Fannie Holcombe was born in 1919 on Etris Road in Milton County. One of 11 children, she learned the meaning of hard work at an early age.
Her father William Samuel Etris (1875–1956) grew cotton and corn on 40 acres. Corn was for turning into meal in their grist mill to feed the cows. He would also grind corn for neighbors in exchange for a portion of the meal. Cotton was the cash crop.
“Oh, how my back hurt picking cotton on my knees” Fannie recalls. Yes, she crawled between the rows of cotton because the large sack strapped around her shoulder had to be dragged along the ground and would weigh 100 pounds when full of picked cotton.
Planting cotton was a complex, multistage process involving a lot of plowing behind a mule and a lot of hoeing by hand. Cotton growing and picking was a sun-up to sun-down job in the hot Georgia sun.
Fannie’s son Bobby also remembers picking cotton. He says the cotton boll “would eat up your hand.” A cotton boll is made up of separate compartments in which up to 300 seeds grow. To pick the cotton from the bolls, Bobby had to twist the cotton out of the boll which was very sharp and would cut your hand if the cotton was not twisted correctly.
The family also operated a dairy farm with about 75 cows for about five years in the 1950s. They raised Guernsey, Jersey and Holstein cows and sold their milk to the Creatwood Farm Dairy in Smyrna.
When young Fannie went to Ebenezer School in Roswell, after milking the cows before breakfast, she had to walk half a mile from her house to catch the school bus. One room of the two-room wooden schoolhouse accommodated grades 1 through 3 and the other housed grades 4 through 6. Each room had a woodburning stove. The curriculum was reading, writing and arithmetic.
Fannie then attended Northwestern Elementary School, which was located where the Milton Community Church…
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