An Apocryphal, yet Emblematic Mama Carr Story

I love family stories. You hear a story, repeat it to other family members, and they stomp all over it, deny its veracity! But, sometimes, there’s a kernel of truth, maybe not in the seminal facts, but an exposition, if you will, of the underlying character of the person(s) involved.

Nancy Dodd Milam and I were visiting with our first cousin, Joan Peterson Frame, sometime in the spring of 2012. Joan shared a story her mother, Katie Carr Peterson, would tell about mama, Mama Carr. And, according to Joan, Katie would get as worked up as if the events had occurred recently!

Back in the day, people made their own soap out of pig fat and lye. In today’s parlance, they “re-purposed” the pig fat – somewhat green-friendly wouldn’t you say? I won’t bore you with the entire process – mainly because I don’t know it! Part of the process required heating the pig fat in a big kettle which had a fire built under it to render the fat. Juanita Carr Rush remembers vividly this process, plus being too young to be allowed near a hot kettle or fire to stir the contents. Well, as you can imagine, this would send cooking pig smell for quite a ways. Dogs would come to investigate.

The apocryphal part of the story is that Mama Carr got mad at one particular dog who was not obeying commands to “Shoo!” and was trying to steal or ruin her hard work. Mama Carr then got an axe and grabbed the dog and chopped off its head!

I looked at Nancy and said, “That explains a lot about the Carr Sisters!”

Juanita does not believe that Mama Carr ever killed a dog like that.

Now for the gentler side of Mama Carr. Brother (Paul Carr was the only male child to make it out of infancy, and so, his sisters almost always refer to him as Brother) was playing with an axe one day, trying to perfect his axe-throwing skills. The family dog, Ring, came trotting around the corner of the house as Brother threw the axe at a stump and the axe split his skull. The dog put up a holler, Brother put up a holler and Mama Carr came running to see what they were a’hollering about. When Mama Carr saw what had happened, she had Brother get various things so she could fix the dog as best she could. She ended up tying a piece of cloth around the dog’s head to close the wound and keep the skull compressed. It must of worked, because Ring survived for a few more years, living to be 14 years old. Juanita remembers thinking of Ring as her dog when she was growing up.