A Lifetime of Memories:
Olive’s Miss Aggie
Written by Justin D. Lamb
Mrs. Agnes Nimmo, 98 of the Olive community, could fill a library with the memories she has acquired over her long life.
“I have been around a long time,” Nimmo chuckled. “And I sure have seen a lot of changes.” Within a few minutes of chatting with Mrs. Nimmo, one is immediately taken back to a much simpler time.
Born on Wednesday, September 5, 1917 to Connie Norwood and Colla (Nelson) Norwood in the Olive community, Aggie, as she is affectionately known by her family and friends, certainly has seen the world change around her over the last century. “There was no running water, no lights, no telephone, no radio, no television, no nothing!” Nimmo recalled. “But we made it just fine.”
During Aggie’s youth, the world was a much naiver place where modern luxuries we are all now accustom to were years away. Cars were few and far in between and roadways were very primitive. “Everybody walked where they had to get and they had horses or mules with a buggy or wagon to travel with,” Nimmo recalled. “All the roads were dirt and when people would go by the house, the dust would fly, and if we had the windows up, here it’d come in the house. Then in the wintertime, the snow and the rain made the roads muddy and hard to travel.”
When a neighbor or family member acquired a car, it was a big news to those in the community back in those day. “Mr. Gentry Lamb had one of the first cars around and he would carry people back and forth from Detroit to look for work. A few years later Mr. Ben Johnson and Mr. Charlie Lovett were able to afford a car. Then I remember my daddy’s uncle got a car. His car just had one seat in it and when they would have a big dinner at Pappy Norwood’s, he’d be there with that little car and he would take everybody for a ride in it one at a time. The car didn’t go very fast and you could mite near walk faster than the car! I remember when I got to ride in it for the first time and I thought it was a big deal!” Nimmo recalled.
Trips to Benton or Paducah were very rare as most people did not have the means to venture very far from their homes. “I remember one time Daddy borrowed a hack wagon from Mr. Amos York and we all went to Benton to Big Singing Day in it. I wasn’t very old at the time, only about five or six, and my brother Joe was just a baby. We hadn’t bit more got over to Benton when the blackest cloud gathered up back in the north and everybody was saying a big storm was a-comin’ in. Well, Daddy got us back in that hack as fast as he could and he ran them horses all the way back to Olive trying to beat the storm!” Nimmo laughed as she reminisced back on that day.
It was at a trip to Hardin that a young Aggie enjoyed her first bottled soda, a day which she will never forget. “The first time I ever had a coke, daddy had bought it for me at Hardin,” Nimmo recalled. “I had never drank out of a glass bottle before and I didn’t know how to drink it so I would stick my tongue down the bottle and sure enough I got it stuck. When I pulled my tongue out, it made a loud pop sound and everyone in the store heard it and glared over at me and Daddy. Daddy was so embarrassed!” Nimmo recalled.
Aggie remembered the day she first went to Paducah and how it was considered a big trip for a young girl from the country. “I was twelve years old before I ever went to Paducah,” Nimmo said. “We had went with Mr. Gentry Lamb and he had taken us down there to pick up my aunt Reba Norwood who was coming in from Chicago. Boy, we had thought we had been around the world traveling to Paducah!” she recalled.
As progress came to Olive in the 1920s, radio became a must-have luxury for those who could afford it. “The first radio in Olive was owned by an old lady named Crosby. She had the headphones with it and her son who was working in Chicago bought it for her and sent it to her. People in the community would gather up there of a night, but she wouldn’t let anybody listen to the radio. She’d listen at the radio with those headphones on and then she would tell everybody what they was saying!,” Nimmo said.
Without means of electricity, people relied on coal oil lamps for lighting and some had carbide lighting in their homes. Carbide consisted primary of calcium carbide which by combing water with it produced a gas known as acetylene gas. Each fixture in the house was piped from a tank where the carbide was placed. Carbide lights were known to put out an extremely bright light. “Mr. Jim Thompson and Mr. Chandler used carbide to light their homes,” Nimmo recalled, “but not many people could afford carbide lighting.”
Without refrigeration, food like milk would be lowered into wells or cisterns to keep them cool and from spoiling. “Mama had a big brown jug that she would fill with milk and hang it down the cistern,” Nimmo said. “One day, Mama was bringing the little jug up and accidentally hit the jug on the neck of that cistern and broke the jug. And we lost all of the milk and all of our water! We had to draw all that water out and have somebody bring us some more water” Nimmo remembered.
It wasn’t until the completion of the Kentucky Dam in the 1940s that electricity and means of refrigeration was able to come to Olive. “I remember when we first got electricity,” Nimmo recalled. “I would turn on all the lights in the house at night and go outside and just look at how pretty those electric lights were.”
When electricity came along and televisions became popular, many began to buy the new source of entertainment. “We had heard about television and we just couldn’t imagine what it looked like,” Nimmo remembered “People would say you could see people on there moving and we just couldn’t figure it out,” Nimmo chuckled. “We finally got one in the 1950s and I still got that old television,” she said.
Today, Olive has no business establishments but that was not the case during Nimmo’s childhood. “Olive was a busy little place when I was growing up as a kid,” she recalled. “There was a grist mill owned by Mr. Chandler and Tom York had a blacksmith shop and he’d shoe horses and do work on wagons and farm equipment.”
Olive also had three general stores where patrons could purchase just about anything from food such as flour and sugar to farming equipment to clothing material. “Grover Harrison and Monico ran one store and up at the crossroads Solon Henson had a store and then Ray Harrison had a store too across the road,” Nimmo said. “Mama made our clothes and we would buy the material at Solon Henson’s store,” she said. “Mama was a good hand to sew and a good hand to cook,” Nimmo recalled affectionately about her mother.
On occasion, a young Aggie had the means to buy rare treats like candy at the store. “When I was a kid, I would carry eggs up to the store to trade for candy,” Nimmo joyfully recalled. “It was very rare though because most of the time we didn’t go up to the stores much because back then people didn’t have much money,” Nimmo said.
Most people had to be self-sufficient and raise their own food with personal vegetable gardens and livestock. “We always had a milk cow, but Daddy, who was a big trader who was known to trade anything, would often sell our cow if someone came along wanting it. I remember I would just cry when he sold our milk cow because we wouldn’t have no milk! I would get my can and walk up to my Aunt Lois’ house and say “Aunt Lo give me some milk because we are out because Daddy sold our milk cow! Nimmo remembered.
The community was a tight-knit place where everyone knew each other and neighbors helped one another along the way. There were also a few colorful characters as well. “Taterbug Hartley was an old bootlegger around here back in those days,” Nimmo said. “He used to wear a long overcoat all the time, and in it, he filled the pockets full of whiskey pints. One time my daddy’s uncle found an old sugar bag and filled it full of sand and he taken it to trade day at Hardin where he asked Taterbug Hartley to trade some of his whiskey for that big bag of “sugar” which he did. Daddy said that Taterbug carried that bag of sand around all day thinking it was full of sugar when it was only full of sand! Oh, how mad he must have been when he found out it was sand and not sugar!” Nimmo said.
As a young girl, Aggie received her formal education at the Olive school which she completed at the eighth grade. “The old schoolhouse at Olive had two rooms with a porch on the side. The big room had a high ceiling. The little room was used for the first grade to the fourth and then we you got done with fourth grade you went to the big room for fifth grade thru eighth grade.
Aggie was a good student who had a perfect attendance almost every year of her school career. “I went seven years and didn’t miss a day of school,” Nimmo recalled proudly. “Every year at the end of school we’d get a prize for perfect attendance. They would give a pencil box with everything in it or a compact with a mirror,” she remembered.
Schools were not equipped with lunch rooms or cafeterias like they are today and students brought their own lunch or went home to eat. “When I would bring my lunch, I would wrap it in a newspaper but most of the time I went home for lunch,” she recalled. “But I remember one time I carried my lunch and I couldn’t wait to get to eat at school like the rest of the students. Our teacher had a chair with rollers and I got in that chair and I reared back getting ready to eat my lunch when out of nowhere somebody gave that chair a good push and I went to flying out of that chair and my lunch went everywhere! The whole classroom got a kick out of that!” Nimmo recalled.
The students of the small country school were always getting into playful mischief on almost a daily basis. “On another occasion Roy Gordon had brought a great big watermelon and he wanted to share it with me and a few others,” she recalled. “Well, the ones who he didn’t invite to eat with him began running after him and were going to take the watermelon away from him,” she recalled. “Roy got to running away from them and ran all through the schoolhouse from the little room to the big room, around all of the desks, and out the front door where he stumped his toe and fell. As he went down, that watermelon flew out of his hands and busted everywhere. All of us kids ran after it and began scooping up what we could salvage and began eating. Boy, was Roy mad about that!” she chuckled.
On occasion, the citizens of Olive were treated to movies at the Olive school house which became a big social gathering. “They would string up a big sheet and show a movie,” Nimmo remembered. “But they didn’t have the sound equipment so we would just watch that movie with no sound. But it didn’t make no difference to us,”
“One time, I remember the film projector got too hot and caught fire and everyone panicked and was rushing to get out of the school house because they were afraid it was going to burn down. This one gentlemen who was there grabbed the arm of a lady next to him thinking it was his wife and frantically pulled her out of the school house to safety. However, when he got outside, he turned and looked at the woman and he realized it wasn’t his wife! He had to go back in to find his wife!” Nimmo laughed.
Much like today, church was the center of life and played a huge part of the community of Olive. “We went to the Baptist church,” Nimmo said. “Back then though they didn’t have preaching all the time and we’d go to the Methodist church when we didn’t have preaching and they would come to our church when they didn’t have preaching,” Nimmo said.
It was at church that Aggie met her future husband, Louie Nimmo, son of John and Viola Nimmo. “We went together for two years before we got married,” she recalled. “We got married in 1933 and I was all of sixteen years old,” Nimmo remembered.
After marriage, Aggie and Louie lived in a three room house at the back of the Olive Baptist Church. “Louie farmed a little for Mr. Edd Lovett when we married and he was making fifty cents a day,” Nimmo said. “Not long after he went to driving a peddling truck for Ray Harrison and went out in the country selling groceries and all kinds of material. He got fifty cents a day and then they raised him to seventy five cents and we thought we was a-flyin’ high!” Nimmo recollected. “We later went to Detroit for a few years so Louie could find work, but got homesick and come back to Olive when Mr. John Edd Walker offered Louie a job at REA in Mayfield. We moved to Mayfield for 25 years where Louie worked at the electric company gassing and oiling the trucks and I worked at the dime store before we moved back to Olive.”
And since then Mrs. Aggie Nimmo has spent her days in the community where she was born and lived most of her life. Her husband Louie left this world in 1986. Though she never had children of her own, Nimmo and her husband became foster parents to five children following the tragic death of the children’s mother in the 1970s. “It is amazing how they took five children ranging from ages 3 to 10 and raised them as their own,” commented Diana Lawrence, who was one of the children raised by Miss Aggie. “She is more of a treasure to me than anyone will ever know.”
Indeed, Miss Aggie is a treasure and loved by all those who know her and call her a friend. She has brought joy throughout her life to many people around her and we hope to have her around for many more years to come.