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Early Negro Life in Dardanelle 1-12. Laura Jackson Edwards, Dardanelle, Arkansas, was born in Mississippi on a Friday in March and she is “somewhere around eighty”. Her mother died when Laura was three months old and her white mistress, a Mrs. Elsie Jackson, raised her. The Jackson family brought her to Arkansas soon after her mother’s death. They traveled in wagons drawn by oxen. “Aunt” Laura was married to a Dardanelle negro, John Edwards. 13. The Jackson home was made of logs covered over with boards. The rooms were large and large open hall ran the length of the house. Each room had a fireplace and candles furnished the light at night. 17-18. Each family in those days raised its own hogs, chickens, wheat, corn, potatoes, oats, and sorghum. All clothing was homespun. Aunt Laura’s master raised sheep for wool for their clothes and she and her mistress spun their thread. 23. The farm implements were all homemade of wood. Some of these were wagons, plows, wooden-teeth harrows, and bull tongue-harrows. “Aunt” Laura says she remembers when the Arkansas river was just wide enough for two boats to pass. She says she used to get on a steam boat and dance all the way us and down the river. 30-34. The only school that “Aunt” Laura attended was one that was conducted on the Jackson premises in Carden Bottoms about twenty miles south of Dardanelle. Her teacher was Ned Williams. The school was free and she remembers studying the old “Blue Back Speller”. “Aunt” Laura has cooked and kept house for many different families in Dardanelle, also for the Powers and Blackwell hotels, which were among the first ones in Dardanelle. She remembers her mistress baking wheat and sweet potatoes real brown during the Civil War, grinding it and using it for coffee. She also remembers the soldiers stripping their house of food and burning the straw beds, break the mirrors, dishes and everything that was of any value. They would then go to the pastures and kill all the cows and hogs. She says that if the “Federals” came and wanted to know where anything was they had to tell, for if they didn’t “they would burn their feet off in a fire”. She went into the house one morning and the soldiers had her mistress before the fireplace fixing to burn her feet because she wouldn’t tell them where her money was. “Aunt” Laura finally told them and they went away. She has eight children, eleven grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren. She makes her home with a daughter in Dardanelle.
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