Mississippi was in the throes of Reconstruction when Sam Matlock was born in 1876. US Grant was President of the United States. Ravaged by the horrors of the War Between the States, Mississippi was starving for the simple basics needs of life. Food and shelter. No doubt Sam saw some hard times growing up in that era. Like so many other tough Mississippians, he was determined not to cave to the deprivation and destruction brought on by Sherman’s vindictive march though Mississippi. He cleared the land with an ax and crosscut saw and eventually operated one of the finest farms in the county. Matlock hill could have graced the cover of Southern Living Magazine till this day.
One of the first things Sam did when he set out on his life’s work was build a giant barn somewhere around 1910. The Matlock barn was designed in a manner that more resembled the central headquarters of his huge farm where he raised cotton as his cash crop and corn and hay as sustenance crops for the family and livestock.
Along with the hayloft, the barn had different rooms for specific purposes. The tack room where they kept saddles for the horses, and gear for the mules was located in the center of the barn on the ground floor near the plow room. A corn crib was located on the ground floor just inside the giant hanging door. Feed troughs still hung in the walls of the stalls. You could see where the mules had gnawed the wood they were made from.
As barns go the Matlock barn was built for the same purpose as any other barn. It was just bigger than most barns of the day. The history of the barn is lost for the most part. Sam Matlock died in 1949 and passed his place to his two sons and his daughter Bessie Matlock Ezell. Bessie and her husband Lloyd lived on and farmed the place as long as their health permitted. Lloyd and Bessie have gone on to be with the Lord. Sadly, they took much of the history with them.
Back in those days barns served another purpose. The Matlock barn was no exception. It was where kids played cowboys and other games. Stacks of hay became giant rocks they ducked behind to defend themselves from the bad guys. Stalls served as the jail house and the corncrib was safe haven. One particular game sticks in the writer’s mind. Corncob war. The name pretty much describes the game. Corncobs were ammunition and anybody who happened to get in the way was the target. There was only one rule of the game. That was “keep it clean.” Clean meant you couldn’t dip the corncob in anything you might find spattered on the ground. But as they say, “rules were meant to be broken.” Invariably somebody would break the rule. When that happened, the corncob war was pretty much over-with and the fist fight began. Nobody got hurt too badly. Pride was the main victim. I learned early on not to mess with any of the Matlock boys.
Aside from serving its purpose as a storage facility and shelter of livestock, the old barn witnessed a century of history. If the barn could talk, it could give us a first hand account of events that we only read about in history books. The airplane was only seven years old when Sam Matlock sawed pines and oaks from his place and hauled them a miles away on a mule drawn wagon to Clifford Cox’s sawmill. The Ford Model T was two years old. Only four years later as Sam was “laying his corn by,” World War I broke out in Europe. During its one hundred- and twelve-year life, tornadoes and ice storms failed to take it down. Sam’s barn lived through the Great Depression. It survived World War II, tornadoes, and ice storms. It lived through the 1960s when American culture took a major turn. It even survived rock and roll music and the Beatles. But like everything else except the Word of God, there comes that time. That time to step aside and make room for the new. The barn had become a safety hazard. Termites and wood decay took its toll. It makes you wonder. Did Sam Matlock anticipate that his barn would some day no longer sit atop Matlock hill? That it might succumb to old age? Probably not. He was too busy keeping it full of hay and corn to get philosophical about his barn. But it’s gone now. Unlike so many old structures that succumb to the forces of gravity, the Matlock barn never became that sad eyesore. Thankfully Melinda and Mark Watts took it down with a degree of dignity before it collapsed from the structural damage caused by the termites and time.
Ralph Gordon is a Past President Mississippi Writers Guild and a recipient of the William Faulkner Literary Award.You may contact Ralph Gordon at rgordon512@hotmail.com.
