The Wilkes County Tax Office miscalculated William Harrison “Bill” Brooks’ 1918 state and local property taxes. On land valued at $5,177, his taxes due should have been $72.48, not $72.49. Be that as it may, the $5,000 dollar tax value must have been for a significant amount of land!

Viola Shaw is his granddaughter, and the wife of “Buck” Shaw. The couple is well known and greatly appreciated for their musical talents, but Viola’s connection to the Brooks and DeBorde families comes from roots grown deep in Alleghany soil.

The Brooks’ farm and homeplace was below the Parkway on Widow’s Creek, bordered by Bullhead and Garden creeks. Bill set out several rows of apple trees for cider, and maybe a little applejack for medicinal purposes. Old-growth chestnut trees helped feed hogs he raised for food or sale.

Viola’s written history of this side of the family mentions her last hike to the area where “skeletons of the old chestnut trees are still standing on the hillside above the homeplace.”

If you were to study 100 mountain farms of this period, the families’ lifestyles would differ very little. Folks planted some food crops and raised a few head of livestock by getting up early and quitting late. The story’s told of a grade school class that took a field trip to a nearby farm. Question-and-answer time followed a tour of the pastures, barn and outbuildings.

“Mr. Jones,” one little girl asked, “what time do you go to work?” “I don’t go to work, honey,” he replied with a smile. “When I get up, I’m surrounded by it!”

Most mountain men worked like that, occasionally recruiting the wife and kids as well. Women’s indoor tasks were set aside until time was available. Their constant chores were cooking and sewing; the former feeding hungry men, and the latter creating quilts and clothing, or weaving bedspreads on the family’s loom.

For the Brooks family, help came early in the form of a neighbor’s waterwheel-driven sawmill. Access to it turned trees into enough framing lumber and weatherboard to build them a two-story house. Porch time was obviously treasured, as the house had one on the front and back. Now, like the old chestnut trees, only a crumbled stone chimney remains. The house was destroyed by fire “many years ago.”

Apparently the sawmill served others, too, since Bill and his older sons pitched in to build the Garden Creek Church near Stone Mountain. The church is still used occasionally for weddings and such.

But Viola’s genealogical histories include a story within a story: When Viola’s father, Lawnie Harrison Brooks and his younger brother, Guy, came home after World War I, it didn’t take long for Lawnie to become concerned about his parents who still lived in relative isolation. Since Bill and Sarah Brooks already owned a parcel of land near the present Dewitt Road, it seemed logical to move them there. The family’s plans toward that end, however, were more than just a little unsettling for the older gentleman.

“As they were loading the furniture to move,” Viola writes, “Granddad Bill suffered a stroke. Everything had to be moved back inside, and Bill lived only three days. The family thought the stroke was caused by the stress of having to leave his beautiful mountain home.”

Grandmother Sarah moved in with Lawnie until she passed away in 1935. Viola and some of her family still live on the family’s Dewitt Road farm.

The other side of Viola’s family reaches back to October 1863, when the Home Guard put Ezra DeBorde and several other mountain men on an eastbound train. He was going to war, leaving Mary, his pregnant wife of fifteen years and their six children. Like so many others, she struggled mightily to keep the family afloat with loads of house and farm work, very little food and no money. When food ran short, Sarah, then nine years old, moved in with a neighbor’s family. After those few dinner times when something was left over, Sarah was sent back home to share the excess.

Mary “worried day and night,” and often stood in the doorway with Ezra’s tobacco pipe as she waited for him to come down their road. But her Ezra never returned. Exactly one month after being inducted into the Army at Camp Holmes, he was killed in the fighting at Chattanooga’s Missionary Ridge. His gravesite is unknown, like those of so many others who fell during that terrible battle.

Grand homes now line Missionary Ridge. Old cannons that once spewed carnage and death stand as silent front yard monuments to the many soldiers who fought and died there. Ezra DeBorde, a private in Company G, 58th Regiment, North Carolina Infantry, and Viola Shaw’s great-grandfather, is one of those remembered.