It's an experiment, sort of. My regular website, Hollow Square Press, is giving me problems. I thought I'd set this one up to see what happens.
Sawyerville is where I live. It is a fairly unprepossessing little hamlet on Highway 14 between Greensboro and Eutaw in West Central Alabama. Except for some 27 years living in New York City, this has been home. I still live in the house where I spent my childhood.
We even have a traffic light now. Sometimes it blinks, sometimes it doesn't.The small white building to the left of the county road heading south was my father's country store for all of my early life, until glaucoma caused him to retire in 1962. Until then he was also the Sawyerville postmaster as well, and the post office occupied the southeast fourth of the store. There used to be a porch facing the highway, but a log truck making a U-turn knocked it off in 2007. Then, in 2014, this happened: http://www.hollowsquarepress.com/the-other-stuff/disaster-well-serious-nuisance |
Looking westerly from the north side of the road. Where the highway vanishes to the right, the Lock Six road angles away to the left. Of course, that old lock and dam have been gone since the late 1950s, but to us locals it is still the Lock Six Road. I guess it is 4 or 5 miles down to the Black Warrior River, the road paved except for the last mile. |
Martin's Store still stands right behind where I am standing to take the photo above. It was built by Mr. M.T. (Melton True) Martin, and after his retirement it was sold to Murray Martin, his protégé and kinsman. He's my kinsman too: some sort of cousin on my father's side and married to my mother's middle sister. Everybody in Sawyerville is kin to everybody else. And more and more I am finding out that the kinship involves both white folk and black folk. |
This is the old main road through Sawyerville. It ran alongside the railroad tracks, which would have been just tot he right of the road here. The tracks themselves are long are gone. The main road through town is now a good city block to the south (that would be to the left) of this one. Old roads fascinate me: I think they and their paths need to be documented just like old historic buildings are. |