Country Connections By James and Ellen Perry
It’s late March of 1962 and spring is breaking in upper East Tennessee. We have had a late snow in March of this year, but here in Union County our last snow has melted and grass is greening up.
Flowers are popping out, fishing in Norris Lake is great and life here is good.
I’m a junior at Horace Maynard High School. I’m on the baseball team and we have a game scheduled with the Petros (Tennessee) High School. I’ve never been to Petros. Don’t know exactly where it is, but the entire baseball team is looking forward to the game. The team goes into the locker room, changes into our team uniforms (which are a copy of the Yankees’ uniform), load into three or four cars and one pickup truck and all follow in convoy Coach Roger Lynch’s 1956 Cadillac.
Five of the senior boys rode with the coach. They always had first dibs to ride with him. Our two main pitchers were in this bunch. Our first pitcher was J. R. Smith and number two was J. C. Hill. I learned a lot about pitching by watching J.C. during my three years playing outfield behind him.
Some of our team members were Dewey Tharp, Gil Jessee, K.D. Cook, Jerald Hobock, Gerald Simmons, Johnny Milton Russell and Gary Suffridge. We had a good team and a great coach. Coach Lynch had no favorites and gave you a chance if you tried. He also had exceptional basketball teams while I attended Horace Maynardville High. I can’t remember our baseball winning totals, but it seems like we won 75 percent of our games.
We arrive at the baseball field that Petros used and it’s just outside the walls surrounding Brushy Mountain State Prison. There is snow still covering most of the baseball field and the prison looks forbidding. I look at the surrounding mountains and have a feeling I will see it again in the future, and 61 years later, Wayne Williams, Dr. Robert Wyrick and my sons, Joel and Morgan Perry, and I are there.
I learned from the tour guides at Brushy Mountain that later there were six baseball fields used by the schools, the prison baseball team and other events. Brushy Mountain also had a football team and played the University of Tennessee Vols.
Brushy Mountain operated from 1896 until June of 2009. Only one prisoner ever escaped from Brushy Mountain, but many tried. There were over 10,000 prisoners who died or were killed during the 113 years that Brushy Mountain was operated as a prison.
Wayne and I rode our motorcycles while Robert and my sons rode in a car behind us. If any readers ride a motorcycle this is a beautiful ride. There were tourists on cycles and cars from Tennessee and different states and leaving amazed at what they had seen.
There’s a good restaurant, a distillery and a souvenir shop in front of Ole Brushy. The restaurant has good food but is a little pricey. I told a young pretty cashier that my grandfather served six months for making moonshine and now the prison makes it. She giggled and said that happened to some members of her family, too.
For a one-day trip, Brushy Mountain Prison is a good one. You’ll have beautiful scenery, a good meal, and a sobering tour through the Ole Brushy Prison that will impress on your mind how some humans have and still do waste their lives and negatively impact their family’s welfare and futures by their wasted lives.
Well, America’s birthday, July 4th, has passed, and I saw no celebration in Union County, Tennessee. How about it Jason and all you county commissioners.
The Declaration of Independence was signed July 4, 1776, and was written by Thomas Jefferson over 17 days from June 11, 1776 till June 28, 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
After the then-13 colony congress changed some wording, it was approved on July 4, 1776.
John Adams wrote, “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God almighty.
“It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forevermore.”
I am now in the shadows of my life and have not seen this happen in my home county yet. “Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light, light, light, light…”
See you next month.