My Mother's Garden

 

 

In Loving Memory:

Mary Lee (Smith) Brown

April 16, 1928, Canton, Georgia

- July 19, 2019, Columbus, Georgia

Memories Mary Hillhouse Flower Garden

My mother, Mary Hillhouse is turning 90 years old in April.  Within the last 4 years, she has had hip and shoulder surgery and her planting days are gone.  She no longer can work in her yard and tend to her flowers.  Most of them are now gone due to the lack of love and care she showered on them for forty years.  Many of these flowers were from her mother's cuttings Eloise McArthur Hillhouse as well as friends through the years.  I didn't appreciate their splendor and beauty as I should have.  They are now memories of times past.  A time of country flower gardens that southern women like her and her mother and mother's mother generations loved to have in the spring living on the country roads of Cherokee County.  I am grateful I have photographs of those precious flowers that will forever linger in my memory of my mom.

Old Sixes School - Little Red One Room Schoolhouse

The Old Sixes one room school house is where my mother and her brothers attended school first thorough 8th grade. The school picture above was taken in 1940 and was recently featured in Dixie Living Magazine.  My uncle Rufus and uncle Earnie Hillhouse attended the one room school and are pictured standing in the back row.  The Sixes school house is located in Cherokee County, Georgia outside of Canton. Sixes is an unincorporated community in western Cherokee County located about three miles west of Holly Springs and near the eastern shore of current-day Lake Allatoona.

Sixes Mill - Site of Fort Sixes, used as a Cherokee Indian Removal Fort

I remember this old mill from my childhood. When I stayed with my grandparents every summer in Cherokee County, they would visit the old Sixes Mill and I remember it was located on a dirt road like most of the roads in the county.  It is now part of a historical park in Canton, Georgia.  I did not realize its' historical significance.  Fort Sixes is located there which was used as a Cherokee Indiana removal fort.  This location is listed in the Trail of Tears.  I wonder how many of my own relatives were removed from the area.  My mother's ancestors were Cherokees from North Georgia.  Her ancestor married a white man and they lived around Greenville at the time of the Trail of Tears in 1838.

 

 

 

The one room school house in Sixes Georgia where  my mother attended as a child. 

Fields Landing Park, Allatoona Lake

My granddaughter Lyssa had her high school graduation luncheon at Fields Landing Park at Allatoona Lake. Allatoona Lake is located at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There were a flock of geese and one lone duck swimming around the shore line. I believe the duck thought he was a goose? On the other side of the lake is Little River Marina where we stopped for lunch the next day. There were a pack of ducks at that end of the lake and there were no geese in sight. Geese on one end and ducks on the other. Makes you wonder?