Mr. William E. Dulaney of Fairview gave information to the Itawamba Settlers periodical ( published in the 1988 edition, pp. 154-155) about his grandfather, Sylvanus Timmons and is recited below. The interview of Mr. Timmons was around 1951.

Although well past the 96 year mark, Mr. Sylvanus Timmons of Fairview is still in fairly good health and able to visit his relatives and friends, even as far away from home as Oklahoma.

Mr. Timmons, who spent his childhood in Tishomingo County near Bay Springs, is fine hand at relating the many interesting experiences a man is sure to accumulate in such a lengthy lifetime—and everybody hopes he will add more to them in the coming years.

Mr. Dulaney tells us that Mr. Timmons sometimes walks as far as three miles at a time, although handicapped at times with a crippled hip, which was caused by a large bullet in his foot fired from a pistol he was carrying in his boot pocket when only 18 years old. “After 78 years with it in my foot, “ Mr. Timmons quipped, ‘I couldn’t do without it.”

He started to school with a third reader which someone had given him. He walked over three miles to a one-teacher school in a small log house near Burnsville with a stick and dirt chimney and a wide fire place which burned long sticks of wood and pine knots gathered up by the teacher and large school boys. Schools then ran on a two-month term. Benches were their only desks and they were made with split logs on four legs.

Mr. Timmons recalls watching the Cotton Mill girls work at Bay Springs. He lived here for a while during his childhood. Machinery then, he explained, was operated with waterpower using a wooden water wheel. His stepfather made the one used by the mill at Bay Springs.

Mr. Timmons can recall the names of several of the girls who spun and baled thread in the factory before the Civil War. Many have descendants now living in this area. Mary Brumley, Nan Murphy, Carolyn Moore, Mary Jane Milligen, two Ables girls and two Hannon girls, and a Mrs. Pannel. They earned about 25 cents a day for their work. Later when the factory closed down, they worked at other things for $1.50 a week.

Mr. Timmons said he started “hiring out” himself at the age of 10 and had worked as much as a week for a bushel of corn.

The old timer well remembers the Battle of Shiloh, one of the major conflicts of the Civil War. It took place not many miles from his home and he could hear the roaring of the cannons clearly. His stepfather paced the yard all day long, he said.

Another battle was also fought near his home and he recalls sitting on a split rail fence with some other children one day when a group of soldiers rode by. Among their horses, he said, was an old grey mule with its tail shot off.

Mr. Timmons tells of the days of the Klu Klux Klan right after the war. He always hated them after they threatened him and his playmate for peeking as they took off their white robes and masks one night.

Once he was working and boarding with a jailer at old Jacinto when a bunch of Klansmen came and took the jail keys and kidnapped a white man and two Negroes. “They took them a little ways,” he said, “and shot one Negro—then went a little further to an old house place and hung the white man to a large shade tree.” They returned the other Negro to the jail and told him they would come back and get him when they “got hungry’ again.

Mr. Timmons can remember the time when a stagecoach was driven from Eastport on the Tennessee River to Columbus, Mississippi. There were regular stops along the way where they changed the four horses, took on passengers, and sold slaves. One of the stations was the Mac Cummings place north of Fulton.

Mr. Timmons and his family moved to Monroe County in 1873 and made a crop near Amory in 1874. He drove an ox wagon from Burnsville to Bigby Switch.

Later on they lived in other places in Mississippi and for many years in Arkansas and Oklahoma. He remembers driving a covered wagon as far as from Alabama to Oklahoma and was out most of the bad winter of 1918 with his last wife and young baby. He “got along fine and enjoyed it,” he said.

Mr. Timmons was married four times. He has five children, 39 grandchildren, and more than 100 great grandchildren. There are sever great, great grandchildren but he doesn’t know just how many.

Mr. Timmons says that although times have changed and people now go after excitement and “sometimes for nothing,” he thinks people are as good nowadays as they were in his younger days.