Amy Choate pauses for a photo outside her home in the Roaring Gap community.

Choate, 92, remembers bygone days growing up in Alleghany

Modern conveniences are mostly taken for granted by younger generations today. However, the older generations made do with what they had, according to 92-year-old Amy Choate.

"It was pretty tough going, but we didn't know the difference," Choate said. "We didn't have all these modern conveniences. We had to walk about three miles to school, rain, snow, whatever. We didn't have a lot of things that children have today. I can remember when there wasn't a loaf of bread in the store. We didn't have bananas in the stores until I was almost grown."

Her school years were spent in a one-room school. The room, containing 20 to 25 students, was heated by a wood stove. The school was known as Crouse School, as well as Cherry Lane School.

"It was cold and rough sometimes walking the three miles," she said. One memory of school that still makes her giggle is when the school caught on fire.

"When George Miles was teaching, the floor caught on fire from the stove. He told us to leave the room and put our books in a safe place. Well, this one little girl grabbed her books and ran out the door. There were steps to go down to get out of the building. When she went down the steps, she pushed her books right under the building. We laughed. That was fun seeing her put her school books under the building for a safe place and it being on fire," she laughed. Luckily, they got the fire put out with very little damage."

Choate commented that growing up, there were not too many things in town. Primarily, there were grocery stores, a hardware store and the courthouse.

"Sparta was really a wide place in the road when I was growing up," she said.

The trips to town were made on a seldom basis, Choate recalled.

"We didn't go to town very often. We had a little grocery store close by we could go to. We raised about all we needed to eat on the farm, outside of the coffee and sugar."

For entertainment, television was not an option.

"The girls made playhouses out of sticks and moss and whatever. Boys played ball. There just wasn't a whole bunch of entertainment going on way back then."

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