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“I'm not sure that they Were the good old days," said nonagenarian Mrs. Bertha Corbin Cooke of Viewtown who celebrated her 94th birthday Sunday, as she reminisced this week at her home about the years gone by. Mrs. Cooke, one of a family of ten children, was born January 13, 1886 in Rappahannock near what was, at the time Olive, Virginia, just at the edge of the county towards Culpeper, l imes were hard for country folk, she said, and everyone had to pitch in, help with the w ork and make the living.
As a child, Bertha was called the “little farmer” by her family because she" worked outdoors, helping with the farm chores. Many times, she continued, she had planted fields of corn, working right along behind the plow, dropping the kernels of corn in the open rows. Everything was done by hand since there was little or no machinery to use.
Mrs. Cooke attended school at the Corbin School south of Amissville, now converted into a home, and to Homeland. Amissville and Forest Grove schools, all gone now. She did not estimate how far she walked to school except to say “it was a long way and I was only six."
"Once 1 was bitten by a poisonous snake, but it did not make me ill. Mv mother thought probably because I w aded a stream getting back to the house, the venom was washed out. She sucked the wound -and poulticed it when 1 got home," Mrs. Cooke continued.
She is the daughter of VVtNiam Burrell Corbin and Emma Nora Spillman, both Rappahannock natives. Of the ten children in the family, two othera besides Mrs.
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