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Charles Estes’ father operated a store in Sperryville where the folks coming down from the mountain brought their business.
“They lived good,” he said of the families he often visited. He remembers the mountain farmers as being wonderful gardeners. They picked up the stones from their hillsides plots and build rock walls. Then with mulch and sometimes a little dirt they’d have to carry in, they’d grow “corn eai-s as long as your arm.”
That com frequently found its way into a moonshine still. The best came from Hazel and Nicholson Hollows, he recalled. “They all made it, all those mountain people made whiskey. They used it for medicinal or for their own pleasure. Some sold it. But they didn’t all sell it.
“They did not sell it to the people going to church up there on Sunday! ” his wife Dot added.
She, too, often rode up into the mountains, never with a worry as to her safety. “They were strong on honor, personal honor and dignity. You never felt that vou were going to be insulted.”
Dot Estes is an encyclopedia on the home remedies used by mountain families. Wild Cherry bark was a cough medicine. Catnip was taken for the stomach. "You made a poultice of it and put it on your stomach.” Calamus was also good for the stomach and for the liver. Spicewood was taken with the measles. “It breaks the fever.” Oldtimers talked of the wonders of “bamby gillen,” Mrs. Estes recalled. It was put in water boiled and then applied to sores as a sure cure. Most herb users know the miracle plant as Balm of Gilead, she noted.
Yarrow' relieved hemorrhoids and flax seed removed foreign matter from the eye. A mixture of kerosene, sugar and a drop of turpentine was a popular remedy for pneumonia and chest colds. Asafetida kept the fleas away. A particular unsavory cure for the common cold called for onions, corn meal and sugar, cooked until it was a “gooey, nasty looking mess” and then drunk. “It would upset your stomach but it would certainly cure your cold,” Mrs. Estes noted.
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