Arminta’s Quilt

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Note for the reader: This letter to my daughter about her great-great grandmother’s life and the quilt I presented to her will, I hope. inspire others to submit stories like it. – Joseph Kitchens

Dear Carrie,

       I wanted to share with you what I know about the quilt I recently gave you, and about Mintie Wright, its maker. Given to me by my mother, Mamie Kitchens, this simple quilt and the photos included are virtually the only physical evidence that your great-great-grandmother, Arminta Barrow Wright, ever lived. She was born in 1876, eleven years after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  She died in 1971 and is buried in the Waynesboro Cemetery. It is incredible to think that someone I knew so well witnessed so many remarkable changes, from the electrification of our cities and world-wide telegraph messaging, to the phonograph, telephone, commercial radio and television, the automobile, air and space travel and a medical revolution beyond imagining.

     During her long life lived almost entirely in Georgia’s Jefferson and Burke counties,  Arminta never owned an automobile, never traveled more than 30 or so miles from her home, raised a family of nine children and outlived three husbands. When Arminta was born, Ulysses S. Grant was president and when she died Richard M. Nixon had already set in motion the events that we would refer to as the Watergate Scandal.

       ”Mintie,” as she  was called (mistakenly written down as “Minnie” by census takers), was the daughter of a confederate soldier’s son. Over the nearly ten decades of her life, the legacy of the south’s defeat in the Civil War was ever present–in the poverty of farm tenancy, in the stifling system of cotton agriculture, in the bondage of racism that imprisoned black and white and in the poverty that denied education and opportunity to so many.

     Mary Stewart Arrington Barrow, Minta’s mother, was one-hundred and two years old when she died in 1941. She was from a prosperous and proud pioneer family of Jefferson County, whose cotton and slaves made them patriotic Confederates. She married a boy from a good family as the Civil War came on. Her husband, his brothers and his father all enlisted in the rebel army. They all fought in the 38th Georgia Infantry, a unit that was decimated at both Sharpsburg and Gettysburg. The unit gained revenge at Fredericksburg and at the Crater, frightful battles with terrible losses, even for the winners. In the last full year of the war, as union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s army marched through the sand spurs and swamps of the Ogeechee Valley of Georgia, federal troop of the 119th Ohio Regiment burned Mary’s home. Sherman’s field map is marked with the location of the “Widow Barrow’s place.” Apparently, her husband died in a confederate hospital in Richmond, Virgina. There is a grave marker at Ways Baptist Church’s cemetery  (in eastern Jefferson County near Wrens))—but this may only be a memorial marker.

     Of Mary’s brothers-in-law, only one came home. With her husband, father-in-law, and two brothers- in- law all dead, Mary and her mother- in- law drifted through the records of the Reconstruction era like the biblical Ruth and Naomi, as working guests of relatives, and eventually they became share croppers themselves.

     Mary later married a poor man, a soldier of the late war named Henry Barrow, and had a family by him. Then he died as well. She shared the homes of her daughters and their husbands for much of the remainder of her life.   In the end, she married a friend and neighbor, an old man twenty-five years her senior. It was an arrangement. Destitute and disabled, he was awarded a confederate pension in 1904 and married so his young friend or relative Mary would receive his pension.  Mary would live on, almost to the outbreak of World War II.

     Mary’s daughter, my great-great grandmother Mintie, came of age in the 1890s and married in succession two men who died young.  With two children in tow, she married a third time to Daniel Wright. Grandpa Daniel Wright and his father were horse farmers-ironically from Appomattox, Virginia where the 38th Georgia made its last charge against the “Yankees” that were biting at Lee’s heels. The Wrights were refugees who settled in Jefferson County Georgia near Stellaville shortly after the Civil War. 

     Great grandpa Wright’s father was Thomas Wright who brought only one son with him to Georgia and that son, Daniel, lost his first wife to cholera, and another in childbirth. Daniel was fifty- one when he married my twenty -nine- year- old great grandmother Mintie (a nickname for Arminta). The two had a house full of children, including my grandmother Carrie Wright (Sego). “Mr. Wright,” as Mintie called Daniel,  was a share cropper in the same sand hills of Jefferson County  where Mintie had grown up,   “Mr. Wright,” died while visiting his sister and her family at Beech Island, South Carolina- leaving Mintie with a family of nine children.

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     Relying on her older children to help, Mintie continued to farm. During the devastating invasion of the boll weevil through her part of Georgia in 1921, Mintie armed her children, the older ones, with small mops made for the purpose of smearing a concoction of arsenic and molasses on the unopened boles of cotton. The weevils ingested the poison and died, the cotton bolls opened and the fibers were picked by the children. It was effective enough and her family survived.

      When Mintie’s son found a job in nearby Gough, Georgia (Burke County),  Mintie moved with the younger children to Gough as well. Her daughter Carrie (my grandmother after whom you are named) was born in 1900 and at 19 married a very young man who arrived from Augusta.

Calvin Leon (“Pop”) Sego came by train to Gough to escape the city of cotton mills and mill workers—Augusta. Both Pop’s father and grandfather were blacksmiths. Pop opened a blacksmith shop.in Gough. It soon became a service station and tractor repair garage as automobiles and tractors became more common-and as manufacturing put the blacksmiths out of work. Behind his Gulf Service Station was a ramshackle, unpainted old farm house where Mintie would live out her life—but not without family and friends and the comforts of religion.

     Visitation with the old folks was a sacrament in our family, intensified I think by the harrowing experience of the World War II years when all were aware of how perilous life could be.  When children and grandchildren, and then great grandchildren, came to Gough for holiday visits, Pop always collected Mintie to join them. I can still see her standing beside the wood-fired cook stove in my grandmother Carrie’s kitchen, her gray hair in a bun, dressed in a floor- length print skirt and blouse,  and an apron, all sewn from flour sacks

     At 4’8″ Mintie was no taller than my ten years had made me. She could hear little, see little, but when we were loud enough or close enough for her to see or hear a little , her smile would illuminate the kitchen and she laughed easily when infants were brought in to be introduced . For twenty years, until her sight was clouded by cataracts, Mintie eked out a living sewing dresses and gowns for the country girls who lived in Gough, Georgia.  In the end, I was dispatched on winter visits as a teenage boy to chop firewood for her kitchen stove. She could hear and see but little.

     Mintie died at 97. Her daughter, Carrie, reached the age of 95. Carrie’s daughter (my mother) Mamie, died in her 92nd year in 2014. These three women’s lives account for more than one hundred and seventy- five years of our family story and much of our nation’s history.  All three lived rich, if difficult lives. More than anything, what defined their lives was the land that gave them birth, the history that shaped their destiny and their courage inspired by love for family.  Mintie. Carrie. Mamie. Now you and your daughter Caroline will carry our family’s history and affections well into the 21^st century.

Love, Dad