Shoot Out at the Hunters

We are currently getting ready to go to north Georgia to the Hunter Reunion up there.

While I was shaving, cutting nostril hairs, and other unmentionables I was thinking of my first trip to a Hunter Reunion there in the about 1981.

There, I met up with a cousin I had been communicating genealogy with. She was a high school principal and her husband a college professor at the University of Georgia. After the reunion she showed me around the area and we went to her father's house.

Her father's house was a big house with several additions going in different directions. The house was on the edge of a giant cornfield.

Her father, now dead, was 93 then. In his den he sat there and smiled and if you said something to him he smiled even more and nodded his head. I asked him something that required an answer, something like what did he do with all that corn and his daughter said he couldn't hear me, he was deaf and didn't like wearing a hearing aid for vanity reasons. As she said that he looked at me smiling and nodding.

The house was over a hundred years old.

His daughter gave me a tour of the house. The house use to be much smaller. The front room was interesting. She pointed out several bullet holes in the floor, ceiling, and one wall. She told me years ago the Hunter cousins had a family meeting there which led to a quarrel and they had a shootout. No one was killed.

On that visit I brought my uncle with us. He was suprised when his new neighbor walked into the room. He hadn't met him yet, but he saw him at a distance. They were cousins, and didn't even know they had the same last names. After all, Marietta is 85 miles away.

A few years later at another Hunter Reunion was a birthday cake celebrating the same deaf old man's birthday, I think it was his 99th. I shook his hand and wished him a happy birthday and he looked at me nodding and smiled.