Estell Lee Baucom & Bennie Eliza Hall Baucom

Written by Jim Baucom

[004] ESTELL LEE BAUCOM                                       [005] BENNIE ELIZA HALL

b. 7 OCT 1887 Baucom, TN Coffee Co.                 b. 10 APR 1888 Memphis, TN Shelby Co.

d. 23 FEB 1987 Birmingham, AL                           d. 11 JUN Birmingham, AL

m. 1 MAR 1905 Huntsville, AL Madison Co.

Estell Lee Baucom, the only grandparent that I have ever known, was my inspiration and beginning source in my search for ancestors. The first time that I had a chance talk with him was in the fall of 1969, when he was 82 and I was 38 years of age. I had seen him twice before but only for a few minutes each time. He, sons Jesse and James (my father), and I made a weekend trip to Tennessee to visit Baucom, TN where he was born and to Archer, TN where his grandparents (John and Nancy Baucom) were buried. This is when the genealogy bug bit me and I have never found the cure. Until that time I knew none of my Baucom kin.

Estell Doc Baucom

Estell was usually called Doc by his children and most of the people that he knew. His daughter, Mary Beatrice said that he got that name when he was a boy because he would try to cure sick chickens. He informed me that Estell was the masculine version of Estelle. I never heard any one call him Estell. Doc’s memory was always phenomenal even until the last time that I saw him before he died, a few months shy of the century mark. He remembered the names any relative that he had known and who they married and their children names. He even knew much about his wife’s family, some of whom he had never met. I sat down with him with a tape recorder and used his information to begin my quest.

Bennie Eliza Hall Baucom (L)

When Doc was born in 1887 his parents lived at Baucom, TN in the bottom of a steep gully where they had a small garden.

He said that it was so steep that when he and the other children were playing upon the side of the hill his mother would call them to come in by shouting up the chimney. When I saw where it was I could almost believe his story. He said that his grandmother Matilda Lambert had died at Baucom, TN, the year he was born. Sometime around 1890 the migration of  his parents, grandparents, several aunts and uncles all left Baucom and relocated about 40 miles away to Archer, TN.

Archer, TN. AKA "Spring Place" 

 Doc said that during this move he saw his first train locomotive with a red smokestack just a pouring out heavy black smoke. He thought that his uncle Wesley had helped them make the move but he returned to Baucom, TN.

Doc’s parents rented at various locations near Archer (aka Spring Place) and share cropped. I do not know if he had any other trade experience. Meanwhile his grandparents, John and Nancy were living in the same household with their son John Jefferson Baucom and his wife Cinthia Holden and family in a house that still stands today, near Archer. The reason for calling it Spring Place was that cool water flowed from a spring nearby and they had made a storage structure there that kept the milk and other food from spoiling so fast. It was their refrigerator.

I assumed that Doc attended school for a while, but his dad hired him out to help share crop on “old Doc Murray’s farm at times. This was his life in Archer from the age of about 5 until he was 14 or 15. About 1902/3 there crops  were so poor that they could not make a living. So Charles and Mettie  and children all left Archer to go to Huntsville, AL, a move of 50 miles, to work in the cotton mills located there.

The industrial revolution had started many years earlier but my Baucom line was just now coming onboard. Charles, and most of his children took jobs in the mill. Age was not a barrier at that time. Since the younger children were not tall enough to reach the looms as needed to operate them, they stood on empty coke cases. Doc said that when he started working there he was a teenager, that had learned mechanical skills well enough to be trained to be a loom fixer, when they broke or had a problem. Loom fixers sat around until a problem arose and they made more money than the operators. 

I think he said that his uncle Matthew and wife Belle also went to Huntsville to work in the mills. Matthew and Belle had come to Archer from Baucom when the others migrated as had Nancy’s younger brother Miles Berry Crick. Miles had been a part time farmer and a Baptist preacher. Charles and family worked through the winter and when spring came the lure of Tennessee pulled them back to Archer to try share cropping again. This year it was no better than the previous year so in the fall they loaded up all their belongings and children onto Berry Crick’s wagon and he moved them to Huntsville in a blinding rain storm. Berry returned to Archer.  

As many children as could possibly work joined Charles to work in the mill. Doc returned to his old job as loom fixer. And life became more stable for everyone, but it was long tedious work.

About 1903/4 a Mrs. Mary Hall came to Huntsville an opened a boarding house near where the Charles Baucoms were living.  She was a widow with children who had been living on a small farm in Huntland, TN, 32 miles, north - north east of Huntsville. Her crops also had failed.

Mary’s oldest child was Bennie Eliza Hall who married Estell Baucom on March 1, 1905 in Huntsville, AL. He was 18 and she was 17. He and his brothers purchased a Model “T” Ford and operated it as a taxi during the summer to take people arriving by train in Huntsville to the top on Monte Sano Mountain for a vacation. Some of us have a copy of a picture with  Charles Baucom and his six sons in or standing near the car. Charles is smoking a cigar.

When searching the Tennessee 1910 census, I discovered by accident that sometime after Comer was born in 1908 in Huntsville before 19 April 1910, Doc, Bennie, my dad James and his brother Comer went to the town of Bemis in Madison Co, TN, from Madison Co., AL where Huntsville is located. The four of them are listed in the 1910 census and indexed at HQ under Estell Bancom, and the boys are listed as being born in Tennessee but from I have been told the were born in Huntsville.

 And by the way, Doc’s occupation was a loom fixer in the mill at Bemis. As far as I know they were in Bemis until some time before Jesse was born in April of 1913 in Huntsville. There was a son, Ben Lee, born to Doc and Bennie in December of 1910 but I have no evidence as to where he was born but it was most probably at Bemis.  After Jesse was born in 1913 at Huntsville ,Bea in 1915, Katherine in in1917, Lois in 1919 and Margie in 1921 were born in Huntsville. Finally, Charles was born in 1923 in Birmingham, AL as was Ruby in 1925 and Garland in 1927. Doc never mentioned the Bemis part of his life.

Uncle Jesse told me that when Doc and his family came to Birmingham from Huntsville by train the family rode  the street car to where Bennie’s mother, Mary Hall was living in Birmingham having left Huntsville ahead of Doc and Bennie. They stayed with her until they rented their own place.  Once again Doc found employment as a loom mechanic in the local cotton mills and much later had a popcorn stand near where he lived in Eastlake, and at the Greyhound Bus Depot at Birmingham, AL

After Bennie died in 1950 at the age of 62, Doc married a widow named Lessie Carlton.

Lessie Downs Carlton Baucom - 2nd wife of Estelle "Doc" Baucom and mother of Milo's Hamburger's founder, Milo Carlton.

When  she died he lived alone until he was past 90 before going into a nursing home where he died at 99 years, 4 months and 16 days.

Doc Baucom

Here are some personal observations made by me and others in his family. My dad was not overly fond of his father because Doc made Comer and him  drop out of school early to work and help support the family. Doc would disappear for several days to go gambling and whatever, then would come home broke and sometimes beaten up. Dad and several of his siblings have stated that sometimes their family would have starved had it not been for Bennie’s brother Tom Hall. He often bought groceries for them.

 I was present at one incident that trapped Doc in one of his biggest lies. Dad, Doc, his second wife, Lessie and I were at the cemetery in Birmingham viewing gravesites of Bennie and other members of the family buried there. Lessie turned to my dad and asked, “how come you never helped out your father in his time of need, like her family did for her.” Doc had told her that he received very little help from his children. During the depression after my dad got a job on the WPA program, he mailed home a few dollars each month because he said his siblings need the money for food. I know this is true because when I was 6 years old I went to the post office, bought a money order and placed it in an addressed envelope to Bennie and mailed it. Later dad’s sister Katherine sent money to him while living in Colorado. Another sister, Lois told me she was asked by Lessie how come she never helped Doc with his large family like his son Charles did. She and her husband Howard had been sending him money for years. She said that she cried all night after that occurred. And finally, what really got my dad was that he and my stepmother, Edith, had sent Doc a check to help purchase a headstone for Bennie’s grave. Doc had acknowledged none of this financial aid from his children.

The above paragraph was not written to be critical of Doc, but he would never be named father of the year. Some people have said that Doc played the guitar and sang, an event that I never witnessed. While in the nursing home he would create puzzles for others to solve because he thought that it was too easy solving crossword puzzles. I have always liked to solve any kind of puzzle, if it was challenging enough. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I got so interested in my genealogy, since there is no end to the puzzle. Each time an ancestor is identified the two parents of that person become two more people to search for.

Doc was very interested in my genealogy findings. He maintained some contact with some of his cousins in Tennessee for years. I felt that he was a fairly intelligent person who knew his way around and I wish that I had been given the chance to be around Bennie and him when I was a child. Being the eldest of their many grandchildren did make me the recipient of birthday cards early in my life, before many other grandchildren were born. After that no more cards were received. This concludes my research for the ancestors of Estell Lee, (Doc) Baucom. Their descendants are being continuously added to my data base but I will not circulate that information publicly because most of them are alive and to do so would violate their privacy. It is available to any of my kin for their own use.   

I have some information on the siblings and their descendants of Charles [016] in my data base. I would like to include more if it is available. My email is jim0400ATaol.com