Brown Davis Lawrence was born 97 years ago last month.

"I was born on April 20, 1920 to Melvin and Ila Lynam Davis. I was born between Smithville and McMinnville, out on the main highway. My father and his brother ran a farm about five miles outside of Smithville, I have one sister, Mildred, who passed in 1989." Lawrence told the Review.

"We raised cotton. I was given a small sack to go along with the other pickers. We also raised sugar cane. We had a molasses mill just below our house, and we would go watch the horses pull the machine that ground up the cane. I still remember the white house with front and back porches. The hallway went all the way through. We had a large, hand-dug well, and when it needed to be cleaned I was always sent to the house, because the men would strip off their clothes and be lowered into the well in the bucket to clean it," she said.

Lawrence said a trip across the county in those days was a big deal.

"We would go to visit my grandmother in Liberty," she recalled. "We would hitch up the buggy early in the morning and take off. We would stop and water the horse at the spring on the Old Snow Hill Road, and go on up the hill. We go on and visit, and we would leave 3-4 hours before dark so we could get back just as the sun set. It took all day. There were toll gates along the road, and we would have to pay to get through. The roads were not graveled, and there were very few cars. When it rained the buggies would sink up to the hubs."

Her education began at Blue Springs, but the family soon sought greener pastures. Literally.

"I went to a little one-teacher schoolhouse. I’m not sure if it was called Blue Springs School yet, but it was in that area. I went there for one year, then we moved to Cottage Home when I was six," she said.

"We had a beautiful place with a field between us and the creek. It was before fertilizer was available, and the main reason my dad moved was because the land was so fertile. The land was pretty poor on McMinnville Highway. The house in Cottage Home was not as sound as the one in Smithville, and when it rained, the roof leaked everywhere. We soon got a new roof, though," Lawrence remembered.

"We went to Prosperity Baptist Church while I was growing up. I was baptized in the old mill pond below the dam that used to be across the Smith Fork Creek, near the swinging bridge. My daddy was baptized there, too," she said.

"We had to walk about a mile out of the (Anderson) hollow to catch the school bus," she went on. "We had a swinging bridge. We had to walk out and cross that bridge across the creek. Sometimes the bus had problems, and it wasn’t unusual to have to get out and walk some more. I went to school at Liberty. The building is still there, but it was built about 1920, so it was new then. It is still the prettiest building in the county. I went to Liberty all the way through to graduation. Elementary was on the first floor, and the high school was upstairs."

Life was simple, but difficult.

"We didn’t have electricity yet, and the house was heated by an open fireplace," she said. "We had a wood stove in the kitchen. We heated our irons on the stove to iron our clothes. Speaking of ironing, washday was an all-day affair. We collected water from the cistern and heated it in a kettle in the yard. We put the water in a tub, and scrubbed the clothes on a washboard. The white clothes were then boiled in the kettle, then rinsed, then hung on a line to dry. We used oil lamps at night, carrying them from room to room. Crime was not rampant in those days. Nobody locked their doors, day or night. People loved, trusted and helped other people. We had good neighbors, and visited with them often.

"Daddy and Uncle Albert did all the farm work. The only time Mamma and we girls helped was when it was time to set tobacco or thin corn. The one job we dreaded was picking up potatoes after they had been dug. We had chickens and sheep, too. I loved to pet the sheep," she said. "There weren’t a lot of places to go. Every year we would go to the fair in Alexandria on Saturday and spent the day. We visited a lot of relatives throughout the year. We visited an aunt who lived in Nashville a few times. That was a big trip."

She said that even though money was short, the holidays were a special time at the Davis home.

"Christmas was a joyous occasion," she shared. "Money wasn’t too plentiful, and Santa Claus never brought too much. There weren’t many toys. I remember having a doll with a metal head, and Mildred had a doll with a china head. We hung our stockings, and got plenty of fruit. We got apples, oranges, bananas, nuts and some candy. The fruit was a treat, because we didn’t get it year round. We always went to my Grandmother Lynam’s on Christmas Day, and all of my aunts, uncles and cousins were there. The adults would eat first, and the children would have to wait until the adults were done at the first table, then we were allowed to eat at the second or third table. The good food was usually gone by the time we got to eat."

Her father traveled in a unique fashion in his younger days.

"My father was a traveling salesman when he was younger. It may have been before he and mother married, I’m not sure. He sold nursery stock, mostly fruit trees," Lawrence shared. "He drove a buggy, and he would put it on a train. He would travel all over, to other states, and that’s how he got around."

Like many people in the south who already had no money, the Great Depression did not affect her family in any great way.

"I can remember the election of 1929," she remembered. "Al Smith ran against Herbert Hoover, and daddy had a picture of Al Smith on the wall. The great depression soon hit. I was nine years old, and didn’t realize too many of the problems, except for the fact that there was a few years of drought, and the farmers did not reap any harvest. Even the gardens would not produce food. I thought the drought was the reason we didn’t have any money. There were great dust storms in the Midwest. People in the cities lost their jobs, and people were jumping out of windows, but we were lucky. We managed to raise enough crops to have food. We had hogs for meat, cows for milk, corn for meal and wheat for flour."

Her beloved uncle soon passed away, a tragedy that was followed by more tragedy when her father became ill as well.

"Albert died from a heart attack in 1932," Lawrence recalled. "He just didn’t wake up one morning. I loved Albert very much. He had always lived with us. He never married. Sometime in the early 30s daddy developed Tuberculosis. In the summer he had whooping cough. He worked in a lot of hay, and it eventually went to his lungs. I don’t really know how long he was sick, but it seemed like years. He became unable to work and rented the farm out."

She said her father tried to prepare her for the inevitable by teaching her to drive.

"My dad got an old T-Model ford," she said. "He taught me how to drive it. I knew how to crank it up, with a hand crank, he taught me how everything worked, but I never did actually drive it. He knew he didn’t have long to live. We would drive from Cottage Home down to Mt. Juliet to a doctor he had to see. He knew my mother wouldn’t drive, and I think he wanted me to know how."

He soon passed away, leaving the women to fend for themselves.

"When he was unable to drive the car, he swapped it for a buggy," she said. "He died in 1935, at 50 years old. My heart was broken. I guess all little girls love their father more than their mother, but after that I loved my mother twice as much as before. I was ready for my freshman year in high school, and it was hard without my father. We had to try to make it by ourselves, my mom and us girls. My mother must have been very tough. She must also have been very lonely, but I never heard her complain. She kept us in school, and rented the farm out. There was a life insurance payment that helped out. Mamma took care of the sheep and cows, and there were chickens and eggs to buy other groceries."

Not too long after graduation she married Cordell Lawrence, a transplant in the area from the far-away land of Brush Creek.

"His mother married a man who lived at Roundtop, and we met when they moved into the community," she said.

She soon found herself in completely different surroundings.

"Then the Big War started," Lawrence informed. "Cordell was in the Army Air Corps, and we moved to Smyrna, to the air base. We lived on the base. I had my own Identification card and everything. He was an aircraft mechanic. We were there the whole war. He wasn’t shipped out, we stayed in Smyrna until the war was over."

The couple soon found themselves back home.

"When the war was over, my husband got a job in Auburntown, working on cars. Not long after that he opened a garage in Brush Creek, and we moved there. He went to work during the construction of the DuPont plant. He got into the union working as a laborer, and was elected representative. He did that for more than 30 years. He still ran the garage in Brush Creek on weekends," Lawrence shared.

"We went on a lot of trips when he worked for the labor union. We went to Washington D.C. a lot. He was the secretary and treasurer for Local 386 out of Nashville. On a trip in 1964 I got to meet President Johnson and shake his hand."

The Lawrence family had four children, Kenneth, who lives in Nashville, Sandra, who lives in Dallas Texas, and Lisa and Gary, who both live in Alexandria. "We divorced in the late 60s, and I never remarried," she said. Lawrence now has eight grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren.

"I worked at Kingston Timer from the mid-70s until I retired in 1990," Lawrence shared. "I was 70 when I retired. I was a Cub Scout Den Mother for several years. I was also a substitute teacher for a while."

She said that she would like to be remembered as a Christian, and advises others to aspire to that as well.

"It comes right down to whether or not you are born again. Being saved is the most important thing."

Lawrence said that her advice to future generations would be to remember the past.

"I would tell them to keep the memories. The pictures, the documents, they are all important. They need to be kept so future generations can know something about the past. People today tend not to do that," she concluded.