Sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s the Talbert family arrived in Liberty in a covered wagon.
“Most of them came from Georgia and the Carolinas like most everybody else around here,” said descendant Pat Talbert, who is the mayor of Liberty.
Now that wagon sits intact in the old Clinton McGehee dairy barn in town.
According to McGehee’s grandson Bernell, a Liberty CPA, the Talbert pioneer had a blacksmith shop and made the tools used to build the town of Liberty.
“Liberty became a town in 1809. He was there before Liberty became a town,” Bernell said.
Reviving the wagon
Pat Talbert’s grandfather, Stuart Talbert, inherited the wagon and kept it until the 1950s, when Clinton McGehee acquired it.
“It hung under a shed in my grandfather’s barn for years and years and years,” Pat remembered. “Before he died he gave the frame to Mr. Clinton.”
Clinton McGehee wanted to use it for the Liberty sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) celebration in 1959. The old hoops that had supported the canvas cover had not survived, so he got a new set plus a new cover.
“He covered it and he bought a pair of matching white horses,” recalled Bernell, who was 4 at the time.
Clinton and his wife Anna Lea dressed in period attire for the celebration, as did nearly everyone else. They planned to take Bernell and his older sister Cli Ann in the wagon to the celebration at the courthouse.
“The horses down at the bottom of the hill started acting up and he made us get out,” Bernell recalled.
After that, “it was put back in the old dairy barn back there and it’s been sitting there for years,” said Paul McGehee, 89, who is Clinton’s son and Bernell’s uncle.
Other memorabilia
When Liberty held its bicentennial celebration in 2009, Bernell suggested dusting off the wagon and bringing it, but his father, the late Tate McGehee, declined.
“Daddy was pretty particular about things and he just didn’t want things touched,” Bernell said. “I’m just thinking about what to do with it.”
Bernell said he’d like to see the wagon put on display somewhere but has yet to come up with a place.
The wagon isn’t the only piece of the past lurking in the old dairy barn. There’s an old hay rake, a corn grinder, drill press, various farming implements and tack — and a sign reading “Malaria control, WPA Board of Health.”
WPA stands for Works Progress Administration, which was formed during the Great Depression to put people to work. According to Bernell, Fred Anderson Sr. of Gloster suggested the idea to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The sign no doubt refers to a statewide malaria eradication campaign in 1944 that included spraying houses with DDT.
When the banks failed
Bernell’s grandparents’ house also contains elements of history.
His grandfather had lived on County Farm Road in the 1920s and decided to sell that home and buy the place in Liberty, which had an old plantation house on it. The purchaser of his County Farm Road property paid him in cash — on the Friday before banks failed in 1929.
Unwilling to deposit the funds amid the financial uncertainty of the day, Clinton rode a wagon to Magnolia, sitting on the money box, to deliver to the seller of the Liberty property.
On Monday the banks closed. If he had deposited the funds on that Friday, he could have lost everything, Bernell said.
Wood-paneled memories
When Clinton McGehee built a new house, he cut trees and used a groundhog sawmill to make the lumber for paneling.
Rooms in the house were named for the type of wood used, such as Magnolia Room and Cedar Room.
The oak flooring came from the sawmill in Crosby, where Clinton worked at the time. Mr. Crosby cut the boards for his own house but decided he didn’t want them, so Clinton got them.
Paul McGehee remembers using wood from his father’s mill to build bridges. The lumber was treated with black creosote.
“It was just running out and I got blistered, and the only way I could get some relief was to jump in the creek,” Paul said.
The old McGehee house also contains a collection of family Bibles dating back to the 1800s, as well as dolls made by Bernell’s grandmother Anna Lea.
Out back where the plantation home once stood, blooming wisteria vines cover numerous trees. Like the passage of time, the flowers are beautiful to look at now, but one day the vines will reduce the trees to a memory.
