My Grandfather Jasper Harrell, Sr.

Jasper Harrell, Sr.

It gives me great pleasure to blog about my maternal grandfather Jasper Harrell, Sr., My mother often talks about my grandfather and I just sit and listen to her. Sometimes she repeats the same stories over and over again and then there are times when she will allow something new to come through. One of her favorite stories she often share is the time she baked herself a birthday cake and my grandfather cut her birthday cake before her.

My grandfather was born in 1911 in a small town call Amite, Louisiana. He was the youngest child born to Alexander and Emma Mead Harrell. According to the United States census he and my grandmother Josephine Richardson Harrell were neighbors. I guest this is when the courtship started between the two.

My mother described him as being a very tall and handsome man. He loved to farm and was a carpenter by trade. She said that he really enjoyed farming, he would plant all kinds of beans, squash, corn, cotton, other vegetables. He was a good provider for his wife, children and grandchildren. My grandfather grew up in the A.M.E. Church, his mother attend Big Zion A.M.E. Church in Roseland, Louisiana. I guess it was after he married my grandmother that he converted over to the Church of God In Christ. To me that was a bit strange, because most of the time the women converted to their husband religion. They married in July of 1931 and to their union ten children were born; Jasper, Jr., Catherine, Roosevelt, Sr., Frank, Sr., Isabell, Henry, Leon Clarence, Herbert, Raymond, Sr., and Deloris.

Two other stories that my mother shared with me that really got my attention, the first one was how he would take his old pickup truck and go around the community and pickup African American  people and give  them a ride to the voting polls. Voting was important to my grandfather Jasper. Another story she shared is how he made the headstones for all his deceased brothers and sisters. He also made headstones for his parents graves.

He died in 1962, I was only two years old so I really have no memories of my grandfather, only the oral history that had been passed down to me by my mother and others. It gives me great pleasure to keep his memories and legacy alive. My grandfather is buried in Big Zion Cemetery with his wife, parents and siblings.

Tangipahoa Parish Colored Training School

Professor Oliver Wendell Dillon

Professor Oliver Wendell Dillon was born October 15, 1882, and died May 18, 1954, in Magnolia, Mississippi, he received his B.S. Degree in Science from Alcorn A. & M. College, in Alcorn, Mississippi and completed his post-graduate work from Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia.

The Tangipahoa Parish Training School, founded in 1911 was the first colored training school in the entire South. The most complete account of the establishment of the school is found in Edward E. Redcay, County Training Schools and Public Education for Negroes in the South, (Washington D. C., September 1910, by Professor A.M. Strange).

The school was the first color training school in the south and one of the first rural public schools providing secondary education for Negroes in the nation. The Tangipahoa Parish Training School concept was extended fully in 1918,  Mr. Oliver Wendell Dillon, during the first year of the founding of his administration. School donations were made through the Julius Rosenwald Fund, The Slater Fund, the state, and parish, and by the supporter of the school, communities both black and white.

O.W. Dillion Colored Training School in Kentwood, LA 

Professor Dillon's contribution in the area of education was a regional impact. The school provided educational instructions for Negro children in grades one through eleven with stress on Vocational and Industrial education at the secondary level. It would also provide teachers training so that its graduates could staff the rural black schools in the parish. The colored training schools were the real beginning of secondary public education for blacks in the rural south.

After seeing his dream of a lifetime shattered, Mr. O. W. Dillon, principal of the Tangipahoa Parish Training School, retired on May 17, 1952, at 69 years old. Although his hope of establishing a normal college in Kentwood to train Black teachers had been dead for many years, he left behind 35 years of sincere service to his people and a better understanding between the white and black races.

When Mr. Dillon first came to Kentwood in 1917 to take charge of the one-room, one-teacher, two months a year school, the town was a booming sawmill center and the largest community in the parish. In 1917, Mr. Dillon received $1,000 from the Brooks Scanlon Lumber Co. and the Natalbany Lumber Co. in order to hire three other teachers and extend the school term to a full nine months for 200 students.

He continued his money-raising efforts to match $5,000 promised by the State Supervisor of Negro Education, which he accomplished within two days through diligence and the assistance of a Mr. Wayne and Mr. H.A. Addison. This endeavor resulted in a new building to replace one that had burned and the girls and boys dormitories that had also been destroyed by fire. Mr. Dillon was undaunted by these setbacks. His next appeal was too rich Northerners, and he was rewarded with enough funds to rebuild both buildings. His ingenuity proved valuable in replacing these building when he appealed to the local board to buy a one-man machine and pay for the millwork to make cement blocks.

After securing the machine, he implored the Negro people in the area to supply labor. They made 40,0000 cement blocks, one at a time, and erected a building for educating the children of this and surrounding areas. He was also instrumental in getting 30 boys from the National Youth Organization in New Orleans, to come to Kentwood and enroll in school. During their stay, enough blocks were made to build a teacher's home for faculty members. Frustration, highs and lows, 35 years of hard work and commuting  15 miles one way each day, resulting in improving the lives of thousands of your people. Mr. Dillion returned to his father's farm in Magnolia, Miss., after his retirement, along with wife, Verdie Dillion, where they lived until their deaths.

Source: Tangipahoa Parish Training School/Dillion Memorial High School Reunion 1995

Aunt Susie Tells of History " From Slavery to the 1950s"

Susie Amacker Washington

Editor's Notes: The following story was penned approximately twenty-five years ago by Mrs. Carl M. Pierce of Kentwood and is reprinted today at the request of Mrs. Naomi Jackson, the youngest daughter of the late Susie Amacker Washington (1846-1957). Mrs. Washington in buried at Oak Grove AME Cemetery here in Kentwood, LA. Thursday, October 16, 1975

It is not everyone who can remember events of a century but Aunt Susie Amacker Washington, ancient Negro woman of Kentwood, who claimed to be one hundred and eleven years old, can speak with conviction of happenings before and immediately after the Civil War, and tells with pride that her "Old Marster" treated his slaves very kindly, indeed. She is a frail looking woman, hardly five feet tall, but gets about with an ease that belies here more that a century of living in this section. With evident delight, she recalls many details of life before and after the war. Asked if she has any proof of her ages, she replies proudly, "Mr. Rube Womack knows how old I am, and he says I be 112 this year." She was born near Kentwood in 1840. Her "old Marster" was Avery Quillian, who farmed and had a sawmill and gin as well. His only son, Francis, the young "young Marster" was kill in the war, but several daughters married into well-known families of the section, the "Mr. Rube" being the of son of "Miss Cooky" Quillian who married Captain Womack.

She remembers moving with the family to Osyka and back on Tickfaw River a few years later. The "Old Mistress" died in Osyka and was buried there. When asked if she had to work into fields, she proudly declared the " Old Marstar" never worked his slave women int he fields; that he had 15 hands to do the field work, leaving the slave women to do cooking, housework, spinning, and weaving. Her own mother did most of the cloth making for the household, and Aunt Susie recalled how they obtained dyes from various sources, such dye-rocks, maple, sumac, walnuts, and indigo, the latter having been grown on their farms. Her grandma was the cook for the family.

She remembered the privations of her folk immediately after the Civil War, and spoke  in some detail of substitutes and makeshifts for commodities taken for granted today. Salt was obtained by boiling water the dirt from smokehouses and dripping in the after through heavy cloths. Soda, she said, was made by burning corn cobs. (Not a chemist the author can see no connection between corn cobs and soda!)

For coffee, meal bran parched and used. their wash tubs was dug out of huge logs, with partitions left between sections to let the water out. Matches, she said were too high-priced for them to use, so they had to  use flint rocks.

Vividly recalling the time they heard the Yankees were coming Aunt Susie told how she was the one to bury the knives and forks, combs and brushes. She related how they rode up and peremptorily demanded the smokehouse key. When the " Old Marster" refused, they became threatening, so the key was promptly produced. They took half the large store of meat and a load of corn, though no horses was taken. Here the old ex-slave giggles delightedly as she recalled that they did take a saddle horses from a neighbor slaveholder, whom she apparently did not like.

Yes, she knew of some case of cruelty. A neighbor slaveholder was not like her " Old Marster" who fed his slaves plenty of meat to make them strong. Instead according to Aunt Susie, who declared she has seen the incident, slaves on the adjoining place were fed at a huge trough in which milk, " pot-licker"and bread were mixed and from which the negroes ate. He also locked one woman slave up and starve her to death because he claimed she had burned his gin. " She didn't do it, though, " Aunt Susie declared with conviction. She also recalled how, after the war and the slaves were freed. Old Uncle Jim went to the polls to vote, only to be whipped by the white folks.

On the Quillian farm each spring found the white folks and Negroes alike drinking sassafras tea, long considered a tonic in the South. This was sweetened with syrup, though, sweetened with syrup, through, "We had some sugar, " Aunt Susie pointed out. "My father hauled sugar in hogshead form Baton Rouge to Vicksburg, and when he would stop to let the team rest, Old Marster would burn us some sugar.

The old negro recalled how she used to go the white folk church on Tickfaw River, but when a small Methodist church for the Negroes  was built in what is now west Kentwood, she attended there. The Town, she said, was not here, then, the site being nothing but a swamp. She remembers the first store and sawmill in the vicinity. Her great-grandmother, she claims, was brought over from Africa and sold at the age of eleven. She, herself, as she proudly asserted, was never sold.

She married George Washington, who worked as a brickmoulder for Fluker-Kent, and lived near the brick-kiln, what was thriving industry in Kentwood. They had nine children, three boys and six girls. Of the nine, six are now living, the oldest 76 years old. She had great-grandchildren, although they do not live in Kentwood. However, she live in the house with her daughter, her grandchildren, and one great grandchild. Her favorite is in the chimney corner, with a fire burning slowly to take the spring chill out of the air.

Her teenage grandchildren attend a modern high school just outside the corporate limits of the town. Only two generations removed form slavery, they seem to enjoy their grandmother's stories, and frequently suggest that she tell something they have apparently heard many times.

Proof of her age, according to Mr. Womack, who is 84 years old, himself, is not in birth records but in his family history and his own memory. Aunt Susie is well-known among white and Negroes folks of the community, and is prolific sources of local history,