Thomas Fountain Robinson was born in Jasper County, Mississippi in 1849; but he spent most of his life farming in Choctaw County, Alabama. He was the son of Peter Robinson and Nancy Husband Robinson. Peter apparently sometimes spelled his last name Roberson.Thomas' first wife, Theadoshia Trice, died in childbirth in 1886, and he married my great-grandmother, Laura Caldonia Nix, of Pleasant Hill in May of 1887. Thomas Fountain fathered twelve children in all, ten of whom survived to be adults. His first child with Laura was my grandfather, Thomas Jesse Robinson, who was born July 13, 1888.
It must have been obvious fairly quickly that Thomas Jesse was a very intelligent, very studious young man. He was sent to a boarding school in York as a teenager, and before the age of 20, he was teaching the children of Gilbertown in a one-room schoolhouse.
Thomas Jesse married Eva May McIlwain in September of 1907. He was 19 and Eva was 21. They wasted no time starting a family, and their first child, Elsie Mae, was born in August of 1908. Thomas and Eva had nine children in all, and eight of them survived to adulthood. My mother Winifred was the sixth child born to the family on November 25, 1919.
Soon after Elsie was born, Thomas resigned his teaching job and began a life-long career with the Post Office. In Gilbertown, he delivered mail in a horse-drawn buggy. In wet weather, when the roads were not passable, he rode horseback and carried the mail in saddlebags. Elsie remembers occasionally accompanying him on his 25-mile route. She recalls people waiting by the side of the road with letters to hand to him. Sometimes they would say "Thomas, I want you to back it for me." This meant that they wanted him to address the envelope, because their handwriting was not legible enough for the postal employees to read.
Another recollection of Elsie's was of Armistice Day in 1918. On November 9, an announcement was made that the armistice had been signed. Several families in Gilbertown had radios, and the news quickly spread to the school, where Elsie was in the fourth grade. The children were allowed to go home and bring back pots and pans and spoons from their mothers' kitchens. They marched through town, banging their pots and pans in celebration. The next day, the Mobile Press Register reported that the announcement had been incorrect. When the actual signing took place on November 11, the children lobbied hard for another parade, but without success.
Thomas Jesse also was ordained as a lay minister of the Methodist church. One family story relates that he was conducting an evening service that was interrupted by a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen who wanted to extort money from his congregation. He and some of the men present faced the intruders down and the service was completed as planned.
After a short time as a letter carrier, Thomas became a railway mail clerk with the Postal Service. This change in jobs caused the family to move from Gilbertown to the Chisholm area of Montgomery, then to Ramer, and finally back to Montgomery. The family lived in several houses during that time, but the last one was a big white frame house at 1717 Park Place, one block from Montgomery's Oak Park. This comfortable old home, with its big front porch, garden and chicken yard in back, and wonderful pecan and pomegranate trees was a refuge for the women and children during World War II, and the focus of many family events during the 1940's, 50's, and early 60's.
Thomas Jesse loved books and reading. A favorite memory of his older grandchildren - there are 17 of us in all - is listening to Papaw read aloud from Joel Chandler Harris' Song of the South. He delighted in Harris' settings of the African folk tales, and passed that enjoyment on to his audience.
As long as he was able, he undertook to teach each grandchild to read during the summer before the child started first grade. His textbook was a black loose-leaf notebook that he had prepared filled with words illustrating the various phonic sounds. Even in that far-away time, though, he bridged the gap between phonics and whole language. In addition to drilling on phonic sounds from his black notebook, each of us was also encouraged to read aloud from the Bible and the Montgomery Advertiser.
The yard on Park Place had several good pecan trees, a fig tree, and a very productive pomegranate tree. This quite naturally meant that every squirrel in the Oak Park area was Papaw's mortal enemy. He devoted a lot of time, and his considerable ingenuity, to devising snares and other apparatus to keep the pesky rodents out of his prized fruit. He even resorted at times to personally standing guard over the trees, sitting in the yard in a lawn chair with a loaded pellet gun across his lap. If a squirrel was foolhardy enough to stick his head into view, he could count on being shot at.
Thomas R. Borden Montgomery, Alabama July 31, 2004