Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek: An Alabama Boyhood in the 1890s

A classic work on small community life in rural Alabama in the age before automobiles.

Since its first publication in 1957, Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek has been a favorite of readers who have enjoyed the entertaining, highly readable account of a southern boy’s life in the 1880s and 1890s. With a wry sense of humor and clear-eyed affection, Mitchell Garrett recalls growing up in a verdant valley of the Appalachian foothills in eastern Alabama.

The Hatchet Creek community in Clay County was Garrett’s whole world. Just three miles wide and six miles long, it contained everything small farmers needed for a susTa&iactue;noble way of life: arable land, fresh springs and flowing creeks, a grist mill, a post office, a school, a store, churches, a country doctor and apothecary, mules and horses. Times were hard but the hill people always ate well from their own gardens and larders. They entertained themselves with revivals, weddings, funerals, political parades, sorghum-makings, and Sacred Harp singings. When rambunctious boys and girls weren’t picking cotton or doing daily chores, they skinny-dipped in the millpond; hunted for opossum, quail, and squirrel; fished for eels and goggle-eyed perch; and played party games called "paddle cat" and "grunts."

Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek will capture the reader’s imagination as it opens a window on the thriving culture of a bygone era. Mitchell Garrett’s neighbors and kin-preachers, teachers, storekeepers, millers, housewives, and children-will live again in the pages of this classic tale.

Mitchell B. Garrett was Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina. When he retired in 1952, he and his wife settled in a century-old farmstead in upstate New York, near Canton, and he began writing this memoir of his beloved boyhood home in Alabama. He died in 1959, just two years after the publication of Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek.