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It looks like an old well, this round concrete trough off to the side of the road in the heart of what was once the bustling Smith County community of New Middleton.

Covered with a green skim and a few leaves, rainwater stands three feet deep in the humble trough, which forms a circle about 18 feet in circumference. You probably wouldn’t want to dip your hand in here, much less sip its murky water.

Most likely this shady hole in the road rarely catches the eye of those who drive past.

But come every fourth Saturday in September, two dozen or so old-timers gather beside this waterhole, once the epicenter of their small universe, and in their minds travel back in time to when they were youngsters as they spin tales and share memories from “the good ole days.” While a few travel a couple of hundred miles to be here, most of them hang their hats in Smith and Wilson counties. With affection they have dubbed this annual rite “meeting at the trough.”

“We’ve been doing this about five years,” said trough organizer Kenneth House, 71, who lives in Brush Creek but grew up in New Middleton. “The way we got started, Delano Washer, a fellow used to live here, and he was moved off to Texas, and he called me one time and said, `I’d like to see Ed Crawford.’ He said he’d like to get together and talk over some old times, and that was how this happened.

“When we were boys, Saturday afternoon was go-to-town day so that’s how we picked Saturday, because after jumping around the farm all week we were ready for a little rest on the weekend. Everybody come to town on Saturday afternoons, and that was big doings back in that era.

“Mom and the women up there in the holler couldn’t understand. What it was was a calling card for the kids to go to town. The women nicknamed New Middleton the glory hole.' They'd say, Well, they’ve gone down to the glory hole.’

“All the boys wanted to go down there and get away from work and spend time with each other. Back in winter in the stores they’d have a Rook game or checkers or be throwing horseshoes to pass a little time,” recalled House.

Back in the 1930s and ’40s, New Middleton boasted five general stores and a pharmacy. The businesses changed hands over the decades but among the storekeepers were Paul Bass, Sam Barrett, Ralph Holbrook, L. Ferguson, Elmer House, Glenn Coffee, A.T. Morris, Ernest Smith, John and Lige Kent, Carl Baird, Charlie Neal and Glenn and Esker Clyde Winfree. Fires eventually brought the structures to the ground.

The town also boasted a filling station, a saw mill, garage and blacksmith shop. Horseshoe pits provided mild physical entertainment in the rear of Coffee’s Store. After it burned in 1937, the pits were moved across the road next to the watering trough, but the stakes and shoes are long gone, and there’s been nary a game pitched here in decades.

However, conversations of yesterday thrive this one day of the year when a hearty band of men, most of them between 70 and 90 years in age, show up beside the intersection of highways 141 and 53. Beneath the shade of an ancient elm they toss around stories as if they were boys playing catch with a baseball. Most of the tales surround working on the farm for their fathers, what happened to old so-and-so and talk of cars, athletic events and days of old lang syne.

“You can believe half of what you hear here,” warns James Robert Bass, who owns this sacred ground. A large metal shed nearby used to hold the rolling stock of his family’s funeral home business: a horse-drawn hearse, an ambulance and flower car among other vehicles.

But Joe Holbrook of Lebanon knows the gospel truth about the trough. His father, Ralph Holbrook, who operated a cash store here from 1939 to 1965, built the round waterhole in 1941.

“Many a mule, horse drank from there. Boys, too,” said Holbrook. “There were fish in there, horses would slobber in there. We’d stick our heads in there and drink.

“There is a spring up the hollow about a quarter mile. He had a pipe up that branch. It had enough pressure come down to here,” he said of the gravity flow that kept the trough filled with fresh water.

“If it got stopped up with a few gravel or crawfish, he’d bring a pump down here and blow it out the other end. There were no baptisms, but some people have been thrown in there,” he says with a grin.

“People, they’d come here to the stores in the ’40s. They’d ride wagons, mules, buggies and horses to get their groceries. There was not only our store, but four other stores here. You can’t imagine them all being busy.”

What brings him back to this spot late in September?

“It’s so many things that happened that I don’t remember. I get to talk with these people to get our stories about preschool days and schooldays and where we are today. Everyone has a story, he noted.

About half an hour before noon a gentleman announces, “Here comes the keynote speaker right now.”

He’s referring to Bill House, who has the food. Around a small table, the men share a blessing of thanks for the meal and then dive into bologna and cheese sandwiches, crackers, baked beans, soft drinks and Moon Pies, a meal fit for a country boy king.

Today’s congregation includes four natives, the Carson brothers: Robert, 89; Glenn, 82; John. 79; and Paul, 76.

“I grew up in a holler 2(1/2) miles from here,” said Robert, the elder. “I had to walk 2(1/2) miles out here to catch the bus. First we’d go to Brush Creek, then to Sykes and Hickman to Gordonsville [High School].”

At last year’s reunion, Glenn Carson, who lives in Mt. Juliet, made cedar walking sticks for every man who attended. Each stick holds a Lincoln penny and has the letters “M.A.T.T.” inscribed on it. The letters stand for “Meeting at the Trough.”

Albert Allison, who grew up in the Saulsbury community and as a youth played on baseball teams for Buckeye Corner, Grant and Watertown, says he came this year because, “It’s been so long since I saw ‘em. They look familiar, but you’ve got to check ‘em out to find out.”

Obviously, it’s a far different world from when these men were young, but a sentimental journey one day a year gives them a mighty fine feeling.

“Back when country stores were there, you kept informed about who was sick, who moved in and who moved out the community, the news,” said House. “Now it’s people move into the area and you don’t know ‘em, don’t ever seen ‘em, maybe pass on the road and see who they are. It was a better time.

“The first year we met there was grown men walking around with big old tears in their eyes. A lot of ‘em hadn’t seen each other in many, many years. It was an opportunity to get reacquainted and visit a little bit,” he said.

“There’s lots of good memories being exchanged here,” said Don Kyle, one of the junior men in this group, who grew up in Commerce and lives in Cookeville. “I appreciate the silent history they taught us: silent examples.

“It’s an inspiration for me to see some of these fellows keeping these stories alive and appreciating their roots. A very dear and precious memory to them.”

As the meeting at the trough begins to break up in early afternoon, the parting words are spoken: “Same time next year.”

Lord willing, they will return.

KINGSPORT, Tenn. - No need for the flying reindeer and sleigh on this Saturday before Thanksgiving, as ole St. Nick glides along a 110-mile railway while giving out toys and gifts on the merry route of the Santa Train.

This Appalachian tradition, which was birthed in 1943, starts at the crack of dawn in Shelby, Ky., and winds down a little over eight hours later in the holiday-spirited city that started it all, Kingsport, Tenn.

Joining the jolly old man in red as this year’s celebrity guest was six-time Grammy Award-winning singer Amy Grant of Nashville, famed for her contemporary Christian songs as well as the pop hit “Baby, Baby” and the nostalgic holiday hit “Tennessee Christmas.”

During the train’s 72nd annual run, Santa, Grant and more than 100 volunteers aboard the train passed out 15 tons of toys, candy, dolls, food, apples, oranges and winter wear such as hats, socks, gloves and scarves to children at 14 communities along the tracks in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee.

Santa Train volunteers get off the train at each stop and hand bags of goodies to children, while the most famous man from the North Pole and five or six helpers toss candy, soft toys and gifts from a platform at the back of the train.

At each place, the loudest sounds come from children as they holler “Santa! Santa!” repeatedly. And Santa’s eye are scanning the crowd.

“I’m looking for the child that looks like this toy fits and has a smile on their face,” said Santa himself, who most of the year pretends to be Don Royston, a CPA and member of the Kingsport Chamber of the Commerce.

“I’ve been really blessed. I grew into the boots,” said the fourth man to portray Mr. Claus over the years, now making his 16th trip as the jolliest man on Earth. “Each trip has its own memories. This year I’m seeing more sharing and passing along the toys.”

Santa gets loads of help from the 132 folks riding the train, while more than 500 volunteers donated their time and labor earlier in the year, and CSX, Dignity U Wear, Food City and the Kingsport Chamber of Commerce provided support as sponsors of the big event.

The train stops from 10 to 25 minutes in towns with name like Marrowbone, Toms Bottom, Haysi, Clincho, Dante, Dungannon and Kermit before it chugs to a halt in Kingsport, Tenn.

But the Christmas spirit of good will to all men thrives the entire way as any number from a few hundred to more than 1,000 folks greet the train at each stop.

Maxine Kiser, 79 of Carbo, Va., has been meeting the Santa Train since she was 7 years old.

“I came to the very first one. Every year it’s great. So exciting. I can’t hardly wait for it. The first year we got toboggans, pencils and paper, but everybody wanted those big peppermint sticks,” remembered Kiser, who brought her granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

Tianah Schoolfield, 8, of Clintwood, Ky., made her second encounter with the train and said. “I got books, a Pony play set and Disney stuff. I got to see Santa, and Santa gives out toys and it’s fun when Santa throws things out.”

Celebrity guest Amy Grant turned the event into both a Christmas occasion and birthday party as she brought her sisters and several of her best friends to experience the joy of tossing toys and candy from the train alongside Santa.

“Oh, my goodness, I was overwhelmed the first time, and I wish I could throw farther. I was so glad that by the end everybody got something. That was good news,” said Grant.

“So I’ve been on the back with Santa, who by the way, is the hardest worker on the train, but when we got up this morning, we boarded the train when it was dark, and my sisters and I walked up all of the train cars, and there were just bags and bags four and five deep, and we all got choked up. There was nobody else on the train and all this preparation.

“Every stop has had a different feeling about it. I mean at one stop somebody gave me a gift, a scarf that they had knitted. I met one gentleman who said, `I just want a picture. I drove six hours to meet the Santa Train.’

“I haven’t seen one disgruntled person. No, I did. I saw one grandmother who was holding lots of bags, and she said, `My children and grandchildren have all left me to get candy at the front of the train, and I’ve got to schlep this stuff up the hill,” said Grant.

Susan “Tootsie” Williams from Alley Valley, Va., came with her daughter Megan, 24, and granddaughter Skyler, 1(1/2), who got a small pocket book and bag.

“My grandbaby, this is her first trip to the Santy Train, and she wouldn’t miss it,” said Williams, who has been here before. “It has grown considerably. It makes me smile. There’s not a lot to smile about anymore. A lot of these children, this will be Christmas for them and that’s wonderful.”

More than 100 helpers aboard the Santa Train take their turns at each stop handing color-coded bags geared toward boys and girls and specific age ranges. Among those is first-time volunteer Betty Yates, a nurse from Haysi, Va. She described the experience saying, “It’s awesome, seeing the kids reach for the gifts and telling what they want. It’s more fun than work, seeing their little faces full of excitement.”

Rita Potter has been checking out the Santa Train for more than 40 years.

“I just think it’s wonderful. The parents are as excited as the kids. Yeah, you gotta get up early but you gotta go. These are good memories for the kids,” said Potter, whose granddaughter Chelsey Potter, 19, won a $5,000 Santa Train scholarship which allowed her to enroll at the University of Pikeville.

Another fortunate child, 12-year-old Calli Caudill of Bart Lick, Va., says, “I got a doll, bingo and a bag. This is fun and exciting and a great experience. The best part is being able to see everybody happy.”

Near the end of the Santa Train run, singer Grant shares one of her most vivid memories of the long but exhilarating day.

“We stopped at one place, and they had a roped-off place for special-needs kids and young adults, and of course there’s no pretense in a crowd like, and I loved that. But toward the back, they said, `If you can just make it back there, there’s a girl in a wheelchair,’ who looked like she had pretty severe cerebral palsy,” Grant recalled.

“She had a scarf that had like little white almost like yarny lace around her hands and circling her face. She looked like an angel. I said, Do you like to sing?' and so I sang a song, and she started kind of Uh, uh.’ I could tell she liked to sing; so we launched into another song and by the end, she was singing her version of `Oh, Come All You Faithful.’ That was so great. I loved that.

The singer also noted, “On the last stop I had a bag of toys, and a young man maybe 13 or 14, he said, Could I have that truck?' and it was like a baby truck, puffy plastic, and I said Sure.’ … He said `I’ve got a little brother I’d like to give that to,’ and to me that was kind of the spirit everybody feels.”

The Santa Train’s own Santa reflected about what this adventure is all about and said, “I see the excitement of the children just seeing Santa, if I’m close enough to hand ‘em a toy. This day is the culmination of seeing all the volunteers from all over the country.

“It’s one of my greatest blessings in life that I have, seeing families come together once a year from all walks of life and spend some quality times celebrating Christmas.”

Few folks in Smith County know their way around a sewing machine and needle better than Grant seamstress Florence Hall.

The octogenarian, whom most in this small community know as “Nannie,” has been stitching, knitting, hemming, patching, weaving and repairing garments for decades. Perhaps neighbors should give her a new nickname: “Mrs. Sew and Sew.”

“I do everything from brides’ dresses to patching blue jeans,” says the spry seamstress, not boasting, just telling it like it is.

Her to-do-list today includes repairing four pairs of ball pants with holes in the knees and a silk cushion that came from Korea.

“I usually charge $1 for putting a patch on overalls. I charge $5 a pair for heavy britches. I got all I can handle,” said Hall.

While more than adequate with needle and thread, the woman with a sweet smile and high-pitched voice, relies heavily on her workhorse, the Singer treadle sewing machine parked in the kitchen beside the front window through which she catches the morning sunlight.

“I got it when we got electricity in 1952,” she shares about her machine. “It’s pure iron, and I’ve sewed satin, silk and everything on it. I bought it from Mr. Tuley at Tuley’s Furniture Store in Carthage.

“It froze up on me one time. My daughter took it to a man in Lebanon, and he hit it with a hammer and unstuck it.”

Hall says that she has been sewing since “I was big enough. I pierced my first quilt when I was 10 years old. Mama said, `Ever point has got to match.’”

She glances to her right toward the first quilt she pierced after she married. It stays on her kitchen table beneath a transparent covering. “I just put it out here where I could look at it,” she said.

“I work on anything that comes. Sometimes I have to think how to fix it. All that’s pinned,” she says about a garment on her sewing machine. “I’ve got to whip it out by hand. I’ve got garments marked and pinned and ready to sew.

“Did you know that it is easier to get a zipper in a new garment than an old one?” she asks.

While she works her magic, Hall listens to music broadcast by the Hartsville radio station as she can’t pick up the Carthage station at her house in the heart of Grant.

She says of her customers, “They come out of Carthage, everywhere. It comes from word of mouth. For years I sewed for laundries and cleaners, Sparkle [Laundry and Cleaners] in Lebanon and West Main in Carthage. I worked at the Carthage Shirt Factory for 11 years.”

Born Florence Jones in Sumner County, she began school in New Middleton and moved with her family to Boulton’s Branch and then to Shaver Town before they settled for good in Grant in 1938 when she was 12. She completed her formal education in the eighth grade at the Grant school.

“My daddy was called Cowboy Jones. He was 6-foot-4-inches tall and skinny as a rail and always wore a cowboy hat,” she recalled of her farmer father.

“I stared to dating this fellow from Flat Rock, and we got married before I turned 16. We were tenant farmers, just moving around these hollows. I’ve stripped tobacco. Tobacco was the money crop. Of course, we raised everything we eat. We recycled all the time. We took what the kids outgrowed and made it for the little kids.”

Florence and her late husband, Dan Hall, raised five children: Lorene, Billy, Margaret, Robert and Bettie Sue. All live nearby. She has eight grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and seven great-greats.

“My husband bought feeder pigs and raised hogs and hauled ‘em to Sparta to sell. Ole Doc Williams, the vet in Lebanon, got into it with him, and he would haul ‘em up north to Indiana. It got to where he was falling asleep [while driving],” she said of her mate.

“He came in one day and said, `Well, I’ve bought us a store. If I fall asleep in a chair, it won’t hurt me.’”

From 1971 until her husband died in 1981, the couple operated Dan Hall’s Grocery down the road a short piece.

“This is the first house we ever owned,” Hall says of the place she has called home except for the 10 years they lived in a little house beside the store.

“When I was in the store I would pierce quilts by hand when I was not busy. I paid a woman $10 to do the quilting. Ain’t no telling how many I sold. Wished I had ‘em back now,” reminisced Hall, who reckons she has made hundreds of quilts.

“I had to have something to do. I couldn’t just sit there and look at them men play checkers. I just like to do it. Every piece is different.”

Hall mentions that her oldest daughter quilts for the public and makes curtains and such. “A lot of people bring old quilts to me and instead of me doing ‘em, I send ‘em to her,” she said, spilling the beans.

Her firstborn, Lorene Myhand, relates, “Mama taught me how to quilt when I was little and how to sew on her old treadle sewing machine, and she taught me how to cook. I was the oldest of five, so I was washing diapers at 8. Mama has worked hard all of her life. I remember her picking green beans, blackberries, tomatoes and canning.

“She is 87, and yesterday we went to the cornfield to gather corn. Many of our patients say to me, `I saw your mom out in the yard today with her boots and bonnet on,’” said the second-most-famous seamstress in the family, who works part-time in the office of Dr. Larrimore Warren in Lebanon.

“She is a people person. She has never met a stranger. I just can’t describe her. She’s something so special, a sweet little mama. She’s just an inspiration is what she is,” the daughter said.

Hall has a crystal-clear memory, thus her mind serves as a repository for the history of Grant going back to the mid-1930s. She recollects that when she was young Grant had a community water well, three active churches, two stores, a blacksmith shop manned by Pap Eastes, and a hotel and livery stable still standing.

“The school had stables where kids could put their ponies and horses,” she says, recalling that one of her classmates was Louise Certain, who later married banjo legend Earl Scruggs.

Hall, who cooked for and fed American soldiers during the World War II maneuvers, remembers a tragic event from 1942 when a half-track ran off a bridge in Grant, turning upside down, killing two G.I.s. Her father and husband-to-be were among the first civilians on the scene.

As for the few entertainment options during her teen years, she said, “There was a neighbor who had a cattle truck back in the 1940s. You could pay him a dime and climb up in that truck, and he’d haul you to the sulphur well [Sampson’s Mineral Well in Rock City] on a Sunday afternoon where we’d watch a ball game.”

Hall grew up with four siblings. Her two surviving sisters live elsewhere. “I’ve just stayed put,” she says. “It’s quiet and peaceful here. I drive right up here to church on top of the hill.

While deft with her hands, she also has a green thumb so her lawn abounds with plants and trees, some of which she transplanted from the woods more than half a century ago. Her front porch and yard also boast about a dozen wind chimes.

“I stay busy,” says the amiable seamstress of Grant. “I can’t quilt anymore, can’t get a thimble on my finger. I got arthritis that has took over. So I pierce ‘em on the sewing machine.”

Besides alterations done right, Hall said what she enjoys most about her work is “I get to meet people I never would have got to meet.”

Her visitors are bound to walk away knowing they have got the best of the deal.

When Ralph “Buddy” Neal and his family abandoned their century-old farm due to the soon-to-be rising waters of the new J. Percy Priest Lake in 1964, they lost much that was dear.

Besides the fertile fields and green forest that were swamped by the backing up of Stones River, Neal saw the home where he was born and nurtured go crashing to the ground by the power of the big, yellow bulldozers.

While he holds no bitterness toward the Army Corps of Engineers for the job they had to do, he clings to the opinion that the loss of their farms – their heritage – hastened some of the agrarian patriarchs toward early graves.

“Several older men died instantly after the lake came in. My daddy, her daddy,” says Neal, 80, referring to his father and his wife’s father. “I think they grieved themselves to death.”

The 200-acre farm had been in the Neal family 10 or 20 years before the Civil War. Half of it was crop land and half woods, but that was half a century ago. Today, 80 percent of the property lies beneath Percy Priest Lake.

“All of the cropland is under the water. Some of the woods is in Long Hunter Park,” said Neal, who lives on Couchville Pike in the northwest corner of Rutherford County, about two miles as the crow flies from his birthplace.

“This is as about as close to back home as I’ll ever be able to get,” he says.

Neal had just remodeled his house and created a Grade-A dairy farm when the family had to move off their land in April 1964. He estimates that another 40 to 50 families were displaced from the Couchville community at the same time. This was less than a year after construction had begun on J. Percy Priest Dam.

The dam was completed in 1968. Today, the 42-mile long J. Percy Priest Lake covers portions of Davidson, Rutherford, and Wilson counties and boasts 213 miles of shoreline.

“The Corps started talking about this stuff several years before. They came around appraising property. They told you what they were gonna give you. If you took it, it was fine. If not, they would give you 90 percent and 10 percent went to the court. If you took it to arbitration, the jury was three federal judges. You knew how that was gonna come out,” Neal said

“We didn’t get much for our property, $600 an acre, but the farm we purchased really had better facilities. That had to be the providence of God.”

At that time, Neal farmed about 300 acres, some of it leased land, and had a 20-acre dairy farm and a new milking parlor for his herd of 40 to 50 Holstein and Ayrshires.

“But what can you do? Knowing you’re gonna have to move and not knowing where you’re gonna find another farm. That’s scary,” he recalled.

“I looked as far away as Lynnville [in Giles County]. This one just fell in our lap,” he said of the farm he eventually found in Smyrna.

But the move was stressful at best as Neal’s father had just had surgery for colon cancer and was in the hospital when the day of exodus arrived.

“I milked my herd of cows over on Stones River that morning and had trucks come in and move them to the other side of Smyrna and milked them there that night. Then, after I finished milking, I had to move furniture out the same day.

“I went from a parlor where I could milk four at one time and then had a barn with a stanchion where I could do six on one side. It was a brand new ball game for the gals and me,” he said.

Before relocating, Neal salvaged two of the log cabins on his father’s farm. One was the smokehouse, which he restored in his backyard, and the other was his grandfather’s “office,” which he gave to a friend. “I was gonna lose it. They were bulldozing and cutting ‘em down,” recalled Neal.

His reflections upon the first time he saw what was left of the home place after everything had been leveled? “It was sad. You couldn’t hardly recognize it after it went down. Every house and barn was a landmark, but they were gone.”

Lost family farm aside, Neal considers himself a blessed man. He and his wife, the former Mary Thadelle Alexander, have four children (sons Ralph and Randy and daughters Lisa Crowder and Vicki Evans) and seven grandchildren, who all live in Rutherford County.

“We grew up together, lived in the same community and went to church and school together. We dated four years and have been married 58 years,” Neal noted of his better half.

Thadelle’s family, like her husband’s, lost their fertile farmland to the lake. She grew up on Alexander Bend, aka Horseshoe Bend, on the Stones River. Her parents relocated to a house in Murfreesboro after giving up the farm, a place her father never got used to.

For the first eight grades Neal and his siblings attended Morrow-Headden school, a two-room, two-teacher school. The family farm originally sat in Rutherford County, but at some point before Neal was born the property had been transferred into Davidson County.

“Somehow Daddy got the county line moved so his children could go to a Davidson County high school,” said the 1952 graduate of Donelson High School.

Neal’s father, Charles Augustus Neal, kept dairy cows, raised hogs and grew crops of corn, hay and cotton.

“We milked cows and plowed with mules before we got a tractor. I plowed corn with a riding cultivator. My job as a kid was to drive the mule that pulled the hay fork as we put hay up in the loft. We used to grow sorghum and make molasses,” he recollected of his growing-up years.

“We always killed several hogs every year, four or five of ‘em. If a hog didn’t make lard, Daddy thought it was a crying shame.

“My mother cooked on a wood stove till we got electricity. She cooked biscuits every morning, and made a hot lunch. That was it. Then the stove went cold and supper was cold.

“We were the end of the line and about a mile from the closest house. Neal’s Ford Road went back to the farm. There was a place where you could ford Stones River but that’s all under water.”

Neal and his wife were baptized in Stones River at a site called Wallace Beach. That location also is permanently immersed by the waters of Priest.

(Neal’s grandfather, Ralph J. Neal, was born in 1841 and died in 1915. While serving in the Civil War he was wounded five times and fought in battles at Fishing Creek, Kennesaw Mountain, Franklin, Murfreesboro and Nashville. Neal’s great-grandfather, Theodore A. Honour, also served with the Confederate army, and Neal has copies of letters that his great-grandfather wrote to his wife during the Civil War.)

After graduating from high school, Neal worked at AVCO for four years and then served in the Navy as a storekeeper on the USS Barton (DD-722), a destroyer stationed in Norfolk, Va.

In the midst of his farming days, he attended the Murfreesboro School of Bible and Preaching and then taught there. He has been preaching for more than 50 years and has served as a minister at the Stewart’s Creek, Vesta, Walter Hill, Rock Hill and Corinth churches of Christ, and he continues to preach every fourth Sunday of the month at Corinth, where he also serves as an elder.

Neal gardens, enjoys picking guitar and woodworking and has made about 15 mountain dulcimers and has given them away except for the one he plays. He also loves fishing on Couchville Lake and hiking the trails of Long Hunter State Park.

“Buddy is invaluable,” says Thurman Mullins, the recently retired manager of Long Hunter State Park. “His recollection is just tremendous. He knew everybody here and grew up in a time when people knew their neighbors, helped their neighbors and cared about their neighbors. That background really provides anybody who visits with Buddy to know what times were like before J. Percy Priest Lake came into being.

“People show up at the park and get maps and want to see where their families used to live. Some were trashing the Corps. Buddy’s the only one when asked if he had a bitter experience, who said, `Naw, we actually got a lot better farm than we had.’

“I’d see Buddy several mornings a week, and he would be toting his rods and reels and buckets and stuff. He got around like a young man. He knows about Percy Priest and Couchville Lake better than anybody, I guess. To sum him up, he’s the kind of person that people need to be like. His main goal is to get to heaven,’’ said Mullins, who worked for 30 years with Tennessee State Parks.

Neal returns to Long Hunter, not far from his house, often to walk and remember things the way they were.

“I guess the thing is you realize that it is gone. I’d like to see Percy Priest drained. I’d just love to walk over it again. Too many people today don’t have any roots,” says the thoughtful man who clings to his own even though they lay buried deep beneath the waters of the lake.

I’m just testing stuff