpected interruption. And a phone call in the middle of the night meant your stomach lurched with the horror of what you were about to learn as the ringing beckoned you out of bed. So the hand written letter, nearly unheard of today, was the mainstay of common day-to-day communication during that time. Postage for letters was considered expensive but reasonable enough to allow a periodic exchange of important events in family's lives.
My grandmother was very sentimental, kind, and mostly soft-spoken woman with a nearly constant sense of humor. She missed her mother, father, and siblings terribly and constantly looked forward to the next potential chance to see them. So she saved the letters her entire life. It was a connection to her mother long after she had passed and in some respects a link back to a simpler time.
Callie Mae Bain Adcock was my maternal great grandmother and lived in a rural area outside of Smithville, Tennessee with her husband, and my great grandfather, Edgar Adcock. They were married in the period approximately 1920. They had a total of 12 children; 10 of those children lived to adulthood. They lived very sparsely on an extremely small war pension from the time when Edgar was in the Army in France during WWI. They grew their own food, hunted, foraged, cut and split wood, and worked odd jobs when available to make a little extra money. This included work on the TVA projects around Center Hill Dam in Tennessee. During the 1940s, several of their children moved from Tennessee looking for work along the auto belt of Michigan and Indiana. Unfortunately, I don't know exact dates when they moved nor what prompted each to move to different areas. At that time, jobs were plentiful in the factories that had been converted to produce war goods. Battle Creek was also the host town for Fort Custer, an enormous military base during that time.
As I understand, my grandfather was drafted and went to boot camp just about the same time that the war ended. Hence his return to Battle Creek, rejoining my grandmother, Jewel. My maternal grandparents, Jewel and Emerson stayed in Battle Creek until their deaths and themselves had three children: Bettie Charlene, Bill, and Ann. I'm not really sure why they decided to stay in Battle Creek. The most likely answer was the abundance of jobs but I'm not really sure. My grandfather worked at a company that made fire trucks (Union Pump??). They certainly didn't stay there because of the weather. During my entire young life grandma complained about the brutality of the cold, snowy winters in Michigan and dreamed of going back to Tennessee to join her parents and many of her siblings who remained there. After grandpa's death in the 1970's she still just couldn't leave. The pain of choosing between one's children and grandchildren who were now firmly entrenched in Michigan and the place that a person longs to be, considers to be her real home, must have been an ongoing difficult pull especially during a time when it was a very expensive prospect to move from one area to another.
Money was not plentiful. So as a result, they would travel to Tennessee at least twice a year if time from work and money allowed it, or if other relatives were making the trip, or if there was a family tragedy that warranted the travel. It was what you did on vacation for a week at a time, you just didn't go anywhere else.
A trip to Tennessee usually meant a car packed to capacity with adults and children eating sandwiches and snacks from a lunch pail, drinking coffee from a thermos and water from any available storage container suitable for the purpose. In our early childhood, this was before the major highway systems were in place in much of the country. The highways were either non-existent, in the planning stages, or under construction. A trip encompassing many states was an entirely different journey. It was traveling backroads using a paper map that you prayed was close to correct. You prayed road signs were in place. There weren't rest stops. There weren't fast food places and there certainly weren't gas stations open at night or on Sundays. You planned your trip based on what you knew was available at the times they were available, not based on your convenience. I spent many days in the car as a child traveling through those beautiful hills along the backroads and finally the highways to and from the South, to and from Tennessee, and have fond memories of spending time with my great-grandparents.
written by Chris Frantz
Links to letters:
click on "arrow" to go back