Key Principle
Women were not auxiliaries to Elkinsville's social fabric — they were the substrate that made it functional. The book documents their work in granular detail across every section while rarely foregrounding them as the central figures: Lulla Stogdill as community midwife and healer, Bertha Followell as postmaster for fifteen years, Radia Wilkerson as garden steward and food provisioner, Ada Bocock as the store operator who extended charity to destitute families, mothers who canned hundreds of quarts of vegetables and fruit every summer, teachers who ran one-room schools under restrictive behavioral codes, and the network of women who sat with the dying, absorbed orphaned children, and prepared bodies for burial. The book's structural gap is this: women's labor was the substrate that made everything else possible — the kinship networks, the mutual aid, the food security, the transmission of culture — but it is rarely the headline of any section.
When families were displaced, women carried material and cultural continuity in ways men did not. Dorothy Stines transplanted her "mutton heads" and flower starts from Brown County to Bloomington, making multiple trips to preserve plants she had grown. Radia Wilkerson transplanted flowers to each new home the family occupied after displacement, knowing the history of each plant. Connie Schooler maintained her great-grandmother's orange day lily bulbs in Arizona. These acts of botanical continuity were not decorative — they were deliberate refusals to sever all material connection to the lost place.
Why This Matters
In a community with no hospital, no welfare system, no professional social services, and no reliable physician within fifteen miles, women's informal expertise and labor substituted for every institution that did not exist. Lulla Stogdill's role as community midwife was not a traditional craft performed alongside formal medical care — it was the only medical care available for childbirth. Her granddaughter Mary Agnes Mobley credits Grandma Fulk (using a sulphur salve) with saving her life after burns that a Nashville doctor predicted would be fatal, "because people cared about their neighbors" (Chapter: Family Stories — Mobley). The healer-neighbor was a structural role that no institution was performing.
The same logic applies to elder care, orphan absorption, and death ritual. When Ida Alice Miller died in 1936, the neighbor Thickstun family informally assumed childcare for the Miller children without formal arrangement. When James A. Sexton walked miles at night carrying a lantern to pray for the sick, that was the community's hospice system. When the Elkinsville economy needed a postmaster, it was Bertha Followell who held the position for fifteen years, nine months, and twenty-one days — longer than any other holder — while simultaneously running the household with Roy and farming (Chapter: Post Office; Family Stories — Followell).
Good Examples
Lulla Stogdill as midwife and healer: Lulla May (Nilson) Stogdill served as the community's birth attendant and medical resource. Her daughter-in-law Fairney was among those whose birthing she attended. After Mary Agnes Bridgewater's near-fatal burn accident in 1933 (April 28, a three-day coma), it was Grandpa Fulk's sulphur salve — folk medical knowledge preserved and transmitted through women — that promoted healing when professional medicine had given up. Lulla's memorial poem, written by Mary M. Bradley for daughter Frona Bruce, preserved her memory outside any institutional framework (Chapter: Family Stories — Mobley; Chapter: Family Stories — Stogdill).
Bertha Followell as final postmaster: Bertha M. Followell received the official discontinuance letter dated August 22, 1941, effective September 15, 1941, from First Assistant Postmaster General Ambrose O'Connell — she was the last formal link in the chain. Her tenure ran from 1926 to 1941. She was simultaneously postal authority, merchant's partner (Roy ran the grocery), farmer, and mother to three sons. Segrid Jordan's 1970 article found Bertha among the last elderly residents still in Elkinsville: "These people take care of each other" (Chapter: Family Stories — Followell; Chapter: Post Office).
Sible Axsom Deckard as household economy: With husband Porter Deckard blind and hard of hearing, Sible sustained a household of five sons through labor that had direct cash value: she devoted one day per week to baking (filling a five-gallon lard can with sorghum cookies), made quilts for sale (a direct income source), churned butter nightly, and maintained the household entirely without external aid. Porter continued farming and cutting crossties "to buy school clothes," but Sible's labor was the economic floor the family stood on. Her contribution is documented in the book only obliquely: "One would think they would last a long time and they probably would, were it not for her five sons who loved them" (Chapter: Family Stories — Deckard).
Counterpoints
The one-room school's female teachers operated under extreme behavioral surveillance that the book does not critique: Early-1900s contracts prohibited female teachers from marriage during their contracts, keeping company with men, traveling beyond city limits without board permission, and riding in vehicles with unrelated men. They were required to be home between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., to wear at least two petticoats, and to sweep, scrub, clean blackboards, and start fires before students arrived — custodial labor added to educational labor for the same salary. The book reproduces these requirements as historical curiosity without noting that they represent state-sanctioned extraction of women's labor (Chapter: Schools).
Rachel Hall's sacrifice enabled her husband's community role, and the book absorbs her into his narrative: Rachel Hall was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher (organist at the Presbyterian Church in Bedford) who was promised a house by Carl but received shop quarters instead. Carl's multi-decade role as Elkinsville's informal mechanic, inventor, and social center depended on Rachel's accommodation of these conditions. Robert Cross's extended tribute to Carl does not address Rachel's contribution or the asymmetry of the arrangement (Chapter: Family Stories — Hall).
Kathryn Stogdill Cross's truncated education was documented but not foregrounded as a structural injustice: Kathryn dropped out at fifteen to work as a housekeeper in Bedford, sending wages home to support siblings — a pattern repeated across multiple Elkinsville women's narratives (Dorothy Stogdill left school after fourth grade to raise ten siblings). The book presents these choices as facts of life rather than as the systematic educational exclusion of girls in subsistence communities (Chapter: Family Stories — Cross; Family Stories — Stines).
Key Quotes
"Roy and Bertha were more than postmasters over a 15-year period. They were friends and neighbors, working hard and raising not only three sons, but doing a great amount of farming as well." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Post Office
"People didn't have to ask for help. It was understood that the church people and neighbors would take care of those in need." — Elza Morton Lucas, describing his grandmother Ethel's community, Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas
"Mom was a great cook, and during butchering times, she always fixed trays of biscuits, fried tenderloins, and made gravy. Everyone would help each other on these special days. Butchering at home is now a thing of the past." — James Bowman, describing his mother Fairney (Stogdill) Bowman, Chapter: Family Stories — Bowman
"She baked enough cookies to fill a five-gallon lard can. One would think they would last a long time and they probably would, were it not for her five sons who loved them." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, describing Sible Deckard, Chapter: Family Stories — Deckard
Rules of Thumb
- When reconstructing a community's economy, list women's productive labor explicitly: canning, quilting, midwifery, teaching, postal service, gardening, and food sharing were economic activity, not domestic background.
- Women's informal expertise (midwifery, herbal medicine, death preparation) substitutes for professional services in isolated communities; displacement eliminates both the knowledge holder and the network through which the knowledge was called upon.
- Look for women in institutional roles that are described in passing: a postmaster's wife who "also helped" is often doing the postmaster's job while raising children and farming.
- When assessing continuity after displacement, trace what women carried: material objects (plants, seeds, recipes), embodied knowledge (canning techniques, folk remedies), and relational practices (sitting with the dying, hosting the orphaned) represent the portable community.
Related References
- Kinship-Based Settlement Geography and Mutual Aid - Women were the primary operators of the mutual-aid networks: sitting with the dying, absorbing orphaned children, managing communal butchering and canning
- Memory Preservation as Community Act - Women's personal preservation acts (botanical continuity, tribute poems, reunion organization) extended institutional memory work to the personal scale
- prior displacement - Each wave of displacement forced women to reconstitute household economies in new settings, carrying community knowledge forward