A Historical Column From The Fayette County Historical Commission
It’s a warm Saturday morning in the spring of 1958 on the Hoelscher-Fehmer farm a couple of miles outside of Ellinger in southeast Fayette County. The cows in the pasture are lazily grazing on the lush grass still glistening with early-morning dew. The old sagging cedar plank gate provides an opening in a rusty barbed wire fence that separates the pasture from the aging house and decrepit outbuildings on a farm that appears to be in a time warp from the previous century.
As my mother and I, along with my two younger sisters, round the corner in our 1953 Chevy sedan, kicking up gravel on the winding dirt road, we see my great-uncle busy hitching his two aged mules, Dolly and Molly, to his cotton wagon. Their blinders are already in place, along with their harnesses and chains attached to the double tree connecting them to the wagon tongue.