This article originally appeared in “The Best of Times” section in GRIT magazine. Shelton, Beth. “How a 1956 GRIT Article Preserves Family History,” GRIT, Sept/Oct 2024, pp. 6–8
Thumbing gently through the thin pages of his deceased mother’s Bible, my husband found a 1956 GRIT Newspaper clipping. “Elderly Sisters Run Farm; Need No Men,” the headline read.
Almost seven decades later, it still grabs a reader’s imagination, which is one reason my mother-in-law would have saved the article. Another reason being the women in the article were family.
The story features four unmarried sisters and one widowed sister-in-law living in the same home and running a farm in Bethel Springs, Tennessee. My husband, Mark, hadn’t thought about the Robinson sisters in many years. They were his paternal grandmother’s first cousins — or, for all you genealogy enthusiasts, his first cousins twice removed. Mark and his parents had visited the sisters when he was a young boy, and he remembers their house across the railroad tracks. A cousin recalls kinfolk “going to see the Robinson girls.”
On our recent Tennessee trip to visit family, we went exploring to find the Robinson sisters’ former home. After taking a few wrong turns, we found the white-painted farmhouse in the middle of freshly plowed fields. We don’t know who currently lives there or if they’re related to the long-gone Robinson sisters. But I can easily picture the sister-farmers rocking on the wide porch, shelling peas, and sipping sweet tea.
If the GRIT editors in 1956 thought the McNairy County Robinson women were interesting enough to feature them in the newspaper, I wanted to know more about the “gritty” sisters and what life was like for them.
Ollie, Maggie, Dinah, Eunice, and Lillie ran the farm without the help of men. They lived into their 80s and 90s, and they’re buried in the New Salem Cemetery, a mile from their farm. The youngest one, Lillie, died in 1986 at age 91. She had two children, but had lost her husband, Private John Scott Robinson, in World War I, before his children were old enough to remember him. According to the photo caption about them printed in 1956 in The Ingham County News, the sisters became like a “band of mothers” for Lillie’s children and grandchildren who lived on the property with them.
Firsthand stories from these remarkable women are long forgotten, but I can imagine the sisters during cotton-picking season, pick sacks slung across their shoulders, reaching callused fingers into prickly bolls to pluck fistfuls of cotton.
Their lifestyle must’ve matched the stories told by my mother-in-law. Related to the Robinsons by marriage, she was born two generations after the sisters and had lived about 4 miles from the sisters’ farm. Though she was from a younger generation, time seemed to stand still in McNairy County for those living off the land. Butchering livestock, raising chickens, churning butter, and canning garden vegetables were common chores in the farming community.
Before her passing, I asked my mother-in-law if she’d enjoyed working on the farm. She said enjoyment was not something she’d thought about; she just did what had to be done.
“I spent most of my life doing work I didn’t want to do,” she loved to tell us.
There was no electricity in McNairy County until 1948. Rural electrification opened new opportunities to farmers and country dwellers. A Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) field engineer visiting a country church in the 1930s heard a farmer proclaim, “Brothers and sisters, I want to tell you that the greatest thing on Earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.”
I believe Mark’s mother and farm women like her who endured the Great Depression, practiced the “Three Rs”— reduce, reuse, and recycle — long before the federal government’s public-service campaign. While raising their families and living off the land, women found creative ways to maximize usage of everything. A towel worn to threads became ties for tomato vines. Glass and plastic containers were reused until they broke or disintegrated. If a piece of paper had a blank side, it was used for correspondence or lists or computations — no matter what was printed on the front side. We often received letters from my mother-in-law written on the verso side of pages ripped from the funeral home calendar. Magazines were traded to neighbors, and old newspapers lined shelves. No scrap was too small or too worn to give it another chance.
I wonder how readers back in 1956 viewed GRIT’s story on the Robinson sisters. Perhaps it was encouragement to find strength even when facing the most challenging aspects of farm life. After all, that was its mission from the beginning. GRIT Newspaper began in 1882. Founder, Dietrick Lamada, a German immigrant, wrote a lasting mission statement to his sons, “Wherever possible, suggest peace and good will toward men. Give our readers courage and strength for their daily tasks. … By such a course, we can do much to improve the minds and lives of the millions of people who read GRIT every week and bring them a higher realization of their duties in life.” Newsboys rode their bikes selling GRIT newspapers in rural communities all over the country. After 142 years, GRIT is now a bimonthly full-color magazine celebrating contemporary country lifestyles, focusing on community and stewardship.
Reading about the Robinson sisters’ legacy of self-sufficiency and independence sparked my imagination and led me to fictionalize their story in my book, Hear the Dirt Sing. Set in Louisiana cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta during the early 1900s, a messy history emerges with hardships of catastrophic flooding, labor shortages, the Great Depression, and murder.
Even though much of their lives may be lost to history now, the spirit of the Robinson sisters lives on through stories like these and the real-life resiliency that passes down to each new generation of farmers and homesteaders. Thanks to GRIT for honoring these women and keeping history alive.
Subscribe to GRIT magazine: www.Grit.com
Hear the Dirt Sing is available from all major book sellers.
For Medium Members: https://ebshelton.medium.com/elderly-sisters-run-farm-need-no-men-24bb27f6599a
