Caswell County Messenger, June 2nd 1927

Mrs. Cora A. Slade is feted on Mothers Day

Wonderful Woman of 80 Years Talks Delightfully of Former Days

"Time with caressing touch,

   About them weaves

The silver-threaded fairy-shawl of age,

   While all the echoes of forgotten songs

Seemed joined to lend a sweetness to their speech."

  As Mrs. Cora A. Slade, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith Harrison, sat in the rocking chair in the home in which she had lived for forty years on Main street, and told of the sumptuous dinner prepared this year for her on Mothers day by Mrs. Roy Slade and attended by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren the above lines from Charles S. Ross' poem were called to mind.

  Those present at this Mothers day dinner were: Mrs. George A. Anderson of Yanceyville; Miss Annie Richmond, Miss Cora Richmond and Miss Nancy Mcrary of Raleigh; Mr. and Mrs. Roy H. Slade of Blanch; and Misses Hattie, Carrie and Addie Slade of Yanceyville. Two of Mrs. Slade's children who were not able to attend the dinner were Thomas Harrison of El Paso, Texas and Mrs. Ella Vincent, of Mebane.

  Mrs. Slade said she would be 81 years old in July. But the years have not dimmed the brightness of her mind or left a trace of bitterness in her heart. She is serene, patient and full of hope, reminding one of the portrait which the artist Whistler painted of his mother, sitting, with folded hands, in a rocking chair before the fire, remembering the past.

  And Mrs. Slade says that she, with sight gone because of cataracts, and confined to the house, lives largely in the past. She said, " I frequently go back to my childhood days, in memory, and call to mind all the people I knew when I was young".

  And then she told us of the days gone by. She said that Yanceyville is not the same town it was when she came here as a bride to live, there being only two people here now that were living in Yanceyville forty years ago.

  "I was raised at Purly," Mrs. Slade said, " when we had a plenty of Negroes. There were 70 at my father's house when they were freed. And I have never gotten over those days. But not withstanding the numerous slaves at our house, I was raised to work. I was taught to sew and knit stockings and socks. We had to sew the slave's clothes. And you must remember that we didn't have a Singer sewing machine. And then I visited the sick people. In those days I could hitch a horse to a buggy. I would fill a basket up with good things, take it on my arm and go to see the sick, either riding horseback or driving a buggy. The bible says 'cast you bread upon the water and after many days it will return to you'. Well mine has come back to me buttered on both sides. Mrs. Harrelson and Mrs. Gwynn are always bringing me good things. People have been mighty nice to me.

  "In those days we went to church in a carriage," said Mrs. Slade, "we would go to Shady grove, New Hope, Camp Springs, Bethesda, Danville or Milton. At that time Danville wasn't much larger than Yanceyville is now, and there was a plank road to Danville and a toll gate at Gatewood's store. My fathers house was the Methodist preacher's home. The presiding elders and circuit riders would sometime bring their families and stay a week. Capus Norman with his wife and children would stay with us. Mr. Norman had a way of getting up before day to start on his journeys. He would call Matt, the colored man, to help him off. Mr. Norman came back to see us when he got to be an old man".

  Mrs. Slade then recounted some incidents of the Civil War. She said "I was engaged to a young man when the war began. We girls encouraged the boys to go to war, but we got mighty sick of it before it was over. I lost my sweetheart. He died of typhoid fever, contracted no doubt, by drinking contaminated water. The man I married after the war in 1870, fought throughout the entire four years of the war without receiving a scratch. I went to the Greensboro Female College, but smallpox invaded the school during the war and made it necessary for the school to close its doors. We had a governess in our home before going to college and were very well instructed. "During the war," Mrs. Slade continued, "So many soldiers, both southern and northern, stopped at our house that they nearly ate us out of house and home. My father was hospitable and generous and could not refuse the southern soldiers. The northern soldiers would demand what they wanted."

  Mrs. Slade said that her father hired the slaves after they were freed, "and they just stayed on working for him for wages. The Negro women spun the thread wove the cloth on the old fashioned spinning wheels and looms."

  As this beautiful young lady of eighty summers sat in the quietness of her home and saw so clearly down the vista of her years through which she had passed, conversing peacefully and delightfully about the great drama of the Civil War and reconstruction, little conscious of the tremendous part which she and other women of her position and character had played in recreating a new south out of the ashes of the old, our hearts went out in thanksgiving to god who had provided the south in her hour of need, with such beautiful, gracious and heroic women.

  The secret of their strength was their faith in god. Mrs. Slade said she was converted at Danville when eleven-year-old. Her simple trusting faith in an overruling providence supported her through the storm and stress of disaster and privations, and now there is not a trace of bitterness in her soul and she cherishes no hatreds as she sits in the sunset of a serene old age, saying, "people have been mighty nice to me and god is good to me. My bread has come back to me buttered on both sides." Mrs. Slade has that which the world can neither give nor take away - "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.