Louisa Jane Good, a Good Mother Who Loved Her Children

 

Mother Jane Good is pictured above. Pictured below are three of her daughters: Ms. Tweedie Few, Mrs. Sarah Lell, and Ms. Ann Good.

 

   “She was an only child who raised eight children,” Mrs. Tweedie Few says about her mother, the late Mrs. Louisa Jane Stroud Good. “She was a sweet lady.”

Mrs. Good, married to Mr. Valentine “Vollie” Good, Jr., raised 3 boys and 5 girls (listed in birth-order): Janie Mae; V.G., Clint, Alma Carrie, Tweedie, Sarah Louise, Butler Hampton, and Annie Ruth. Mrs. Good’s father, Mr. Richard Stroud, died before Tweedie was born. He owned perhaps 900 acres on Highways 25 and 414) north of Travelers Rest, SC, but the Great Depression (1929 – 1933) caused loss of much of his wealth. Mrs. Good inherited her father’s remaining land.  

“When New Liberty Baptist Church burned, my grandfather had lumber cut from his land to rebuild the church,” Tweedie says. “We went there to church.”   

Tweedie was 17 when she dated the late Leonard Few and first attended Gum Springs Pentecostal-Holiness Church. She saw folk rejoicing in the Lord and told Leonard, “Boy, when I went to church, we had to be quiet!”

The Good family was poor. “But I didn’t know anything else,” Tweedie says. Her father, Mr. Good, “repaired sewing machines and tuned pianos.” Her mother did not drive, work away from home, or trust banks. Mrs. Sarah Lell (wife of Mr. Jimmy Lell) says her father did not make much money and was often paid in canned goods.

Mrs. Sally Few McWhite, Tweedie’s younger daughter and sister to Mrs. Diane Ebert, says her grandmother “told it like it was.” Sally recalls her grandmother saying, “You better sweep around your own front porch before you sweep around somebody else’s.”

The Good family’s father, born in 1887, died at age 71 in 1958 when Sarah was 16. Their mother, born in 1905 and about 18 years younger than their father, died at age 82 in 1987. 

“Mother had to work the garden, and when the well went dry, Mama got water from a spring,” Sarah says. She recalls going to the spring with her mother and making a fire under a black pot filled with water for washing clothes. “We’d stay down there all day,” she says.  “I remember they killed a hog, and Mother made soap from the fat [tallow]. Mother went eight years to school. She said she once went, as a mother, about as much as a year without five cents in her pocket.”

Sarah says her mother rode the bus and worked in a pie factory for a few days but was needed at home and quit. After Sarah was six years old, her father lived in a separate house on the family property. She remembers him dressing in a suit, wearing a felt hat, and riding the bus to Greenville on workdays. 

“Mama went out to the field and got broom straw to sweep the yard,” she says. “We walked about a mile to school and didn’t eat lunch at school — it cost ten cents. I don’t remember one time of getting a birthday or Christmas present. One time, Daddy’s sister who lived in Greensboro, NC, sent ‘stick candy’ and a bushel of apples and a bushel of oranges for Christmas.” 

Tweedie and Leonard married and lived in half of the Ms. Mary Beardon house. (That house sat near Hwy. 290 on Faith Temple property. Ms. Beardon donated the land on which Faith Temple sits.) Sarah, 3 years younger than Tweedie, went at age 14 to live with Tweedie and Leonard. Sarah married prior to 12th grade at Blue Ridge High and graduated the following year.  

Sarah’s husband, Jimmy, worked two jobs for 7 years to pay off their house. Sarah, who has 5 children, worked 12-hour shifts (3 or 4 days each week) for 42 years, mostly in weaving at Slater’s J.P. Stevens plant. “I was determined my children were not going to grow up like I did,” she says. “Our mother had a rough life.” 

When Mrs. Jane Good died, her home sat on a 3/4-acre plot. The rest of her land had been sold off, little by little, to help with raising her children. The epitaph etched on her gravestone at New Liberty Baptist Church inTravelers Rest reads: “LOUISA JANE STROUD GOOD … A MOTHER WHO LOVED ALL HER CHILDREN DEARLY.”