Christy Marshall and Jay Marshall

[00:00] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: My name is Christie Marshall. I am 71 years old. Today is Friday, March 11, 2022. I'm in Pensacola, Florida. I am with my brother, Jay Marshall, and he can introduce himself.

[00:21] JAY MARSHALL: Hi, my name is Jay Marshall. I am now 75 years old, and I am with Christie on the same day of this March 11, excuse me, in Pensacola, and I am going to be speaking with my sister, Christie

[00:43] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: I will start. And we decided we would talk about our family farm. So when. So, first of all, how our. We have a family farm in a lovely little, very, very little town called Grubville, Missouri. So can you tell me how Grubville was named?

[01:09] JAY MARSHALL: Well, Grubville, Missouri, which is approximately 40 miles southeast of St. Louis, or, sorry, southwest of St. Louis, is a town which has been there for probably since the late 18 hundreds, but really didn't have a name until the early part of the 20th century, somewhere around 1920, when the local store and said, you'll put in a request to the local postmaster that we wanted to have a town. We wanted to have a post office. And so they sent a postal examiner out to this little. And they came in the general store, and the good old boys are sitting around the potbelly stove. And he said, okay, this is far enough away from the other towns. We could make this your own post office of your own town. And what would you like to name it? And he looked around, and, of course, inertia being as it was, no one said anything. And finally, he looked out the window, and a local highway was being put through there at that one. At that. That time wasn't much of a highway, but anyway, the road was all torn up, and it was dirty and mucky and had mud everywhere and rock. And he said, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. He said, I'm going to call it Grubville. And when you guys come up with another name, I'll change it. And in the last 100 years, that name has not been changed. So it is still Grubville.

[02:41] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: And how did Grandpa find our land?

[02:44] JAY MARSHALL: Well, my grandfather had been raised on farms in Iowa and subsequently in Minnesota, and he eventually was a dentist and had a practice in Maplewood, Missouri, which was a suburb of St. Louis. And so he had criteria that. It had three criteria. The farm had to be within an hour's drive of St. Louis. It had to have live water, which means it had to have springs on the property. And it had, in his final request was that it be far enough off the main road that no one would stop in for a free drink. And so he, with using those criteria, he put the word out and was finally directed toward this property.

[03:30] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: And how did he get the land cleared and the land house built? Well, this was during the depression.

[03:36] JAY MARSHALL: This was. This was in 1932. And it was in the height of the depression. No one had any money. And so my grandfather was able to get enough loans to buy the piece of property, which was 100 acres and spent somewhere in the range of $10 per acre. And then he had to build a house and had to clear the land because the land was full of sprouts and had been logged in the past. And therefore, there were really no open areas. The woods were just sprouts, the fields were full of sprouts. So anyway, he. He worked once again to get enough money to build a small house. And in the basement of that house, he put a dental office. So he would come out to the farm on Saturday, Saturday, and during the day, he. His family would work on the farm. And then on Sunday morning, he would open his door to his dental practice. And by the time he opened the door at seven in the morning on Sunday, there were horses and buggies all around the circular drive in front of the house, people waiting to get in to see him because no one had any money. And it was known that he would do all of his work on a barter plan. And so, for example, an extraction of a tooth was one half a day's work. A filling was a full day's work. A set of dentures was two weeks work, or a cow and a calf. And from that he was able to get the farm cleared and get some. Some money from selling cows and calves. And. And he was able to. To get the farm to work. And the people were thrilled because this way they got their dental care. And since they had no money, they were able to get a. Get it done.

[05:33] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: And so once they had the land cleared, the house built then, and dad was a teenager at this time, and so dad decided. Dad fell in love with the farm and he decided that he heard about some open land that they could add to the farm. Do you want to tell about that?

[05:54] JAY MARSHALL: So my father, in an attempt to.

[05:58] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Was it also a dentist?

[06:00] JAY MARSHALL: Well, eventually was, but at this time he was only. He was only 17 years old. And so he. He set up with an egg root and he would take a little. An old model t truck and he would drive around to the neighbors and he would buy eggs. And. And they were thrilled to sell his eggs because he had a little bit of money and he was able to give them some cash. So he got these eggs, and he would then go into town in Maplewood and sell the eggs. On making these trips, he got to know the locals very well. And he. And he ran into the Weber family, which was next door, and they were having a family dispute about land. And one of the. One of the brothers said, I want out of here. And dad happened to be in the room, and dad said, oh, you do? And he said, yeah. He said, I want out of here. I want to get rid of this land. I want to sell it. So my dad said, boyden, you know, he's 17 years old. He said. And the guy said, well, I'll take $10 an acre. So. And he had. He had a hundred. He had 100 acres. So my dad said, oh, I'll take that. Well, dad didn't have $10. He didn't have enough for the first month's payment. And so the $1,000 was supposed to be $10 a month until it was paid off. Well, he ended up borrowing some money for my father to get started and then worked for the rest for the next 20 years. It took him to actually pay it totally off and finally have that land.

[07:30] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: So then he grew up and became an orthodontist, and we lived in the city in St. Louis. And when I was two or three years old, my mother, who had grown up in a small town in Missouri, opened a good housekeeping magazine and ripped out a picture of a very small ranch house. And so she said, let's build that. So when we were little, they built that house, and we want to tell us. So in the summers, we lived there.

[08:07] JAY MARSHALL: We would. We would actually move out to the farm. On June 1, we close up our little house in town, and we would head out to the farm with all dogs, cats, etcetera. And we would stay there until September 1. And so in our entire life from that, during those three months, was involved with being on the farm and doing farm things and nothing. So I was groomed into farmer like activities and learning how to run machinery and do hay and cut weeds, etc. Etcetera. And my sisters.

[08:47] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: We had the easy life. We had our expectations levels. The bar was low, so we read a lot. We rode horses a lot. We weren't allowed inside during the day, so we had to make our own adventures and keep ourselves busy. It was very basic, but it was in the 1950s, the 1950s and early sixties. We didn't have a washing machine. We'd have to go. My mother would have to haul us a laundromat and we had one day a week. We got cleaned up. Oh, we were never allowed to wear shoes. Don't ask me that. I mean, it was the weirdest thing. My father somehow came to the conclusion that we would have very strong feet if we couldn't wear shoes. So when we would get a prize at the end of the summer if we never put shoes on, except when we went into the city, once a week was the weirdest thing. And so we would go. We would get cleaned up one day a week, and we would go to the city, and my mother would run her errands, and we go to the grocery store, and we would do kind of civilized things and then go back and be wild banshees at the farm. And every day, my mother would insist that we had to have a quiet time after lunch. And we would. So we would all go into our rooms. There were three. Well, we had an older sister, but she was always at camp. So Jay and I would go to our rooms and then climb out the windows and then explore the farm.

[10:24] JAY MARSHALL: So my mother had the idea that. Or she perpetuated the old wives tale that if you swam within an hour of the time that you ate, that you would develop abdominal cramps and you would not be able to float, and you would sink and die. So this hour of rest time after lunch, we had. She said, well, you might as well go in your room and read and nap because you can't go in the creek and you can't go in the pond, and you can't.

[10:53] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: We had a swimming pool.

[10:54] JAY MARSHALL: Can't swim. We believed her. And, of course, it was fallacious, but anyway, we believed her. And so we. We stayed out of the water for that hour every day.

[11:07] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: But she also had a philosophy that when the whippoorwill came out, the whippoorwill wasn't just going, doing a whippoorwill song. It was saying, go to bed. Go to bed. Go to bed. And we would, like. Foolishly we would go to bed, because.

[11:25] JAY MARSHALL: That'S what the whippoorwill said.

[11:27] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: That was a whippoorwill. I mean, hey, it's a power bigger than we were.

[11:31] JAY MARSHALL: And I would. I became an inveterate hunter during those times. And I would hunt squirrels. And when my father would get up in the morning to drive to town to go to work, he would get me up, and I would go into the. Grab my rifle and walk into the woods, and I'd be there until maybe 10:00 in the morning and come back with my squirrels and clean them. And then my mother would say, okay, now you need to go get the horses. And so I oh, we worked him hard.

[12:00] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: We were the only boy. He worked him hard. Actually, he was a prince, but we worked him hard.

[12:06] JAY MARSHALL: So anyway, so she said, get the horses for your sisters. Well, the horses. I didn't really care for the horses that much, and they did. They really didn't like me. And so they would see me coming, and they'd say, well, what are we gonna do today? Are we going to kick him? Are we going to bite him? We're going to run over him? What are we going to do? So I would finally figure out some way to catch them, bring them in, and so that my sisters could ride a. And then in the later afternoon, about 05:00 I would head back to the woods, and I would stay there until dusk, bring my squirrels in, and then we'd clean the squirrels and have dinner. But.

[12:44] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: And sometimes. So that in Grubville, a kind of a big event for us at the end of the day. So Jay started driving our jeep when he was about 14, and so. And I was three years younger. But even when we were younger than that, and I don't know how we got there. In the hub of Grubville, there was a gas station slash candy store, slash bar. And across the street for most of our.

[13:13] JAY MARSHALL: And they also repaired cars in the back, in the garage behind it.

[13:16] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Right? And it was run by Violet and Wheeler Frost. And so a big tree was where we would go up at the end of the afternoon, and we would get. What was the soda called?

[13:30] JAY MARSHALL: It was called a whistle. There was an orange soda that was called a whistle, obviously, in a glass bottle. We'd sit at the bar with the. With the town drunk, with the denizens of the bar who were sitting there next to us drinking their beers. And we're sitting there drinking our whistles.

[13:46] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Right. And I remember I had to have help getting up on the stool because I was so short. And then across the street was a. For a while, but then it did. It burned down was a general store.

[13:58] JAY MARSHALL: And it had everything. It had the post office in it and the potbellied stove that was I mentioned earlier. And it was the hub of activity for the town, including the bar across the street. And really, that was about it. That was it, those two buildings. And the other thing about Grubville is that Grubville had a sign at the north end of town that said Grubville. But there was no sign at the other end of town. So once you pass that sign you were always in Grubville because there was no other end. And so we would kind of say, well Grubville is more of a state of mind than it is a place. So because it had no limits and of course it was never incorporated. So it was just a place out in the wood out there. And when we grew up there were, there was a town every 5 miles because back in the 19th century you, it was comfortable to ride a horse about 5 miles and then you had to get water for it. So they, these little towns all along these highways extending to and from St. Louis had little towns 5 miles apart. So there was, there was Ditmer, there was Ormond, there was Groveville, there was lone Dell lubering all these little cities spread out along there. So there were little places to go visit, but there wasn't a whole lot.

[15:25] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: There, so, and not a lot to do. But as time went on and the general store disappeared, that needed a new place for the post office. So they built a very small post office on the other side of Violet Wheeler Frost candy store bar. And at one point the postmistress, a wonderful, wonderful Wanda Sue Frazier, got very large. She just got, well to be kind, huge. And so she wrote the government and said, and she did, she lived like what, 500ft away? Not far at all. I mean truly just the end of one block to another. But she wrote the government and said that it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for her to go from her house to the post office. So the post, so the government, which I wish we had such a, such an amenable government today went oh no not a problem. They put it on the other side of her kitchen.

[16:32] JAY MARSHALL: So she had it at her home.

[16:34] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: She had it in her home. And she was always dieting and she was always making sweets with nutrient nutra.

[16:42] JAY MARSHALL: Nutrasweet.

[16:43] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Nutrasweet. But she didn't realize it wasn't a one to one. I hope we don't hurt misses Fraser's feelings by telling this story. She didn't know it wasn't a one to one. So she would put in a cup of nutrasweet instead of a cup of sugar because this is completely inedible. And so you go in and she would be like hi honey, how are you? Here, here's some muffins. And you would come out and there'd be a trash can full of misses Fraser's weapons because you of course have to accept it. But then of course you couldn't eat it. So as time went on, the frost passed away and it became the bar, became Joe Mama's Hilltop Tavern. And at one point, I worked at the us attorney's office and they confided to me that if there was ever a crime in all of Jefferson county, they could usually find the culprit in mom's hilltop tavern. That was probably one of the first places the sheriff would go. And years went on, and now it has to.

[17:52] JAY MARSHALL: It's gone as well. There is no viable business in Grubville anymore.

[17:57] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: No. Some nasty, nasty old building.

[18:00] JAY MARSHALL: So the farm itself is still there.

[18:04] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Fourth generation.

[18:06] JAY MARSHALL: Fifth generation.

[18:07] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Fifth generation.

[18:08] JAY MARSHALL: My grandfather, my father, us, our children, and our grandchildren. So fifth generation. And my father arranged it so that the children would. The farm would stay within the children and they could only negotiate between themselves. So we've been able to hold on to the farm and it's been great, and we all have places to stay there and our children caring qualities, may.

[18:34] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: I quickly add, Jay has what is referred to effectually as the big ass house. And then my sister built a house, and then my niece, Jay's middle child, owns what was originally my grandfather's house. And then there was this very quaint, I think quaint is a nice word.

[18:56] JAY MARSHALL: Quite a nice word.

[18:57] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Very nice quaint playhouse that my father had built for us, but got the measurements wrong. So instead of your typical playhouse that was built for a child of the age of five, it was a real house. 800 single room that he built. To say on the low side of an investment would be kind of an understatement. Just four walls, and that's where I live. And through the years, it did expand because it was the caretaker's house. And so it did seem fair to put in for the caretaker a bathroom and a kitchen and a bedroom. So it's now 800 sqft. It was probably 200, 300 sqft originally. And that my husband calls it the crap shack, but I refer to it as the mini mill. And the mini mansion is there as well, so we all have places to stay.

[20:03] JAY MARSHALL: So the farm has been a farm since 1932. And my grandfather had cattle and sheep. And a person during those years was always on the place to help watch after, because my grandfather would go back to the city during the week to work. And so there was somebody living on the place. They didn't really get paid, they just had a place to live. And then they would take care of the cows and the sheep, etcetera. So that has been continued ever since. And we to this day still have a cow calf operation there. And we have about 50 head with about 30 cows and 20 calves in a bull and plan to do that for the time being. And my goal is, if I can make it to 85, the farm will that at that point in time, be 100 years old, and it will become a century farm in the state of Missouri. The state actually gives you a little plaque that you can put out and notifying that this is the Marshall farm and it's a century farm. And so I would like to someday be able to have that, so. But my children have plans. My three children all have plans to use the farm, and Christie's as well. And our other sister has a son who's planning to use the farm. So there will be a nucleus of people on this piece of property, we hope, for quite some time to come.

[21:39] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Another interesting thing that happened at the farm when I was, I guess, in second grade. What is that?

[21:45] JAY MARSHALL: And you were seven.

[21:47] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: My father hired caretakers from Mississippi and they were the first African Americans in the county. And it wasn't a pleasant experience for them or us. We had people calling at all times, leaving things in our mailbox when they couldn't. The most wonderful couples, Sam and Leila Scurlock. And while we were there. So that was early fifties, their church started having their church picnic at our farm because they couldn't have. They weren't allowed to have it even in the public parks at that point. And that tradition carried on for almost 50 years. They just no longer. They no longer do it now. And now they could do it where? Obviously, wherever, happily, wherever they want to go. But for 50 years, they would come out every summer and have a. A great big picnic, which was wonderful, and they were wonderful people. So I think, what else? Any other things? The farm has always been our touchstone. It was, as my sister used to say, we would be all crabby and rude to each other, and then when we got to the farm, it just didn't matter. What were you gonna be crabby about? It has always been air touchstone. And the nice thing is our children find it the same way. The jays three girls, my sister's son and daughter, and my daughter came much later than that, but they all grew up. The farm was where you met. You were there for every holiday, you were there every summer. And it's not fancy, but it's just beautiful land and it's just such a major part of us. I always refer to it as the gas station for my soul. When I go out there, it's just like a pump is filling my soul. Back up and I'm ready to regroup. And everybody, there's a cemetery there and we'll all be buried there.

[24:06] JAY MARSHALL: Yes. Well, so I think that's it.

[24:10] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Yeah. I think that that pretty much recapsulates Cedar Valley farms, named after all the cedar trees that are everywhere. Who knew that was a weed? And that's us.

[24:25] JAY MARSHALL: Well, thank you, Christie

[24:28] CHRISTIE MARSHALL: Thank you, Jay