Life as a Storyteller, Potter, Farmer, and Craftsman in Lenoir, North Carolina--Glenn Bolick

Interview conducted with Glenn Bolick that took place in a cabin on Glenn’s property, for the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and "The We We Worked" exhibition from the Smithsonian. The cabin we did the interview in was actually one of the first school buildings in Watauga County, it was moved from its original site to Glen’s property. Some of the interview has been reorganized for narrative structure.

"When I got old enough to work the sawmill, I helped move the sawmill different times and it seemed like he knew exactly where to dig the holes to set on and it had to level and plumbed up and everything. We have say there’d be six or eight men and we would start in the morning and take that sawmill apart and load it on to the truck, it was heavy stuff, and you had to slide it on very gentle like, we would slide it on, we didn’t have tractors or anything like that. You’d slide it on the truck and take it to another location and set it down and have it almost ready to run by the next morning.

So Daddy’d go to sleep that night and come back the next morning he’d come back in and level things up and start sawing the next day, you could do it that quick if you had a good crew. Heavy stuff to move, but that’s the way it was, and back then we didn’t have tractors or bulldozers or stuff, he did have a little crawler with a blade on it that he built roads with sometimes and he would log with it too..." Well nowadays, bought the same as its been for a lot of years.

After Lula and I married in 1962, I met her in Asheboro, North Carolina when they moved 221 and they built that bypass there and we would move from town to town and crush a big pile of gravel and then move to another place from South Carolina to Durham and then from Durham to Asheboro. And Lu and I met, she was working that time at the Clockman Mills in Asheboro and she lived 20 miles south of there over in Seagrove, where all the pottery people are. She and her friend had not gone into work, they went into work at 11 o’clock at night, and me and my friend we slept in a little camper trailer, and stayed in a little trailer and worked at the rock crusher, you know, and rented a little trailer or something there, so we pulled into this drive-in grill beside of a 53 Chevrolet..."

Asset ID #7796