“God’s not done with me yet.”
That’s what Howard Tevepaugh, 88, said the afternoon he reminisced about his many years as an orchardist in the Brushy Mountains.
The Brushy Mountain Ruritan Club chose Howard and his wife, Shirley Tevepaugh, as grand marshals for the 2019 Brushy Mountain Apple Festival for their contributions to the community and for being good neighbors.
The club organizes the festival, always held on the first Saturday in October in downtown North Wilkesboro. This year’s festival is Oct. 5. Howard and Shirley Dula Tevepaugh will be in the lobby of Wilkes Towers on Main Street greeting visitors during the festival.
Orchardist with nine lives
The orchard business is a lifetime of hard work, but Howard has had misadventures and near misses with death in his orchard. That’s why he said, “God’s not done with me yet.”
Once while cutting brush around fruit trees, he couldn’t get his scythe near enough to a tree trunk. “I reached down to pull out a twig and along with it came a copperhead snake with its fangs in my thumb.”
Helping Howard that day was his nephew, Gary Hayes, then 5 years old. Howard said he needed to get to the hospital and Gary knew his father, Leo Hayes, was supposed to be working in his adjoining orchard that day, so they walked up the mountain to find him – but he wasn’t there.
Gary said they walked back down the mountain, finally found his father and got Howard to the hospital. Although the shots he received saved his life, Howard said, “I still hate getting shots. I had to get 15 or 20 in this thumb,” he exclaimed.
Gary continued with the story, “As soon as Uncle Howard got rid of the snake, he whipped out his handkerchief and tied it around his arm as a tourniquet to keep the venom from traveling too quickly.”
However, he said, Howard had forgotten that he put his false teeth in his handkerchief that day, so when he pulled out the handkerchief the teeth dropped into tall weeds. “We didn’t give it thought right then, but later on we had to go back to the orchard and hunt for them until we found those teeth,” said Gary.
Howard’s second brush with the hereafter came when a thunderstorm approached his mountain farmstead as he was about to start the afternoon milking. “Shirley and I hurried to get the cows inside the barn. I was holding open a wire gate when thunder boomed too close and lightning hit nearby. That lightning bolt managed to travel from its strike through the gate I was holding. The jolt threw me 20 feet. I remember waking up with my head in my wife’s lap, but I was okay.”
Howard’s family said it was a miracle he wasn’t killed or permanently paralyzed by the third accident.
“It was just after Hurricane Hugo came through in 1989. The storm winds took down a lot of trees that had to be cleared out, but it also left a lot of them caught up in each other and they had to be taken care of too,” Howard said.
He was using his tractor to clear a deadfall when a tree caught diagonally in the crotch of another fell and hit him in the head. When Howard managed to get home, he told Shirley, “I think I need an aspirin.” What he really needed was another trip to the hospital, which resulted in steel plates to repair a broken back.
Howard’s kids have always thought their dad had nine lives.
“City girl” moves to Brushies
He started in the orchard business about 1950, following his dad’s example. “My father, Thomas Chancellor “Tom” Tevepaugh, came to the Brushy Mountains from Charlotte because he wanted to grow fruit and drink clean spring water.” Tom planted an orchard and started a family, and Howard still sleeps in the bedroom where he was born.
Howard spent two years away from the orchard starting in 1952 when he joined the Navy. He served as an admiral’s personal driver in California.
His daughter, Phyllis Kiesler, said, “He told us stories about his California days, including his dance lessons from Arthur Murray, rollerblade dancing and buying a Harley motorcycle he named Agnes.”
Howard towed his motorcycle home after the Navy, but sold it when Phyllis was born to pay the hospital bill. “I still owe him a motorcycle,” said Phyllis with a laugh.
Howard and Shirley were married a few years after he returned to the orchard and they’ll celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary in December. In addition to Phyllis, their children are Sheila Hamby, Cynthia Staley and James Tevepaugh Jr.
Shirley, called “a city girl” by the family because she was from Winston-Salem, was in for surprises when she moved to the Brushies. This included having to haul water in a bucket from the spring house every day, but what she remembers most is learning to milk a cow and then drink it fresh. “As far as I’m concerned, milk comes in a glass bottle and is delivered to my front porch. I didn’t like drinking that milk straight from the cow. I wrote to my mama that I had made a big mistake getting married and moving up here.”
Howard and Shirley share a lot of loving memories so that “mistake” turned out okay, but they do have advice to anyone considering starting an apple or peach orchard. “Run the other way,” said Howard. Shirley added, “The wife should run twice as fast.”
Hard times hit one year when a heavy freeze killed all the buds on the apple and peach trees. Howard said, “I had to get a job at Schneider Mills because I needed regular money, not just one paycheck a year after the fruit was harvested. I ended up working at the mill for 21 years, and Shirley got a job there, too, after the kids were all in school.”
Howard also put up ceilings for six years while working at Wilkes Acoustical. He retired but then got a job with Dodge Automotive driving cars to auctions and dealerships. “I can’t take it easy. I have to keep doing something,” he said.
Self-sufficiency
Many of Howard’s memories reflect a self-sufficient lifestyle – growing hay for cows, raising chickens and pigs, making cider, having a big garden and putting up canned goods to last all winter, plowing fields with a mule named “Old Joe” and making jams and pies to sell with pickup-truck loads of apples and peaches to curbside markets, factory cafeterias and restaurants in Hickory.
Phyllis remembers those trips to Hickory, “There wasn’t room for all of us in the front seat, so Daddy would let us ride in the back of the pickup-truck bed with the fruit. He just threw a tarp over us and gave us a flashlight.”
She also remembers the job they hated the most — cutting and storing the year’s hay crop. “It was the hardest, stickiest, itchiest job with snakes jumping out of the hay bales as we threw them up on the wagon or bees swarming us when we stacked the bales in the barn.”
Then Phyllis smiled when she recalled a good memory. “Daddy tried to make a game out of some of our chores. When we had to dig potatoes, it was a long job, but Daddy said he would give a dollar to the one who found the weirdest shaped potato or the biggest one. And we all knew that after chores were done, we could go jump in the creek to cool off.”
That stream, Rocky Creek, runs at the bottom of their property in a cool, cascading sweep beneath the trees. Besides being a good place to cool off, a spot on Rocky Creek holds a special place in the hearts of Baptists on the mountain. Known as the “Visie Hole,” it was the site of a lot of baptizing, preaching, praying and singing.
“The preacher would take a long pole and stick it into the water, looking for the deepest place,” Howard recalled. “It had to be deep because it was full submersion baptism.”
Gary Hayes can attest to how cold the creek’s water is, having played in it while growing up.
Hard life but a good life
Even though it was a hard life, “it was a good life,” said Howard.
Howard’s children remember him building them gas-powered go-carts and all the neighbors coming to race on the dirt track he made below the house. They remember sledding down a snowy hill on a piece of linoleum or playing board games when the power went out.
“We played with each other, and we played outside,” said Phyllis, who especially remembered a game in which one of the children pretended to be a bear and chased the others as it turned dark.
Howard liked to play horseshoes and cards in his spare time. “Daddy would rather play cards than eat,” said Phyllis, but added that what he liked best was chopping and sawing wood. “He loved to haul downed trees out of the woods, or cut down trees, then saw them up and stack up the logs so we’d have heat in the house all year.”
Shirley said her great love was reading books. Her children remember all the good things she cooked and baked, as well as the pretty dresses she sewed for the girls at Christmas. They remember special trips to the mountains or beach as a reward for hard work well done.
Howard likes to tell the story about the time he and his brother-in-law, Leo Hayes, decided to make molasses. “We grew the sugar cane, put the stalks through the mill to get the juice out and then cooked it for six to eight hours until the liquid went from bubbly green to thick dark brown. Our problem was that we’d never done it before and we didn’t know how long to cook it,” he said.
“After a while we dribbled a little bit into a cup and let it cool to see if it was thick enough. You do this by trickling a spoonful out, and if it makes a string, then it’s done. We wanted to make sure it was good and done, so we cooked it some more and then tested again. We still weren’t sure, so we cooked it some more. Turns out we overcooked it because when we put it in jugs and cooled it off, it turned into hard candy.”
Howard, Leo Hayes and cousin Joe Tevepaugh also used to slaughter hogs for themselves and others in the Brushy Mountain community.
If you go down Brushy Mountain Road today, you’ll see a gravel drive that turns left beneath dense trees and crosses Rocky Creek. You’ll come to a sweeping lawn where the old farmhouse still stands, but the orchards are gone. As Howard said, “The trees just grew back up into woods” since no one else in the family wanted to make a life as an orchardist.
When asked what made his orchard special, Howard responded, “I never picked an apple or a peach until it was ripe, unlike today’s commercial orchards that often pick them with just a little bit of color on their green because they’re shipped to faraway markets.”
Maybe God figures Howard still has a little bit of green on him and that’s why he hasn’t been “picked” yet. Maybe God’s not done with him yet.
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