Samuel Harrell Smith, Sr., (1879-1920) married Lillie Mae Pennington (1888-1978), the daughter of Thomas Courtney and Augusta Eliza Sample Pennington, in February of 1904 in the family home, as was the custom in that day, in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Sadly, Samuel Harrell succumbed during the Great Flu epidemic, dying on March 8, 1920, but he was survived by his wife and several young offspring: Thomas "Tommie" (1907-1966), Eldridge Dodson "L.D." (1909-1982), Samuel "Sam" Harrell, Jr. (1911-1993), and Evelyn Lorena "Sis" Smith (1914-1997). The couple's eldest son Seaborn Scott Smith (1905-1909) had died as a young boy. He was almost four years old.
Going back to the beginning, with the families of Samuel Harrell Smith, Sr. and Lillie Mae Pennington having familiarity and living in close proximity, the two first became acquainted near Baywood (thirty miles to the northeast of Baton Rouge in East Baton Rouge Parish)/Grangeville (a community about eleven miles west of Montpelier in St. Helena Parish). The young couple first settled on a sort of island in the Amite River after they married in 1904. It was described in Sylvia Kelly Smith's book, my source for this series of columns, "Baywood and Beyond-Ancestors and Descendants of Samuel Harrell Smith, Sr., and Lillie Mae Pennington," as Mackey or MacKey Island.
Early life, as farmers raising cotton, corn, potatoes, peas, and livestock, wasn't easy. But tenacious, the Smiths ploughed forward. With times hard, they moved north to the Mississippi Delta where they became sharecroppers to save enough money for their Louisiana home, but learning it was a mistake, they soon returned to Baywood. With patriotism running high during World War I, Sam, as he was called, registered for the draft on September 12, 1918, at the age of forty. Then, in March of 1920 he succumbed to the influenza sweeping the country during the epidemic which lasted from early 1918 to the spring of 1920. According to the memoir of son Samuel Harrell Smith, Jr., "Tommie was 12 years old, LD was 10 years old, I was 8, and Evelyn was 5 years old."
Yet, Sam's young widow Lillie Mae and her four little children managed to keep the family together. Together, they continued to work the farm, getting crops in and selling them. The family lived in Police Jury Ward 5 of East Baton Rouge Parish on what was then known as River Road, where Sam and Lillie Mae had settled at least as early as 1910 (according to the Census). The home was primitive, as most rural homes were back in that day, with no indoor plumbing or electricity.
The family relied on coal-oil lamps for light. L.D. and Sam, Jr., contributed the prize money they won for their produce in area parish fairs to the family for provisions. From their winnings at the Donaldsonville Fair, they purchased a 16-guage shotgun and an Aladdin's lamp which helped immensely, providing light for the children to complete their homework after dark. But the only heat in the home came from the fireplace and the stove, which was wood-burning. The family kept milk and other food cool in "ice boxes," which held a block of ice.
With ingenuity and tenacity, the Smith family developed a successful truck farming business, the answer to prayers. Loving Lillie Mae, a devoted and independent mother, saw to it that three of her children graduated from high school, with two graduating from college. Son Sam graduated first in class from the old Baywood School in 1929, the year of the infamous stock market crash - a harbinger of what was to come in the 1930s, the Great Depression.
Sam's memoir, written in his twilight years in the late 1980s at his home on Tenth Avenue in Franklinton, revealed a strong work ethic, evidenced by the myriad of jobs he performed as a youth - planting and picking strawberries; laboring for his own family or another during the spring and summer; toiling in a sawmill, driving oxen transporting the logs; and serving as a janitor in the school. Even with all this labor, young Sam still had time for 4-H, growing and showing his corn in Shreveport and Donaldsonville. Then, in his senior year at Baywood School, Sam was named 4-H state champion.
It was, in fact, the County Agent who urged Sam to attend Louisiana State University. With a job in the dairy at LSU, Sam helped pay his own way through college. His class rank also helped provide some of the fees. But he failed English his first semester of college, which cost him his campus job, so he secured employment with the Hundred Oaks Dairy, where two employees milked 186 cows. Working in the wee morning hours and in the late evening, with school in between, Sam was short on sleep, getting about four hours each day. He admitted it wasn't much, but it apparently was enough to set him on the trajectory toward Franklinton - more on that next time.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series on Sam Smith and his family.
