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The Clayton Tribune (Rabun Co. GA) Thursday, October 20, 1927, Page 1:
“Reminiscence of Brother Simmons---I am thinking that a little reminiscence would not be amiss. In January, 1891, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the rides of the Circuit Rider’s horse carried me up the winding road to the home of Uncle Jack Martin, just below Mud Creek Falls.
As I passed around the high lot fence the enclosure was full of mules of all sizes and not one of them had “bobbed hair,” and my big, blazed faced horse, Frank, being a stranger, the entire bunch of mules tried to put their heads over the fence to examine horse and rider.
Alighting, I tied the halter rein to a hanging limb and approached the house. A low plank fence surrounded the yard but no gate was in the gateway. It being raining I had on rubber leggings and a long, rubber coat and just as I started to enter the gateway a young man who was chopping wood just outside the fence, and no doubt had been watching my actions said “You had better not go in there, you’ll get dog bit.” I said “Well, it will be the first time.” He replied, “He’ll shore do it.” I felt that he should step over and prevent such a calamity but he made no effort to do so, and so I said “Let him do it.”
About that time the biggest, speckled hound that I had ever seen run across the yard, coming around the corner of the house dragging about 15 feet of chain and growling way down in his throat. He had long ears and lips that hung way down over his mouth and the meanest look I ever saw on a dog’s face. About that time the man on the outside spoke again and said “I told you that he’d bite you.” I said “He hasn’t yet.” He said “He shore will.”
By that time the dog had stopped, stiff legged, about five feet from me, seemingly preparing to make a lunge for me. I gathered up in my hand the tail of the rattling, rubber coat, still keeping my eye on the dog and my adviser still taking no part. Well, I tried to jump right on that dog and at the same time rattling my rubber coat, and the only reason that hound didn’t go to the woods was because he went around the house so fast that the long chain wrapped around a veranda post and he took it out in yelling for quarters.
My friend laughed very heartily and I said “When will the bitin’ dog be around?” and that was my introduction to Big Jim Dillingham, who I learned to know, and the next year took him in the church. I learned that he died while Chief of Police in Anderson, South Carolina.
Mrs. Martin came hurriedly to the door and said “Stranger, did the dog bite you?” and I said “No, he didn’t want to bite me.”
I spent that night and many more in the home of that dear old friend, Uncle Jack Martin, and his good wife.
I have listened to his account of how, as a boy, he and his father rode horseback up the Tennessee River just following an Indian trail and of his locating a home.
I heard him say, one time, at the church (when we had a wet spring) and the farmers were depressed, that he had made 69 crops in four miles of that place and had never bought a bushel of corn or a pound of meat.
Uncle Jack lived to be more than 80 years old. I went back to see him just before he died and sat by his bedside as he assured me that the way was all clear.
Not many of his kind of mountain people are now left.” ---W.A. Simmons, Hapeville, [Fulton Co.] Georgia.
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