Traveling the BACKROADS

“My Granddaddy, Robert Ely Davis, was born in 1878,” Bo said, “and the house burnt when he was two weeks old. His sister grabbed him up, pillow, mattress, and all, and carried him to the smokehouse.” Later, when the excitement of the fire came to an end, Jim asked, “Where’s the baby?” “He’s out there in the smokehouse,” they told him. And there they found him, sound asleep.

From the burned home, “They saved some of the sills and used them when they rebuilt the house,” Bo told the interviewer. “In that old house—my granddaddy’s house—the lumber on the walls are boards 25 inches wide. That lumber was sawed in 1878 when they built the house. They had a sawmill, and they sawed the planks and built the house back around the chimney of the old house.”

Bo was born in this house on December 21, 1943, and the valley was blanketed in ten inches of snow.

After Zion Hill Methodist Church burned, the Methodist Conference decided not to rebuild and all that remained was the cemetery. However, Bo remembered two preachers who came and held revivals on Zion Hill property.

One evangelist held services under a “brush arbor.” An online article, “The history of Brush Arbors,” gives this description: “Rural folk built a brush arbor by putting poles in the ground for the sides and then poles across these uprights. For the roof covering, they cut bushes and branches and laid them across the roof poles for a covering.”

Bo recalled that a “Rev. A. E. Jones would come from Gadsden and hold a week or two brush arbor revival on Zion Hill. He’d come down to my grandmother and get permission to run power lines down to my grandaddy’s house so they could have lights at night.”

“There was another preacher who ran a tent revival,” Bo recollected. “I think his last name was Bowlen who lived down around Margaret. He had tent revivals there back in the ‘50s.”

Slasham Valley has been a place called home for almost 200 years now. Settled year-by-year by families relocating from other states, it became a sweeping valley of farms and homes, schools and churches, and cemeteries, for with living comes dying. Folk who live, or have lived, in the valley speak of it with affection and love, and for all of those who have called it home, the lyrics of a song as old as Slasham hums in their hearts:

Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Home, home sweet home

There’s no place like home. l