03/16/2026
This is the story of Big Jim, the draft horse.
My granddaddy must have liked the name Jim, because he had another animal, whose name was Big Jim. My grandfather owned a saw mill in McDowell County. The saw mill was on a mine site and he cut the timber off of the mountain land and took it inside the mine to shore up the roof. He had four draft horses, that he used to pull the logs into the mine. I was told they were Percherons. He kept two of the draft horses at the mine site and he kept two at home resting. Periodically, he would switch the horses out. One of the horses was very fond of my granddaddy. His name was Big Jim. The minute granddaddy arrived home from the sawmill site every afternoon, Big Jim would jump the fence and come up to my granddaddy’s pickup truck. When my granddaddy got out of the pickup truck, he would give Big Jim a treat, either a sugar cube, a carrot, or a piece of apple. Big Jim did this every day, when he was at the farm. One day big Jim did not arrive at the pickup truck when my granddaddy came home, so my granddaddy just proceeded down the sidewalk into the house. Big Jim arrived later seeing the empty pickup truck and knew that my granddaddy would walk down the sidewalk and go in the house, so Big Jim went looking for him. He climbed the stone steps, pushed open the screen door and went into the kitchen. The kitchen door was open because the screened in porch allowed my grandmother to leave the kitchen door open without worrying about flies. Big Jim was so big he could not make the turn from the kitchen into the dining room and started stomping his feet. My grandmother heard the noise and went into the kitchen and saw a horse in the kitchen. She started swatting the horse with a dishtowel, which was always tucked into the strings of her apron, yelling at my granddaddy, “Eddie, come get this horse out of my kitchen!” My granddaddy supposedly replied, “Ah, he just came to get some dinner”. It took my granddaddy a while to get the horse out of the kitchen, because he had to back down the step from the kitchen door to the kitchen porch. Once he got him on the screened in porch, the horse would not back down the steps, because as he put his foot back he could not feel anything but air. My granddaddy had to go and get two boards and put them overtop the steps so that when the horse backed up he was on firm footing and could back down the stairs. Just imagine, my granddaddy was like Mary Poppins. He comes home from work gets out of his truck, this big Percheron draft horse jumps the fence, my granddaddy feeds him and the crow comes down off the telephone wire or the cherry tree and lands on my granddaddy’s hat; he feeds him corn, so now you can see where my granddaddy was like Mary Poppins.
