Oral history interview with Martha Cooley, April 25, 1995

Martha Cooley learned how to run a household when she was just a girl; by the age of twelve, she had taken charge of her home, cooking meals and hanging tobacco leaves to help her father's farming venture in Granville County, NC. Eighty-five years old at the time of this 1995 interview, Cooley describes a childhood in the rural South before the advent of the civil rights movement, the intrusion of roads and highways, or interference from industrial growth or urban sprawl. Cooley remembers her history and that of her family, recalling her education in a one-room schoolhouse, Sunday afternoons, quiltings, and cornshuckings. She creates an image of an inward-looking, supportive community.