AROUND THE COURTHOUSE Williamson County

AROUND THE COURTHOUSE
E. C. "Pete" Bouffard: Bobby Deaton, Interviewer

I remember going to town with Daddy in the buggy or in the wagon to go to the gin or to take corn in there, and around the courthouse was hitching posts. It was short posts about two and a half feet high with a two inch pipe running through it all the way around the courthouse. Manure six inches deep all away around there. No pavement what-ever. From the sidewalks on one block across the street to the other was big cobblestones. I would say they were eight inches across and eighteen or twenty inches this way. They were spaced where you could just walk across the street. That was to keep from getting muddy when it rained. But there was no pavement whatsoever.

I remember when they did pave it. That was something when they began to pave the town. Oh, man! Of course, the old farmers didn't like it because the horses couldn't get around on pavement. The farmers fought it because the horse would fall and break his leg on the pavement.

The town was from half a block from the Square, to the Square. That was the town right there. There were people living in houses from the back door of the stores that faced the Square. And everybody that lived in town and had any business in town they lived right there [behind the store] or they lived upstairs over the stores. Even if they lived two or three blocks away they walked. Everybody walked in those days.

I walked as a teenager. I walked from town to home at night, many and many and many a night. I thought nothing of it. What teenager today would walk five miles in the dark on a gravel road, wade the creek, go up a branch to home? Not very many.

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