Remember Brown County
“Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember Pearl Harbor!” “Remember to call your Mother!” ~by Mark Blackwell
R
emembering is a good thing. The philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Well, that particular word of forewarning is most relevant in those “Groundhog Day” situations where you might find yourself repeating the same idiot behavior that got you into the predicament in the first place. Remembering has a preventative effect—kind of an antidote to stupidity. But that’s not memory’s only virtue. Remembering how things were helps to keep a tally of progress—for good or ill. I find it instructive to think back over the fifty years that I have been acquainted with Brown County and the changes that have been made.
52 Our Brown County • Nov./Dec. 2020
When I first came to the county, I came through Gnaw Bone where there was a big flea market and an old-fashioned sorghum mill. The mill operated by having a mule, tethered to a horizontal pole, walk in circles hour after hour to turn the mill that crushed the cane to extract the sorghum syrup. Back then, I found that mule to be a potent metaphor for a life to be avoided at all cost. I knew that I didn’t want to be tethered to a monotonous life, turning the mill of somebody else’s fortunes. But in the time it took for me to shake off that vision of the future, I turned north onto the Van Buren Street portion of Highway 135. The intersection at the time was occupied by a Dairy Queen and just up the street was McDonald’s Chevrolet dealership. This was memorable for two reasons. One, was that Nashville, even though it was smaller than it is now, somehow supported a new-car dealer. The other reason is that in the show room window sat a 1954 Corvette. It was one of only 3,640 built, and there it was in little old Nashville. I remember the old “Ferguson House” shop on west Franklin Street because of the guillotine on the front porch. It was owned by a rather eccentric lady who stocked the shop with antiques, brica-brac, stuffed wolves, and a skeleton in a coffin. The skeleton would on occasion sit up to entertain unsuspecting customers. I remember the smell; it was akin to what the writer Ray Bradbury called “mummy dust.” Nowadays many of the places and things that I remember are gone. But Brown County is not just Nashville. It is the woods, and parks for hiking and camping, and lakes for boating and fishing. I like to think back on camping and canoeing with my daughters in Yellowwood State Forest. One time in particular stuck in my mind. It was in the latter part of the last century, on a sunny summer weekend. The two youngest of my three daughters and I decided to take the canoe down to Yellowwood lake and go camping. We spent that Saturday canoeing, cloud watching, and playing with lily pads. As the afternoon wore on,
