Claude’s Blog

This blog is dedicated to the newly published book “Sunny Side Up: Memoirs of the Depression and World War II” by Claude Swanson Kidd. Claude was raised on a tobacco farm near Mt. Airy, the North Carolina town after which the television town Mayberry was modeled, during the Great Depression. He was among U.S. troops in the D-Day invasion of 1944 and was a POW. This week’s excerpt from the book is as follows:

My ancestors migrated into North Carolina and my family were established farmers in Surry County at the time of my birth. Surry County borders Virginia on the north, and Surry extends heavily into the Blue Ridge. The towns of Mount Airy, Elkin, and from there to the mountains were in Surry, and Pilot Mountain is the southernmost part of Surry.

My mother, Bertie Alice Brintle Kidd, lived at White Plains, which is between Mount Airy and Dobson. Dobson is in about the center of Surry and is the county seat, and White Plains is about seven miles to the northwest.

My father, Thomas Jefferson Kidd, was from Dobson. His ancestors migrated from England to Virginia, and then to North Carolina.

My father was a farmer. He farmed tobacco, grain, and a general mixture. We were in the last section of flue-cured tobacco going toward the mountains. After you left Surry County, it was air-cured burly tobacco. Flue-cured is the kind that’s cured with heat. A number of my fathers’ brothers and sisters had adjoining farms because my grandfather had a pretty big piece of land and it was divided up. We had roughly 75-80 acres.

Sunny Side Up gives much more detail about the history of Claude’s Kidd ancestors, who first came to England from Virginia in 1648 and then migrated to Surry County, North Carolina. It also includes general information about the history and culture of the people who settled Surry County, including the Quakers from which his mother was descended.

The cooperative farming lifestyle of the area came to define its subsistence farming culture, which is described in detail in the book. Nearly every farm grew grain, vegetables, fruits, cattle, hogs, dairy products and poultry and produced staples such as honey and molasses. Tobacco was their main cash crop.

Claude’s grandfather, Allen Kidd Jr., married Lucinda “Lucy” Golden, daughter of Deborah Wright and Abner Golden, on July 21, 1879. They had eleven children.  They lived on Fisher River, five miles east of Dobson in the Turkey Ford community of Surry County. They were farmers and raised their children on the Kidd home place. Both are buried on the family farm.

The next entry will be about Claude’s birth as well as his eight siblings.

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