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Still voting after all these years
When Jane Chastain of Tuckasegee casts her ballot for president this year, it will be the 19th time she has done so.
Chastain will turn 95 this Saturday, and she has voted in every presidential election since 1932. The nonagenarian, who gave her vote to Franklin D. Roosevelt all four times he ran, said she'd like to help return a Democrat to the White House this year.
"I'm proud to be a Democrat – and proud to be a Baptist," she said, looking around the senior adult day program at Love's Chapel Methodist Church and smiling at her "baby" sister – 77-year-old Jemima Tucker of Webster.
"She was the first newborn baby I ever held," Chastain said of Tucker. "The midwife handed her to me first thing."
Termed by program director Diane Melton as "the spryest one of us," Chastain attributes her good health to "staying away from doctors" and said she doesn't take any medicines except vitamins.
In fact, Chastain is so active and involved with the present that it was difficult to steer the conversation back to Jackson County's earlier days.
When she and Jemima told me of making quilts and delivering them to a mission in Lenoir that helps recovering drug addicts, I accidentally insulted her.
"How many quilts did you two make?" I asked.
"Nineteen," Chastain said.
"This year?"
"This summer," Chastain declared.
And then they told me of the beans, pumpkins and tomatoes they'd put up, the chow-chow and pepper relish they'd canned and the blackberries they'd picked and turned into jelly.
I was exhausted by the time we got around to the bygone days.
According to Chastain, the biggest change to Jackson County during her lifetime is good roads.
She remembers when traveling to Sylva from her parents' home on Shook Cove was a three-day excursion.
"We'd go to town in a covered wagon and camp overnight in Cullowhee," she said. "Horses would sink in the mud in Lovesfield near where Bryson's Farm Supply is now."
Keeping bridges wasn't easy in the old days either, Chastain said.
"Every time the Tuckaseigee got up, it would wash the bridges away," she said. "The Tuckaseigee River – before the dams – was something you'd better be afraid of. You didn't fool with it when it was up – it'd get you."
Chastain remembers that one bridge near her family's home was washed away the day after it was finished.
Chastain, who helped out at the Tuckasegee School when her children were small, said she could remember Roy Tritt bringing children to school in a boat because it was so hard to keep bridges in place.
According to Chastain, all the logging in the Canada section during the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the flooding.
"They'd cut those big old tree laps into the river," she said. "It was awful – you couldn't keep a bridge across the Tuckaseigee. Those lakes stopped it."
The lakes she means are Cedar Cliff, Bear Creek, Wolf Creek and Tanassee Creek, a series of reservoirs and hydroelectric plants built by Nantahala Power & Light (now Duke Power/Nantahala Area) on the Tuckaseigee's East Fork, which flows through Canada community.
Last month's flooding in the wake of Hurricanes Frances and Ivan was bad, she said, but nothing like the 1940 flood.
"That flood washed our milk cow and chickens away and did a lot of damage to our fields," she said.
Another change Chastain mentioned has to do with weather. According to her, it doesn't get nearly as cold around here as it used to.
"I've seen men cutting ice out of the Tuckaseigee with axes and piling it over to one side so the horses could cross," she said. "When they'd come back, they'd have to do it again."
She also remembers a snow so deep during the early 1960s that helicopters flew over Jackson County to drop food packages to isolated families.
"We don't have no winter now," she said. "Not like we used to."
Her earliest memory is sitting on her daddy Jim Shook's lap when she was about 2 years old, she said. She remembers hearing talk that her daddy would have to leave to fight in World War I, but the fact that he had 11 children kept him at home, she said.
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