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stock that settled much of this country. Her mother was a
daughter of the Reverend Mr. Calvert who founded most
of the Cumberland Presbyterian churches in western
Kentucky. John Tompkins Brown, Mother's father, had originally
moved west from Virginia with his brothers, had
become a toabacco grower, and at Jordan, Kentucky, had
built tobacco warehouses and a mercantile store. During
the Civil War, Grandfather Brown, although opposed to
slavery, sympathized with the Confederacy because he was
a part of the Southern economy, which he wanted to preserve,
and he helped supply General Nathan Bedford
Forrest's Confederate raiders, composed of men from Tennessee
and western Kentucky. As soon as the war was over,
my grandfather paid for having picked the losing side;
vigilantes burned him out in three consecutive nights, destroying
his store, warehouses, and home. Surprisingly,
nobody in the family seemed to hold any grudges; in later
years I never heard a single bitter word about the episodes.
They were the fortunes of war. The Browns took life as it
came and did not complain about things they could not
change.
Mother was born in 1865, just as Grandfather Brown
was losing all that he had accumulated. On top of the
normal postwar hardships, my mother suffered a child-
hood siege of measles that affected her eyes and threatened
her future. Doctors warned her never to strain her eyes
and so, because reading was thought to be a strain, she was
taken out of school. She didn't let it bother her any; she
was canny and determined and she taught herself to read
and to write.