y handsome man who never married; she thinks he might have died of influenza. He died at age 22, in 1914. George Deal also worked as a railroad laborer.
William Washington Deal’s youngest daughter, Mamie, married Joseph Engles, another brakeman on the Nashville-Chattanooga line. Mamie and Joe were married in Dickson County, but later moved to the Belmont section of Nashville. When the trains went through White Bluff, Joe Engles would stand on the platform at the rear of the caboose and throw candy to his nieces and nephews (especially the children of Clara Mai Deal). 
The Generations Change
William Washington Deal died on 13 September 1917, after spending a few days in a hospital in Nashville. His widow Louisa later moved in with Douglas, in the house on his farm, which adjoined the Hutton Cemetery.

Lou was now the matriarch of the family in White Bluff. Robert Harold Deal remembers that his grandmother Lou taught the boys how to set traps – “jump traps” they were called – using parched corn as bait. (They were always hoping to catch a fox and sell the hide, but usually just caught possums). 
And Lou would teach them about planting. Robert Harold helped with the garden, and Lou would tell him how to plant and tend beans and potatoes – things his mother, Ina, didn’t know and his father, Douglas, wasn’t home to tell him. Lou would tell her grandchildren stories about how plentiful chestnuts were before the blight, and how they used to split fence rails out of chestnut trees. She talked about the time when there were still wildcats (panthers) in Tennessee, and how the cry of the wildcat was just like a woman’s scream.
Sometime between 1920 and 1930, however, Lou had to find a new place to live.  Doulgas’s wife Ina (Evans) Deal had decided that she could stand White Bluff no longer. “I’m not going to live out here anymore, Douglas,” she told him. “I’m just not going to live out here.” Douglas agreed to move to Kingston Springs – just a few miles away, but a more sophisticated place. Kingston Springs was a resort town with two big hotels, and people came by rail to “take the waters,” (which, Douglas’s daughter Myra says, “stank to high heaven”).
So Lou moved in with her son William Andrew Deal and daughter-in-law Lydia. Every Monday, Lou would walk down to James and Ida’s house. This was Ida’s wash day. Ida would wash clothes in a big iron kettle in the rear yard, under the walnut tree. Lou would stay for washday dinner, and then walk back to William and Lydia’s house. Lou gave her sewing machine to her granddaughter Dorothy Deal (James and Ida’s youngest daughter) for Dorothy to make doll clothes.
Around 1936, Lou, who had been to Dickson, was getting off the bus back at home, and she fell. After that, she never walked without crutches. Louisa (Wynn) Deal died on 21 June 1937 and is buried in the Hutton Cemetery in White Bluff, next to her husband William Washington Deal. 

William and Lou did not have carved headstones, but a very large fieldstone – large enough that it probably took three or four men to lift – was placed over their graves. (Much later on, in the early 2000’s, the large stone disappeared, and William and Lou’s grandchildren Myra Deal and Robert Harold Deal had proper markers carved for their grandparents.)

After Lou passed on, her eldest son James Henry Deal was clearly the head of the family in White Bluff. Although James lived into the 1960’s, he never drove a car. If he needed to go someplace, he walked or hitched up a team of mules to the wagon. One early photo of James shows him wearing a suit, but this must have been for a very special occasion. Later on, James always wore overalls, even to church – the White Bluff Church of Christ, where he was an elder. 

Jim and Ida’s grandson Gerald Miller lived with them through the 1940’s and into the early 1950’s, and he has vivid recollections of the household.

Ida was usually in the kitchen. She always wore an apron, and if she was outdoors, she’d wear a bonnet (“the kind the Mennonites wear,” Gerald says). The kitchen stove was one of those enormous, cast-iron and porcelain affairs, with warming bins and a compartment for heating water.

Water had to be drawn from the Naul spring a quarter mile away, and transported by wagon to the house (this also changed, in the early 1940’s, when James and Ida had a well dug). 

The kitchen also had an icebox, and you would leave a sign on the porch saying how many pounds of ice you wanted when the ice wagon came around – five, ten, or fifteen pounds. (This eventually changed: around 1945, James had the house wired for electricity, and four or five years after that, he purchased an electric refrigerator).

There was a root cellar, where apples, pears, and potatoes were stored, wrapped in newspaper. There was a garden, a smokehouse, a barn, and, further back, an outhouse. Jim and Ida never did get indoor plumbing.

Out in the rear yard was where the clothes were washed – by hand, on a ribbed glass washboard, until the late 1940’s when they got one of those Maytag washers with two tubs and a wringer in between.

They grew corn, of course, and in the barn was a hand-cranked corn sheller, which James Henry would let Gerald run. Then they would hitch up a team and take the dried corn kernels to a gristmill out toward Pegram Station, to be ground into meal.

In the garden, Ida grew several varieties of beans and peas, and she grew cabbages, which she made into sauerkraut, since it would keep through the winter. Ida made lots of sauerkraut, in quarter-barrel wooden kegs. Ida’s granddaughter Dorothy (Deal) Prowell recalls, “I hated that stuff.”

And of course, every autumn, it was time to harvest the sorghum cane and run the mill. Here’s a story which Earl told in 1979 about the skimming hole (where the liquid waste of the cooking process was thrown out), and the eventual fate of one of the hogs:

I tell you, back when we first started, when you had your skimming hole right there… well, there was no fence at all then. No, cattle and hogs would all run out. And so them pigs, hogs, we had about eight or ten, I don’t know how many, now, I’ve forgot. But they’d come up there at the morning, and that stuff’d ferment in that hole, skimming hole where you’d throw it out. And it’d make ‘em drunk. And them hogs’d get drunk every morning. And you talk about squealing and carrying on, and staggering, but they’d do it. And one of ‘em got cross-eyed, why, the other one, they had a car run into it and killed it. And we just skinned and barbequed it.

The usual time for hog butchering was in November, after sorghum-time was over and the weather was colder. That was when it was time to cure meat for the winter. Jim and Ida would get several of their neighbors together, and each family would bring a hog, so there would be four or six hogs. They’d shoot the hogs in the morning, and bleed them out. Then they’d drag them into the rear yard. 

In the rear yard was a big, cast-iron cauldron to heat the water for scalding the hogs. The cauldron was about three feet in diameter and rested on three short legs. They’d then hang the hogs up, take hot water from the pot, and pour it on the carcasses to scald them. Then they’d take a big knife and scrape the hair off, holding the knife sideways with both hands, until the skin was clean and white. Then they’d rip a long cut down the center of each hog, catching the entrails in a #2 galvanized iron washtub underneath. “I can still smell that smell,” Gerald says – “It was awful.” 

Once the carcasses had cooled, they would be blocked out. You would cut the hams off, cut the sides out, cut the shoulders off, and trim the cuts of meat. Then you would put the meat down and salt it, all except the tenderloin (backstrap), which would be eaten that night: the evening meal would be backstrap and eggs. “This,” Gerald says, “was a very big deal. We didn’t have a lot of meat. We ate a lot of cornbread and beans and sorghum.”

Just about the only foodstuffs that Jim and Ida bought at the store were flour, coffee, and salt, plus other pepper and other spices. Anything else, they grew themselves, or did without. 

James Henry Deal and Ida Petty celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1951. There was a large family celebration, and they invited Gordon Turner, a reporter from the newspaper in Nashville, who wrote filed a story: 

… All these Deals, most of the children now grown, married and with children and grandchildren of their own, read and enjoy THE NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN. In a family caucus last week, they elected to invite me to the golden wedding and molasses-making anniversary celebration. Staged a few days ago at the old home (and molasses mill) near here, nearly 100 kinfolks, neighbors, and friends came for the big dinner and to bring gifts to the honored couple.
Late in the day, at the molasses mill where tourists from all 48 states and several foreign countries have stopped to see sorghum made and buy it, the elder Deals told me of their humble but magnificent “sweet obsession.” Of course it was the off season but, with the copper evaporating pan clean and overturned for safe-keeping and the muledrawn mill still, everything is ready for the 51st season come early September.
Many years of cane leavings were rotting away near the mill where the juice was extracted, and the hewn-out “lever pull” was in place ready for the instant hitching of the mules when another planting and harvesting is done. All in all, the mill scene with the little home in the background befittingly portrayed the end of a perfect day as well as 50 years for the Deals.

But Ida was becoming ill. Her lifelong habit of dipping snuff – a habit she inherited from her mother, Tennessee Frances Daugherty – gave Ida cancer of the lip, and she died from it in 1956. Her body was laid out in the hallway of the home – no funeral home was involved – and someone sat with the body around the clock until Ida was buried. One of the Catheys dug the grave.

Then James Henry Deal, now in his eighties, broke his hip, and could no longer take care of himself. So Clifford Deal’s wife Frances Dorothy Deal paid for her father-in-law’s surgery with the money she had gotten from her hogs and her chickens; and she told Clifford pointedly that they were going to take James Henry in.  James Henry Deal lived in a room at the back of Clifford and Frances’s house for the rest of his life. James Henry Deal died in 1963.

It is striking how many of the Deals are buried in White Bluff. The Hutton Cemetery and the Olds’ Cemetery are both on Highway 70, less than half a mile apart. In just these two, small cemeteries are the graves for William Washington Deal and Louisa (Wynn) Deal, plus seven of their ten children – Eliza, James Henry, Lula, Hattie, Douglas, Mamie, and Robert – plus the childrens’ spouses, and many of William and Lou’s grandchildren.

Eliza and Mamie had lived most of their lives in Nashville, but they came home to White Bluff to be buried. Eliza died of pneumonia in January 1937, at her boardinghouse in Nashville. She had been separated from her second husband, Bill Jones, but is buried next to him in the Olds’ Cemetery.

Mamie died of cancer in 1952. She passed away at a clinic converted from an old private home near the Vanderbilt campus. The entry in Ruby (Garton) Deal's memo book says, “Aunt Mamie died October 10, 1952 Buried Oct 12th. She had $567.15 in Insurance and Savings. Funeral expenses was $415.00 to John Gupton $15 to preacher & singer $40 for monument $396 for express on luggage to Joseph to Los Angeles and $3.50 to Loyd Deal for flash light films for pictures made of the flowers. I had $79.69 left I added 31c & gave the Joe Wertham Home $80. for caring for her.” Mamie is buried in the Hutton Cemetery.

Three of the ten children ended up buried in other places. William A. “Will” Deal and his family moved to Alabama. Robert Harold Deal tried to get in touch with them but could not; and he doesn’t know where in Alabama they moved to. 

John Franklin Deal spent the last years of his life working as a portrait photographer in Miami, Florida; and he is buried in the Dade Memorial Gardens. 

And it’s a little bit surprising that the youngest son, George Washington Deal, is not buried near his siblings, especially since his wife Kathryne (Radford) Deal is right there in the Hutton Cemetery. 

But George made good. He had started out as a railroad laborer, like the rest of them. But George worked his way up, and eventually became conductor on the City of Memphis streamliner – the gem of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis line. As a consequence, George moved to Bruceton, 120 miles west of White Bluff. Bruceton was the mid-point of the Nashville-to-Memphis route, where the crews changed.

The City of Memphis had made its inaugural run in 1947, and was a thing of beauty. The cars were air-conditioned. The windows were made larger than usual, so the passengers wouldn’t feel cooped up. At the rear was an observation lounge car, with magazines on the tables. The engine itself wasn’t new: it was a 1913 Baldwin 4-6-2, re-built to make it lighter and faster, and encased in a new, streamlined shell painted blue, gray, and black. It was unl