Memories of Old Shelby

This column was written by Jesse H. Merrell, president of Merrell Enterprises-News & Feature Syndicate, Washington, DC, at the request of Historic Shelby, seeking to restore parts of Shelby to its former glory.

Merrell grew up in Shelby, and was then known as “Howard,” son of James W. Merrell (1887-1962), who worked for the L&N Railroad, and Emma Davis (1905-1986), whose father Jesse Davis (1880-1964) worked as a young man as a carpenter and blacksmith for Shelby Iron Co., and in his retirement years as a night watchman for the lumber mill (Brown-Loper) adjacent to the old Shelby Hotel.

After leaving Shelby in 1958, Merrell played professional
baseball in the Cincinnati Reds organization for three years, and later worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in Virginia and Washington for many years, winning many writing awards. He is listed in such publications
as the Marquis “Who’s Who in America”. He may write additional columns on his Shelby recollections for us in the future.

Memories of Old Shelby

By Jesse H. Merrell

“Memory is the receptacle and sheath of all knowledge.” Cicero
—
When John Brasher asked me to write a column for the site, I was gratified, and feel honored. I immediately thought of something my sister (and his aunt), Pattie Merrell Brasher once told me: “Happiness, in the long run, is not so much lived as it is remembered.”

On my last trip to Shelby, in October 2003, I visited all the cemeteries, as I always do. At Bay Springs, this incisive inscription on the tomb of my great aunt, Zylpha Ann Davis Dupree (1874-1952), caught my eye:

Memory is a gift of God
That death cannot destroy.

ìAunt Zylph,î as my mother, Emma Davis Merrell (1905-1986), used to call her, was a sister of Mama’s father, Jesse Davis (1880-1964), after whom I was named, and who used to shoe horses and did carpentry work, among other things, for Shelby Iron Company.

As a young girl, long before World War I, Mama would take Granddaddy his lunch in the ore mines, passing by the old Shelby Post Office, beside the old hotel. In the back of the post office, she said, there was a barber shop. She would sometimes “sell” some of her hair, a custom of yesteryear, which barbers fashioned to create elegant coiffures for women of means.

In later years, just up the road, at the old L&N depot, while waiting one Sunday afternoon for the train with the man she would later marry, and who would become my father, James W. Merrell (1887-1962), Mama fell victim to a tragic incident that scarred her for life.

A runaway automobile suddenly crashed into Mama, knocking her down and running over her legs, then dragging her underneath it when her brand-new coat became tangled in the old-style hand-crank in front of the car, finally stopping when Mama’s head, mercifully, lodged only inches from one of the massive iron railroad tracks, for which I’m grateful, or I would not be here.

The driver, Gluver Carden, said he thought he had it in reverse. In those days (some 80 years ago), cars were higher off the ground than they are today, or Mama would have surely been crushed beneath the vehicle. Years later, she told me, tearfully, at the exact spot it happened, “I guess I was left here for some reason.”

The depot was a social gathering place, then and years later, where I and many others loved to “meet the train,” which then came in the morning, just before 11, and in the afternoon about 3. Some of my fondest memories are when I would actually board the train, going back to stay on the “camp cars” for a week with Daddy, who worked for the L&N Railroad in bridge-building.

About 50 yards east-northeast of the depot, toward where the truss factory now stands, just west of the road to the old schoolhouse, and just south of the road to the old hotel, stood the old office for Brown Lumber Co., where I would go some nights with Granddaddy Davis, in the late 1940s, when he was a night watchman. Each hour, on the hour, he would make his “rounds” through the lumber yards, pausing at regular intervals to “punch” the “clock” he carried strung around his shoulder, about five inches in diameter, and three inches thick.

This “punch” was made by inserting into a hole in the clock a special key, each one chained inside metal containers at about ten locations along the route, then turning the key, whose sharp point punched a tiny indentation in a super-thin, cylindrical paper inserted inside the clock daily.

This hole not only showed that the key had been punched at the particular location, but the actual time it was done, since the paper rotated with the clock, and had hourly markings on it. After the recording paper was put inside the clock each afternoon, it was locked. Since Granddaddy had no key to reopen it, and could only punch it with the keys along the prescribed route, there was no way to falsify the record kept by the hourly punches. It was foolproof, by design.

The lumber company wanted it that way. So did the insurance company, for whom these daily paper records were kept, to show whether the regular rounds were made on schedule throughout the lumber yards. One night, when I arrived with Granddaddy, to “spend the night” and “make his rounds” with him, two nicely dressed men were talking with the lumber company foreman, George Mobley, inside the office.

They were examining the “punches” in the papers, kept in envelopes for each month, checking for regularity. As they held them up to the light, the holes in each paper were so uniform, that is, made at the same time each hourly round, at each key location, that you could have easily slid a needle through the entire month’s record, on any hour of the night!

After looking at several months of the files, this inspection was made yearly, one man asked: “Does the same man do this every night?”

When told that he did, the man said, “Well, we don’t have to look at the rest of them.”

That made me proud of Granddaddy, especially in later years, as I understood it more fully, that they could examine only a portion of his work, and judge its entirety based on the consistency and reliability of only the small part they had seen.

That very night, in discussing honesty, Granddaddy told me something I have never forgotten about Chant Cross, an old black man who was a “grown man with a full set of whiskers,” Granddaddy said, when he was just a boy, watching Chant help lay the railroad tracks into Shelby about 1890.

“If that table was full of thousand-dollar bills,” Granddaddy said, “and Chant was in here all by himself, with nobody watching, he would not touch a single one of them.”

He was that honest! And Chant was a poor old man, often depending on the charity of others for food, shelter, clothing and other necessities.

When people would buy him a soft drink at Cecil Davis’ store, and tell him to pick out what kind he wanted from the cooler, he would never get it himself because that would require him to “go behind the counter.” He would actually do without a soda, unless someone got it for him.

When asked why he would not go behind the counter, he would invariably reply: “My Mama taught me better than that.” Oh, for those days again–when mothers taught their children honesty, instead of rewarding dishonesty, as is too often the case today!

Years later, when I began a contest for students at Shelby Elementary School (where John’s father, Robert Brasher, was then principal), offering a $100 award for a student annually, chosen by teachers, based only on “honesty, integrity and character,” guess what I named the award?

If you said the “Chant Cross Award,” you’re right.

Memories can not only be wonderful to recall, but also teach us important lessons we should not forget, in this case, the flawless honesty and integrity of a mother who drilled these sterling virtues into her son so diligently that he never forgot them, and always revered them, and which, through memory, still shine forth with unblemished glory more than a century later!

Shelby has truly turned out some matchless characters. I’m glad the Historic Shelby Association is doing such a wonderful job in preserving this vital part of our unique heritage.