Florence Hall, Grant Seamstress

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.

Published in: Smith County