Welcome to White House!
By Margery McCurdy Plummer

Although I have lived in White House for many years, you won’t find a Plummer or McCurdy in the White House section of the phone book.

Because I’ve lived in White House for most of my life, I’m sure many people think that I have generations of relatives behind me living in the White House area. Not so.

I’m a native, but my parents were not. They came here soon after their marriage. There were no other McCurdys then and since they had only two daughters, there are no McCurdy’s here, and there are no other Plummers. We had two sons who live not far away but not in White House.

We have no relatives here, which seems strange because while I was growing up and long after I was an adult and married, just about everyone in White House seemed to be in some way related to the other. There are still many “same names” in White House.

White House consisted of a tiny handful of stores and a few houses clustered around a square to make a little town.

Coming from McMinnville, TN, a much larger place even then with “running water”, sidewalks, large stores and schools, a Riverside Drive area and street and traffic lights, could have turned my parents around to go back when they first saw White House, it didn’t. From the minute they arrived with a dream of a drug store and not much else, they loved it and were welcomed with open arms by people who became customers and friends.

Times were hard, and everyone had to help each other, and if citizens needed medicine or other necessities, my father would put them on “the book”. In return the customers helped with garden produce and since we were a no garden family and had no time to can and preserve we welcomed the “barter”. It wasn’t unusual to be given a ham after hog killing time, and one old lady frequently baked for my father the fried pies that he liked.

Recreation was of the usual small town variety such as sand lot baseball and other made up games. My family occasionally took us to a movie in Nashville, but most likely to Franklin, KY, which boasted two theaters with the common names of Roxy and Princess.

Camping was a popular diversion for my parents and friends for a short week end or night. Incidentally, the place they camped was called Eldorado Springs, now Camp Holloway, a well known Girl Scout Camp, that our grand daughter occasionally attends. It’s of interest, I think, that Camp Holloway is named for a woman whose maiden name was Holloway, and she organized a camp that allowed for the first time African American girls to belong.

Perhaps some of our large city transplants can find in us old timers the warm welcome in a little town that my parents found a long time ago. I hope so.