Grandma's House in Riverview

I'm going way, way back with this photo! One hundred years ago, my Yankee born and bred grandmother lived in this house (photo from her album) in the Riverview District of Selma. (Don't you just love the white picket fence?)

Anyway, Grandma was a recent graduate of Berea College in Kentucky, and her entire family had moved here from New Burlington, Ohio (the town that was drowned in the 1970s when a reservoir was built). Her father and two brothers worked at the Schuer-Miller Lumber Company. Another brother was an engraver at a jewelry store, and she was a teacher.

Selma was something of a boomtown in those days... its population increasing more than 50 percent during the first decade of the 20th Century. Banks and hospitals were under construction. Streets were paved, and electricity introduced. Then, streetcars arrived.

All was well in Selma until influenza struck in the Spring of 1912. My great-grandfather was among the afflicted that April, and the virus progressed to pneumonia. About the time the "worst" was over and the same week the RMS Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic, his illness relapsed and he died. Well, his second wife (my grandmother lost her own mama when she was little) had never cared for Heart of Dixie humidity, so she and most of the children returned to the North...except for Grandma. She was in love with a foreman at the sawmill. He couldn't let her go, so they got married one day in May and lived happily ever after. He got a new job at another sawmill and they left Selma, but decades later, one of her granddaughters (that would be me) moved back specifically to research this story!

This little bit of family history was made possible by Grandma's memories, her photo albums, newspapers on microfilm and the 1909 Selma City Directory that is so wonderfully preserved at the Selma-Dallas County Public Library.