Tillman Wood McIlwain (my great-grandfather) was born in Choctaw County, Alabama in 1860, the son of Vincent McIlwain. When he reached young manhood, he married a striking-looking young woman named Ella Cordelia Nordan. At the time they married, Ella already had a baby boy named Elisha, who is something of a family mystery. We don't think that Tillman was Elisha's father, but we do know that Elisha was raised as an integral part of the family, and all the children certainly considered him to be their brother. One genealogical site on the internet even mistakenly identifies him as the twin of Tillman and Ella's oldest daughter, my grandmother, Eva.
Ella's mother's maiden name was Doggett, which is thought to be a corruption of the French Daughette. There were a large number of French settlers that came north from Mobile into Washington and Choctaw counties during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and it was not unusual for them to intermarry with the indigenous Choctaws. Ella's photographs show her to have the flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones characteristic of the American Indians, so family legend has always assumed her to have "Choctaw blood".
Soon after Tillman and Ella were married in 1881, the log building of the Adventist Church in Gilbertown was torn down in preparation for constructing a new building. Tillman salvaged the logs from the old building and dragged them overland by ox team to his plot of ground about three miles southwest of present-day Gilbertown. He used the logs to build the one-room house where he and Ella raised a family of seven children and lived for the rest of their lives. As the family grew, so did the house, and by the 1930's, my mother remembers that there were two additional bedrooms and a kitchen that was detached from the rest of the house because of the danger of fire.
Tillman had purchased the land itself from Bob Sims, who later achieved notoriety as Choctaw County's version of Jesse James. Even as late as the last two decades of the 19th Century, living in rural Choctaw County had some frontier aspects. The notorious Bob Sims and his band of outlaws roamed the area without fear of reprisal for a number of years. When Sims himself was finally captured at Bladon Springs, one of his brothers escaped the posse. He hid himself and his horse in Tillman and Ella's barn for a couple of days before heading west to Mississippi and Arkansas. The McIlwain's provided him with food for his journey in exchange for their safety.
There was also danger from wild animals. A story that is told to all of Eva's descendants relates how a large panther was known to be roaming the woods. One night, after the family went to bed, they heard the big cat roaring not far from their little clearing. Before very long, they could hear him growling and clawing at the side of the house, trying to get in for food. Tillman gathered his family around him, and got his rifle ready to defend the house; but eventually the panther gave up and made his way back into the woods.
Tillman loved to sing, and the family somehow acquired a small pump organ which one of the girls, my great-aunt Edna, learned to play. My mother remembers large gatherings of family and neighbors at the little house, with Edna providing accompaniment on the wheezing little pump organ while Tillman led the group in familiar hymns and folk songs.
David and Myram McIlwain of Meridian, Mississippi, and their son David, have restored the little house to the condition it was in at the beginning of the 20th century. A visit to it is like going back 100 years in time, if you can ignore the oil derricks that pump continuously about 400 yards down the road (just over the McIlwain property line).
Eva McIlwain married Thomas Jesse Robinson in September of 1907. The family lived in Gilbertown for several years before moving to Montgomery County, living in Chisholm, then Ramer, then back to Montgomery, finally settling in the wonderful old white frame house at 1717 Park Place near Oak Park in Montgomery.
It is impossible for me to think of my grandmother without thinking of the house on Park Place at the same time. Wiry, small, quick and efficient in her movements, Mamaw never bothered to learn to drive a car, and spent most of her adult life in the kitchens of the several houses the family lived in. She was a truly wonderful cook, and her chocolate cakes were legendary throughout the family. My mother, and now my daughter Jennifer, have inherited her talent and her recipe to carry on that delightful tradition.
Other than the kitchen, I always associate Mamaw with the big high-ceilinged dining room where her quilting rack was installed. The rack was a large wooden rectanglular frame that could be lowered down from the ceiling to its operational height about three or four feet above the floor. Mamaw, along with any of her daughters who happened to be around, and Viola, the long-time family employee, would sit in chairs around the rack, stitching the brightly colored patches into place on the current quilt-in-progress.
Mamaw undertook to make a quilt for each of her grandchildren. I'm not sure how far down the list of 17 she got, but I was fortunate enough to be Number 3, and I still prize the quilt she made for me, and I think of her every time I pull it out of the closet to snuggle up in on cold winter nights.