The Georgia Game Park

Saturday, Dixie and I got up early and drove up to Whitney Junction and followed Hwy 11 up to Chattanooga. Last Thursday through Sunday was the Antique Alley Yard Sale that runs from Meridian MS to Bristol VA along Hwy 11. Saturday was the day we took in our portion of that sale. It is not as big of an event  as the World's Longest Yard Sale in August, but I like it and the weather in usually a bit cooler.

Every time I go this route and get up near Rising Fawn GA I pass the little building that was once the site of the Georgia Game Park. Many people remember the Georgia Game Park from its existence out at exit 1 on I-59 but I remember when it was on Hwy 11. Several times in the past, I have searched for Georgia Game Park on the internet but this year I was successful in finding a site that told its story.

Back in the 1960's my family made a trip to Tennessee, I think we started out in Nashville and ended up in Chattanooga. I seem to recall a visit to The Hermitage near Nashville and maybe Rock City and Ruby Falls in Chattanooga. I don't remember much else about that trip but I do remember that we came back down Hwy 11 coming home and passed by the Georgia Game Park. We did not stop, but for some reason it stuck in my mind. After reading the article about it, I kind of wish we had stopped. I would have liked to have tried some of that cherry cider.

Food

I was talking to my sister yesterday on the phone. She was telling me about a video that she and my brother-in-law had watched called "Forks over Knives." She was talking about, when we were growing up, what we ate when we were down at my maternal grand parents house. They always had two big gardens and there was always an abundance of fresh vegetables during the growing season and home canned vegetables the rest of the year.

After we got off the phone, I started thinking about how much food has changed in just the last 60 years. By the time I was born, supermarkets were already in place and my grandparents made regular trips to the A&P in Alexander City, but they did not buy prepared foods. In fact the main thing that I remember them buying was Eight O'clock Coffee. I am sure they were getting sugar, flour, corn meal, baking soda and things like that as well, but the bulk of their food was raised at their home down in Pentonville.

They always had a pig or two and 6 or 7 cows with 2 or 3 of them being milked daily. I recall being down there for numerous hog killings and at least once when a steer was butchered. As my sister pointed out in our conversation, they did not eat that much meat with lunch and dinner. That was at a time when chicken was still a Sunday dinner treat. They did have a lot of meat when a steer or hog was killed but that was before they got a freezer so the fresh beef was shared with other families in the community and most of the pork ended up in the smoke house and lasted through to the next year. They drank the sweet milk raw, unpasteurized and churned their own butter which resulted in a good bit of butter milk. I never have been a big fan of milk, although I drank my share of butter milk growing up.

They also ate a fair amount of fish and some wild game.  My grand dad loved to fish and if there was no farm work to do, he was fishing. Most of the game was squirrel. I know that occasionally they ate possum and probably rabbit, but deer were scarce in Coosa County back then and no one I knew hunted deer or turkey. Personally, I was involved in numerous fishing trips and quite a few squirrel hunts and I have cleaned my share of fish and squirrels as well.

Speaking of dressing animals and fish reminds me of something that happened when I was still fairly young. I was school age I am certain but I don't think my sister who is four years younger than me had started school yet. We lived on US 231 / AL 21 just south of Rockford. The road was relatively flat for a 1/4 mile or so north of our house, but right in front there was a slight rise and then a dip. Cars coming from the north could not see what was in that dip and that dip was where every animal in the vicinity choose to cross the road. I have drug a dump truck load of cats and dogs, one at a time of course, out of that road during my life. We took them out behind our barn an buried them. On this particular occasion, it was not a cat or dog but a little bantam hen that picked the wrong time to cross the road in front of a car. She could not get out of the way so the car obligingly knocked her out of the way, killing her in the process. We witnessed the accident and run and told mama. Mama went down to the edge of the road and retrieved the hen which while quite dead was not mangled. Unlike the cats and dogs, the little hen got a more useful ending. Mama cleaned her, boiled her and used her to make chicken and dressing. Little bantam hens are not even as big as the Cornish game hens that you see in the grocery stores now, but as I remember it, she made a nice pan of chicken and dressing.

I know I could still dress a squirrel and clean a fish and I suspect I could handle gutting a chicken and picking it clean of feathers, but most of us have become so accustom to buying our meats wrapped in plastic on styrofoam trays that the thought never crosses our mind. I wonder in the next 60 years if food will have changed as much as it has in the past 60.