Arva Conner Coleman Interview

People

Interviewee: Arva Coleman
Interviewer: Ryleigh Avancini
Interviewer: Kathleen Ingoldsby

Date

2016

Places

Union, Floyd County

Material/Medium

Various oral history recording media and documentation materials

Specifications

• 26 page printed transcript
• 77 minute mp3 audio
• interview video
• candid photos
• resource material scans
• respondent-provided photographs
• 2 student-produced short films: “Never Be Afraid to Work,” “Faith and Family”

Description

For this lively interview, Arva Coleman, age 95, came well-prepared with books, articles, and items to share with the Roots with Wings interview team.  Arva describes the happy years of her early family life, her trips on horseback to accompany her grandfather, Solomon Hylton, to preach.  Arva recalled her grandfather, who had carpentry skills, helping Martin Harman make caskets which were lined with silk. At age sixteen, Arva began work sewing at the J. Freezer Shirt factory, hemming shirt tails. And at seventeen, she married George William Conner and set up housekeeping and family life. Building their fortunes, one step at a time, Arva relates,”we didn’t have anything except his dad gave him a calf. And we kept it and bred it, sold the calf . . . and bought us a cook stove, a wood cook stove. And then we had enough left to buy us a pig. It was a little girl pig, so we bred it. And when it had pigs, we bought ourselves a bed and a mattress. And it was just a little bit at a time.” In one interesting portion of the interview, Arva explained the relative cost of goods at a time when her mother-in-law traded eggs, listing the prices of various items at Ingram’s Store.  From her youth, Mrs. Coleman had always valued the virtues of work, and had proudly canned 112 quarts of green beans the previous summer.  Arva advised the youth in the room, “Make sure you love who you’re marrying. And you’ve got to work; like I said, you’ve got to work. Work’s the one thing that has to go on.”

Keywords

rattlesnakes, one-room school, dance, butcher, thresh, corn field, wheat, crank telephone, party line, casket, pig, wood cook stove, quilts, hay, cows, string beans, ground cherries, hoe, castor oil, sheep, bonnet, biscuit, preacher. lamp oil, flood, baptized, pulpit, Montgomery Ward, Sears Roebuck, horses wagon, tombstones, suits, scrapbook, bluing, eggs, popcorn popper, brooms, watering trough

Bio Sketch

Arva Coleman (1921-2017), daughter of Martin Conner and Minnie Hylton Conner, was raised near Buffalo Mountain, at Union, with her sister and brothers in a single-parent household. She lived nearby to her grandmother, Nannie Byrd Hylton, and grandfather, Solomon Hylton (1871-1931), who was a minister at the Burks Fork Brethren Church at Union.  Arva worked at the J. Freezer & Son shirt factory in the town of Floyd prior to her marriage.  She eloped age seventeen with George William Conner, a telephone line repairman, traveling to Bristol, TN.  They were married for fifty-three years, and she lived out her later years working on a large farm with her second husband, Bill Coleman.

Notes

The Community and Neighborhood oral history series was directed by the Floyd Story Center at the Old Church Gallery, where the complete archives are held. Arva Coleman’s interview was conducted by Floyd County High School student Ryleigh Avancini, as part of a student team in the Roots with Wings project. The project was guided by a collaborative community-university partnership with Dr. Melinda Bollar Wagner, Radford University Anthropology Professor Emerita, whose students took on the role of mentors in the production of these place-based interviews. Generations will be enriched by the recordings of all who shared their memories. Thank you all.