Granny's Letters:
We drove out of town about 15 miles to Hobs Island and camped on the side of a hill, a very poor place. We named it camp uncomfortable. That was where we sold our meat. We have seen nothing but cotton since we struck Alabama, a few corn fields, they plant one stalk in a hill about 2 or 3 ft. apart in the rows and the rows are at least 4 ft. apart and the ground is too poor to plant like we do. We had such awful roads from Huntsville to New Hope so had to go on to Guntersville, 19 miles over a new road, it was fierce, but we got there. We had so much mountain road. We stopped at Guntersville (here we ferried over the river) got the spring fixed that Carrie had broken on the bad road at New Hope, got our dinner and it was time to camp. It is a county seat but is the dirtiest town that I ever saw. We drove about 5 miles out of Guntersville to the top of a mountain and camped, it was quite a camp something like 20 or 30 cars all going to Florida. We had a fine place but it was cold. Some people had their radiators to freeze. We came over more rough roads, we struck another mountain but the roads were better and one place called Point View was the finest scenery, we could look away over the valley and see ever so many farms. We then came to three towns, Attala, Alabama City and Gadsden, they were so close together you could not tell where one ended and the other began, they were great factory towns, cotton mills we supposed, from Gadsden we came to Centerville and camped again at the big camp grounds. There was a man and a woman there from Van Wert, they were traveling alone, their names were Bitner, they came and warmed at our fire and today they traveled with us. We came through one big town today, Rome Ga. It was surely a grand town and cotton bale after bale and field after field, and then we came to a place today where they were picking the first cotton we have seen, we took some pictures of one family, there were 7 of them, four more were not at home or there would have been 11. It was Mr. Benny Jackson and family. Frank went to the toilet, it was a box and his head stuck out of the top.