Ed's story - 08/27/00 04:30 PM
Family history of the Kennebec potato & me.
Walter Harris Sutton left Michigan & went to Brevard, NC area looking for a mail order bride in the late 30's-early 40's. She was already taken so he went back to agronomy. He was working on a new variety of potato (now known as the Kennebec) part of the name probably came from the Quebec area of Lake Toxaway, NC.
Walter was told to go try Lake Toxaway area as he needed ground where no potatoes had been grown & none growing for 1-2 miles.
He found land owned by "Looney" and Penira Owen. "Looney" would raise corn & grain for untaxed beverage purposes. "Looney"and Penira had 5 kids. Ellen, Marvin, Wayne, Donna, Lucy.
Walter was of the old school, of a family wealthy before the depression, but he was wiped out by it; as well as most of them. Educated in the best schools of old Europe, and a world traveler.
His wife had left him years earlier with their one child, to be relocated & remarried in California. This he discovered after years of searching. Her reasons for leaving I don't know. When he resumed working on his new variety of potato he was fifty five years old, no heirs, and lonely. Solace was found in botanical work. Those who knew more are long dead or unaware of relatives.
The Owen children had typical high-school range education. Walter was a near physician whose career was aborted by amputation below the left knee and subsequent years of trying to drink away dashed hopes.
Donna was very late teens to early twenty something. Walter was fifty five, aristocratic and commanding in demeanor. Tall and striking in appearance, penetrating eyes and prominent bushy eyebrows curling upwards and at times a dark mustache.
She told me it was love at first sight for both of them. A north / south romance that risked violence toward himself while in the autumn of his years, for a kind and dark haired girl in the Blue Ridge Mountains .
To get married they hitched a ride with the mail truck on it's way down the higher mountains to the county seat, twenty plus miles and two thousand foot plus drop in elevation below.
Mervin Anders was the post master driving the mail truck. Mervin & his wife Kansey Anders were solid Seventh Day Adventists, lovingly trying to lead as many of their fellow mountain neighbours to God and the Bible as possible.
Mervin was a little suspicious when Walter an older man and Donna a young girl, hitched a ride to go to Brevard together. They did not tell him their plans.
Halfway down to Brevard from Lake Toxaway was the little town of Rosman. It had only a blinking caution light for it's one intersection in town while it straddled the land between the densely wooded mountains and the river.
At that intersection if you turned right you would wind down a narrow two lane blacktop down the steep mountains to Pickens SC. ; where for a fee the justice of the peace would marry a couple with out waiting.
As they got close to that intersection, Walter tapped Mervin on the shoulder & said "you can turn right here Mervin". Mervin started & kept objecting and stated that "Looney" would shout him for that. Donna convinced him that would not be allowed to happen.
Walter told him essentially that if they had to walk and hitchhike they would. Did he want an older man with one leg and a young woman going through some of those rough places?
Mervin relented and took them & they were married. Talk about the mail being late that day!
After 20-30 years of faithfully working for souls, how do you suppose Mervin and Kansey Anders felt when the only male child of Walter and Donna Sutton was baptized into the Seventh Day Adventist Church by immersion in the Davidson River up in the Blue Ridge Parkway?
In the late 1940's Walter Harris Sutton sold the Kennebec Potato to the USDA, he probably did not negociate and without a contract ever being mentioned, only got a small amount for this very popular potato variety.
Walter Harris Sutton June 18-1884.....October 9-1961 Fondly in my memory
by ...........Edward F. Sutton 10-07-51.............and still kicking.
end of part-one.
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Edward F. Sutton