A variety of influences on Carter's childhood
Raised by her great-aunt and great-uncle, Carter grew up in a family where she was influenced by Quaker abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, educated middle-class ladies and coal mining labor activists.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Margaret Carter, October 25, 1975. Interview A-0309-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- MARGARET CARTER:
-
My great-aunt was one of the first graduates of the first normal school
at Huntsville. Before she was eligible to go to Huntsville, she went to
a private academy where she lived in the home of the principal and did
housework and sewing for his large family to make her expenses. That was
not because her father had never earned any money, but because her
family had invested what they had in Confederate currency as all the
loyal Texas families did at that time. She was born the year that the
Civil War began and she was a change of life child. I remember my
great-grandmother, Amanda Anderson Dial, who lived to be 95 years old.
My great-grandfather Benjamin Franklin Dial, was a general in the Army of
the Confederate States of America and they had lived in Marshall which
was then an outpost of Anglo-American civilization. Many of their old
friends had lived in Marshall and I have had a pretty long jump to make
in my personal orientation. They told me that it was a shame that Mr.
Lincoln was assassinated. The South would have been better off if he had
lived, but they also told me that the Negroes would be much better off
if they stayed in their place and that part of it I didn't believe,
probably on account of my mother, whom I did know——I
was ten years old when she died. Her older brother had become a Friends
minister, so I had some Quaker influence on her side and then I married
the youngest son of a miner who had had some experience with seeing his
male relatives belong to and take leadership in local unions at a time
when there was discord with management and activity required real
sacrifice and courage.
- CHANDLER DAVIDSON:
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This was a coal miner?
- MARGARET CARTER:
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A coal miner. In Thurber.
- CHANDLER DAVIDSON:
-
Where is Thurber?
- MARGARET CARTER:
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It is not far from Stephenville. My husband [Jack Carter] was actually
born in Stephenville because they had to go to Stephenville to get a
doctor. Thurber was a company town. There was a Thurber Coal Mine and a
Thurber Brick Company and that was all that was there. He grew up there
for, I suppose, the first ten years of his life. He moved to Ft. Worth a
little before I did and when my family moved to Ft. Worth, it was coming
back to Ft. Worth. They lived in Ft. Worth, then in Sherman about twenty
years and came back to Ft. Worth when I was eleven. So, I spent almost
all of my life in which I did much thinking in Ft. Worth.