Submitter’s note: This story was written by Sophia Lucas Vossmeyer. It will be continued in the April 14 issue of the Brown County Democrat.

My story begins with a Lucas family moving to England from Alsace-Lorraine. With a Greek name of Lucas, their origin would have long ago been Greece. On my trip to Athens, Greece, I saw the name Lucas on store fronts and billboards.

My forebears came to Virginia from England in the mid-1700s. They came to Monroe County in early 1800 across the Cumberland Gap by horseback, on foot and by covered wagon, driving their flocks before them. They were Thomas and Nancy Lucas. They bought acreage which includes where the boat docks are, and ground now covered by Lake Monroe near the Four Winds Motel. They donated the land for Mt. Ebal Cemetery and are buried there. They also gave the land for Mt. Ebal Church’s first building.

Their oldest son was Thomas Lucas Jr., my great grandfather. He was the only one of their 12 children to settle in Brown County. This Thomas was a schoolteacher and a circuit rider and part-time farmer. He married Louisa Pennington before coming to Brown County.

They settled on a wooded hill on Crooked Creek, in Johnson Township. Like all early pioneers, they built a single, large, hewn-log house of which I write so much about and where I was born. Their oldest son was my grandfather, Lowery Lucas. He inherited their home after they died. Lowery married Juliana Moore and my father was their oldest son.

My father, John Wesley Lucas, married Rosa Lee Hedrick. They went to housekeeping in the log house filled with all the original furniture. Three of us children were born there: Clarence, Sophia and Edna. Another sister was born near Elkinsville. My grandfather and his siblings were all born there and were rocked in the same cradle and slept in the same trundle bed.

Long after we moved from the log house, I liked to drive by and look at the place, and was sorry when it was gone. Some lovers of picturesque Brown County bought and salvaged the logs and took them away to a new location.

The fireplace served for heating, cooking and lighting in the evenings as we sat around it. The big meal had been eaten at noon and the kitchen fire was out. Potatoes would be baking in the hot ashes and coals and apples would be oozing juice in the front of the flames. We liked mugs of hot sweet cider. Sometimes, supper would be a pitcher of milk and pie. Then there was fun food: popcorn, parched corn, and several kinds of nuts cracked on the stone hearth. Afterward, we swept the shells into the fire. This made the fire crackle.

The fire in this fireplace never went out day or night in winter. It took two large backlogs to keep the fireplace going, one in the evening and one in the morning. My father could not handle those logs by himself, so Uncle Billy Colbert (we had to call people uncle and aunt for good manners), living on grandpa’s land close by in a shack, would come by twice a day to help. He did not want any pay except what he called “chawing” and smoking “tobaccy” and buttermilk when we churned. He was not in poverty because he had a Civil War pension. He was very dependable and stayed with us children when our parents had to be away.

In the morning, all the charred wood and coals had to be pushed to the front of the deep fireplace and the big back log rolled to the back. In the early evening, this was repeated the same as morning. All the heat we had in winter was from the two fireplaces, one in the log house and one in the bedroom, and a cook stove in the kitchen.

On the big mantel stood a tall Seth Thomas clock showing a picture of a pine tree. A pendulum swung back and forth, and the hours were struck loudly enough to wake up the dead, but not us because we were used to it.

After we started to school my brother and I began to play school in the farthest corner of the room in the flickering firelight, taking turns being teacher. He soon got tired, and I continued both parts by myself. I loved school so much I could not get enough of it.

Submitted by Pauline Hoover, Brown County Historical Society