ALABAMA HERITAGE
  • Magazine
    • Current and Back Issues >
      • Back Issues 141-150 >
        • Issue 147, Winter 2023
        • Issue 146, Fall 2022
        • Issue 145, Summer 2022
        • Issue 144, Spring 2022
        • Issue 143, Winter 2022
        • Issue 142, Fall 2021
        • Issue 141, Summer 2021
      • Back Issues 131-140 >
        • Issue 140, Spring 2021
        • Issue 139, Winter 2021
        • Issue 138, Fall 2020
        • Issue 137, Summer 2020
        • Issue 136, Spring 2020
        • Issue 135, Winter 2020
        • Issue 134, Fall 2019
        • Issue 133, Summer 2019
        • Issue 132 Spring 2019
        • Issue 131, Winter 2019
      • Back Issues 121-130 >
        • Issue 130, Fall 2018
        • Issue 129, Summer 2018
        • Issue 128, Spring 2018
        • Issue 127, Winter 2018
        • Issue 126, Fall 2017
        • Issue 125 Summer 2017
        • Issue 124, Spring 2017
        • Issue 123, Winter 2017
        • Issue 122, Fall 2016
        • Issue 121, Summer 2016
      • Back Issues 111-120 >
        • Issue 120, Spring 2016
        • Issue 119, Winter 2016
        • Issue 118, Fall 2015
        • Issue 117, Summer 2015
        • Issue 116, Spring 2015
        • Issue 115, Winter 2015
        • Issue 114, Fall 2014
        • Issue 113, Summer 2014
        • Issue 112, Spring 2014
        • Issue 111, Winter 2014
      • Back Issues 101-110 >
        • Issue 110, Fall 2013
        • Issue 109, Summer 2013
        • Issue 108, Spring 2013
        • Issue 107, Winter 2013
        • Issue 106, Fall 2012
        • Issue 105, Summer 2012
        • Issue 104, Spring 2012
        • Issue 103, Winter 2012
        • Issue 102, Fall 2011
        • Issue 101, Summer 2011
      • Back Issues 91-100 >
        • Issue 100, Spring 2011
        • Issue 99, Winter 2011
        • Issue 98, Fall 2010
        • Issue 97, Summer 2010
        • Issue 96, Spring 2010
        • Issue 95, Winter 2010
        • Issue 94, Fall 2009
        • Issue 93, Summer 2009
        • Issue 92, Spring 2009
        • Issue 91, Winter 2009
      • Back Issues 81-90 >
        • Issue 90, Fall 2008
        • Issue 89, Summer 2008
        • Issue 88, Spring 2008
        • Issue 87, Winter 2008
        • Issue 86, Fall 2007
        • Issue 85, Summer 2007
        • Issue 84, Spring 2007
        • Issue 83, Winter 2007
        • Issue 82, Fall 2006
        • Issue 81, Summer 2006
      • Back Issues 71-80 >
        • Issue 80, Spring 2006
        • Issue 79, Winter 2006
        • Issue 78, Fall 2005
        • Issue 77, Summer 2005
        • Issue 76, Spring 2005
        • Issue 75, Winter 2005
        • Issue 74, Fall 2004
        • Issue 73, Summer 2004
        • Issue 72, Spring 2004
        • Issue 71, Winter 2004
      • Back Issues 61-70 >
        • Issue 70, Fall 2003
        • Issue 69, Summer 2003
        • Issue 68, Spring 2003
        • Issue 67, Winter 2003
        • Issue 66, Fall 2002
        • Issue 65, Summer 2002
        • Issue 64, Spring 2002
        • Issue 63, Winter 2002
        • Issue 62, Fall 2001
        • Issue 61, Summer 2001
      • Back Issues 51-60 >
        • Issue 60, Spring 2001
        • Issue 59, Winter 2001
        • Issue 58, Fall 2000
        • Issue 57, Summer 2000
        • Issue 56, Spring 2000
        • Issue 55, Winter 2000
        • Issue 54, Fall 1999
        • Issue 53, Summer 1999
        • Issue 52, Spring 1999
        • Issue 51, Winter 1999
      • Back Issues 41-50 >
        • Issue 50, Fall 1998
        • Issue 49, Summer 1998
        • Issue 48, Spring 1998
        • Issue 47, Winter 1998
        • Issue 46, Fall 1997
        • Issue 45, Summer 1997
        • Issue 44, Spring 1997
        • Issue 43, Winter 1997
        • Issue 42, Fall 1996
        • Issue 41, Summer 1996
      • Back Issues 31-40 >
        • Issue 40, Spring 1996
        • Issue 39, Winter 1996
        • Issue 38, Fall 1995
        • Issue 37, Summer 1995
        • Issue 36, Spring 1995
        • Issue 35, Winter 1995
        • Issue 34, Fall 1994
        • Issue 33, Summer 1994
        • Issue 32, Spring 1994
        • Issue 31, Winter 1994
      • Back Issues 21-30 >
        • Issue 30, Fall 1993
        • Issue 29, Summer 1993
        • Issue 28, Spring 1993
        • Issue 27, Winter 1993
        • Issue 26, Fall 1992
        • Issue 25, Summer 1992
        • Issue 24, Spring 1992
        • Issue 23, Winter 1992
        • Issue 22, Fall 1991
        • Issue 21, Summer 1991
      • Back Issues 11-20 >
        • Issue 20, Spring 1991
        • Issue 19, Winter 1991
        • Issue 18, Fall 1990
        • Issue 17, Summer 1990
        • Issue 16, Spring 1990
        • Issue 15, Winter 1990
        • Issue 14, Fall 1989
        • Issue 13, Summer 1989
        • Issue 12, Spring 1989
        • Issue 11, Winter 1989
      • Back Issues 1-10 >
        • Issue 10, Fall 1988
        • Issue 9, Summer 1988
        • Issue 8, Spring 1988
        • Issue 7, Winter 1988
        • Issue 6, Fall 1987
        • Issue 5, Summer 1987
        • Issue 4, Spring 1987
        • Issue 3, Winter 1987
        • Issue 2, Fall 1986
        • Issue 1, Summer 1986
    • Digital Features
    • Links of Interest
    • Bonus Materials >
      • Adventures in Genealogy
      • Alabama Heritage Blog
      • Alabama Territory
      • Becoming Alabama >
        • Creek War Era
        • Civil War Era
        • Civil Rights Movement
      • From the Vault
      • History in Ruins
      • Places in Peril
      • Recipes
  • Online Store
    • Customer Service
  • About Us
    • Awards
    • Meet Our Team
    • News
    • Writer's Guidelines and Submissions
  • Search
  • Donate
Published by The University of Alabama,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Hope Chest

6/18/2018

 
​My wife had news when I called her from the Best Western in Monroeville, Alabama. I was attending a literary conference, where writers pondered, among other things, how being Southern had shaped who they were and what they wrote. Such ruminative gatherings are a minor industry for our region, and the local community college was eager to capitalize on Monroeville's claim to Harper Lee and other notable local writers.
​"We've got the chest," my wife said. "Aunt Zelda had it for us when Sarah and I went by to see her."
 
The chest? It's at our house?
 
"I couldn't believe it," my wife said, "but Aunt Mamie told Aunt Zelda it was time to pass the chest down, and we brought it home with us. I was scared to death something would happen to it on the way."
 
My wife paused. "They gave it to Sarah. Aunt Mamie wanted Sarah to have it."
 
Sarah is our fourteen-year-old. Many times, I had told her how my grandmother kept the chest on a bureau in her guest bedroom like some museum piece. When I was small, she would allow me to look at the heirloom, but I could never touch it. The leather was cracked and peeling from the studs that bound it to a wooden frame. The ancient lock no longer worked.
 
The chest, which looks like a miniature foot locker, may have come with my grandmother's people from the British Isles. It was just large enough to hold valuables, such as any jewelry or gold they might have acquired. What turned the chest into a relic, however, was an event that occurred around April 10, 1865. Thereafter, the chest would hold memories, rather than things.
 
About a week before that date, a detachment of some 1,500 Union cavalry under Brig. Gen. John Thomas Croxton swept into Tuscaloosa County. They fought off Rebel skirmishers around Vance and then occupied Northport and Tuscaloosa, where they burned the University of Alabama. The Bluecoats next attempted to march southwestwardly through Greene and Pickens counties. They hoped to rejoin the main body of federal raiders under the command of Gen. James Harrison Wilson. But Croxton's men, thereafter known as the "lost brigade," became discouraged as they meandered across hostile country. Some of them drowned in swollen rivers. A few fell captive to Southern sympathizers.
 
Having learned that a brigade of tough Confederates under Wirt Adams was marching toward them from Pickensville, Croxton ordered his men back toward Tuscaloosa. As rain pelted the retreating federals, Adams' men fell on the Union rear, harassing the exhausted Kentuckians. A running fight occurred for some thirty miles, costing the federals about three dozen men, until finally the raiders stumbled into Northport, just across the Warrior River from Tuscaloosa.
 
Though safe for the moment, Croxton had to keep moving. In addition to a tired brigade, he had as many as two thousand horses and mules that needed forage. With no word of Wilson's whereabouts, he decided this time to march north toward Jasper, taking the old Byler Road. From Jasper, he would march east to find Wilson.
 
About twelve miles out of Northport, Croxton ordered his men to make camp for a few days near the plantation of John Prewitt, one of the county's wealthiest slaveholders. This respite would allow foraging patrols to trip the country of anything edible.
 
Mary Ann Kemp's three hundred acres of rolling farm land and woods lay about ten miles away, as the crow flies. Like most of the South's "plain folk," she and her family subsisted on what they grew, selling the surplus to acquire a little cash. They lived in a modest wooden house and stored their corn in a crib nearby.
 
It's unclear who first saw the Yankees riding up to the home place. The sun was setting, and family members were probably on the front porch, having finished supper. Mary Ann, a widow, was alone with her two grown daughters, Martha and Sarah, and her twelve-year-old son Robert. Her two oldest sons were away fighting for the Confederacy.
 
Although word had gone throughout the county that the Yankees were moving northward, Mary Ann probably hadn't expected them to show up so far from the main road. But she thought quickly, as women have always had to do when confronted by menacing men. As the invaders milled around in her yard, she tucked the little chest under her apron and strode out the back door of her house.
 
She headed for her chicken coop, a primitive structure about three feet long and two feet high. Made of wooden slats, the coop resembled the roof of a house. Farmers used such shelters to protect their chickens at night from predators. They would lift the coop and attract the biddies under it with a tin plate of cracked corn.
 
Mary Ann raised one end of the coop in the semidarkness and quickly shoved in the chest where the chicks normally slept.
 
"What are you doing?" yelled one of the Yankee soldiers.
 
"I'm just checking on my biddies," she replied. "They're all we're going to have for eating this spring."
 
"You get back in that house and stay there," the soldier ordered.
Inside the chest was the family's small fortune: $300 in gold that somehow Mary Ann had managed to save. The soldier never came over to investigate, and she returned to the house.
The Yankees commandeered the family's mules and two wagons and loaded them with the corn they found in the crib. They chased down the chickens in the yard, tied their legs and threw them on top of the corn. Then they searched the house, but they did not harm the family members.
 
Finally, they set fire to the crib and rounded up the family's milk cows and calves. Driving the livestock before them, the soldiers left with the wagons and their plunder—but not with the little chest and its treasure. It remained safely hidden under the chicken coop. Because of Mary Ann's quick thinking, there would be money to see the family through the hard year ahead.
 
I must digress to explain how the little chest came down through the family. Mary Ann's daughter Martha, whom the family called Aunt Sis, never married. When she was seventy, she moved to Berry to live with one of Robert's children, Patience Kemp Kimbrell, who was my grandmother. In the wagon ride to her new home, Aunt Sis brought with her a trunk filled with her clothes. She also brought the little chest, which she kept in her bedroom. Often she told about the marauding Yankees and how her mother had hidden the chest under the chicken coop.
 
After Aunt Sis died, my grandmother kept the chest. Later, she brought it with her when she and my grandfather moved to Fayette, where they lived in a cottage that always seemed filled with light and laughter. When I visited my grandparents, I would ask to see the chest and look at the old pictures in the bureau's bottom drawer. One of the photographs showed my grandmother and her brothers and sisters in 1903 standing in front of what may have been the original Kemp house. In the photograph, Aunt Sis is seated with the children.
 
Upon my grandmother's death, the chest passed to Aunt Mamie, the youngest of her six children. Although she has lost much of her eyesight, she directed me recently to the old Kemp homestead, hidden in the brambles and pines. Near the site, however, and along what is still called "the Kemp Road" in north Tuscaloosa County, remains a tiny cemetery, protected by a chain-link fence. Here lies buried Mary Ann Kemp, my great-great-grandmother, and next to her, Aunt Sis.
 
Aunt Mamie is the one who insisted that the chest go not to me, but instead to my daughter, Sarah. My Aunt Zelda seemed bemused by that request, but I understood the sentiment. The legacy of their mother's people was that of strong women who persevered in a region that had known a tragically different history from the victorious American version. They were among the conquered people; yet they endured and clung fiercely to their heritage, just as Aunt Sis had protected her little chest during the wagon trip to Berry.
 
When my wife finished telling me the news about the heirloom, I hung up the telephone and felt an itch to write. Was I responding as a Southerner to my region's peculiar culture, as someone at the literary conference might have suggested? Or was I simply acting upon a universal impulse to understand the human experience through the means of a good story?
 
I don't know. A more pressing matter was to write these words so that my daughter might store them in the old chest­—where they will be safe for the next generation.

This feature was previously published in Issue 50, Fall 1998.

About the Author

Bailey Thomson is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa.
Subscribe to Alabama Heritage

Comments are closed.

    From the Vault

    Read complete classic articles and departments featured in Alabama Heritage magazine in the past 35 years of publishing. You'll find in-depth features along with quirky and fun departments that cover the people, places, and events that make our state great!

    Read More From the Vault

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    August 2022
    June 2022
    February 2022
    June 2021
    May 2021
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    April 2015
    July 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    October 2012
    July 2012
    October 2009

    Categories

    All
    African Americans
    Agriculture
    Alabama
    Archeaology
    Architecture
    Avondale
    Avondale Zoo
    Birmingham
    Business
    Cathedral Caverns
    Civil War
    Constitution
    Cuba
    Episcopal Church
    Food
    Guntersville
    Hollywood
    Hunting
    Murder
    Mystery
    National Guard
    Native American
    Nursing
    Photography
    Poarch Creek Indians
    Politics
    Preservation
    Quilts
    Religion
    Revolutionary War
    Sand Mountain
    Whiskey
    Women
    WWI
    WWII

    RSS Feed

Online Store
​Customer Service
Meet Our Team
Board of Directors
Corporate Sponsors
News
Join Our Email List

Employment
UA Disclaimer
UA Privacy Policy ​
​Website comments or questions?  

Email ah.online@ua.edu
Published by The University of Alabama, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History
​Alabama Heritage
Box 870342
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Local: (205) 348-7467
Toll-Free: (877) 925-2323
Fax: (205) 348-7473

alabama.heritage@ua.edu