Ancestors and Descendants of Eda "Eddie" Farley and Anna May Harvey Farley

08/30/2026

This is big Jim, my granddaddy Farley‘s draft horse that I wrote a story about earlier today.
These are my five uncles, who were the youngest children of Eddie Farley and May Harvey Farley. They are from the left, Fred Allen, Frank Eugene, Willard Ray, Clarence Donald, and Wilber Clifton. All of them are deceased, except Freddy, who will be 89 on September 4, 2026.

08/30/2026

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 sawmill in McDowell County. The sawmill 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. I was told they were Percherons, that he used to pull the logs into the mine. 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, Eddie Farley was like Mary Poppins. (Some spelling shows Eda Farley)

08/30/2026

This is the story of Jim Crow and my Granddaddy Eddie Farley.
Burnace Farley, Eddie Farley’s eldest son, was a coal miner in Crystal, West Virginia. Occasionally, the coal miners would come out of the mine to eat their lunch. One day, a wild crow, started flying down to where they were eating and the coal miners started feeding him breadcrumbs. The crow got used to this and started coming around every time the miners were outside. Some of the miners then started throwing little pebbles toward him and he would pick them up and try to eat them. This upset Burnace that it would hurt the crow eating small pebbles, so he decided to rescue the crow. On Friday afternoon, he managed to catch the crow and put him in his lunch bucket and carry him home. When he got home he took the top off of his lunch bucket and replaced it with the screen and a rock so that the crow couldn’t get out, but would be able to breathe. The next morning, which was a Saturday, he took the crow to Princeton to his father’s farm and let him go. The crow flew up onto the electric wires and watched all the people down below. Burnace explained to Poppy Farley what had happened and so Poppy started throwing dried corn out of his corn crib down on the ground for the crow. The crow realized Poppy was a friend and eventually started flying down and landing on Poppy’s hat. Poppy started carrying dried corn in his shirt pocket and the crow began to eat the corn out of his shirt pocket. When I was a little girl, I have this distinct memory of sitting on the stone steps in front of the house up on the hill with my granddaddy next to me and the crow on my granddaddy’s shoulder eating corn out of his pocket. My granddaddy was trying to teach me how to put a blade of grass between my two thumbs and learn how to whistle. I never learned that, but I still remember the lesson.
I was told that every time my granddaddy came home from work and got out of his pickup truck, the crow, which was now called Jim Crow, would fly down either out of the large cherry tree in the lane or off one of the electric wires and would land on my granddaddy’s hat which was a Fedora. My granddaddy would go into the house and shoo the crow away off of his hat before he went in the house. When my granddaddy came back out of the house to start his farm chores, Jim Crow would fly back down onto the top of my granddaddy’s hat and Granddaddy continued doing his farm chores with the crow riding on top of his hat.
Unfortunately, the crow came to a very violent end. One day he flew down over the hill to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had left the window open and the crow flew into the window, spying a shiny necklace on top of the dresser. The crow took the necklace in his beak and proceeded to fly out the window of the neighbor’s house.. One wonders if he was taking it to my granddaddy, since crows like to bring presents to those they liked. Anyway, the neighbor who lived in the house happened to be cleaning his sh***un and saw the crow fly out of the window with his wife’s necklace dangling from his beak and so he shot him. Then he called my granddaddy and said I think I just shot your crow. That was the end of Jim Crow. Granddaddy Farley found the crow and buried him on the farm

08/03/2026

Princeton Railroad Museum

On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain, commanding three ships with a total crew of 86 men, intent on finding a new route to the Indies. After a stop in the Canary Islands to restock the ships’ provisions, the expedition sailed west, into the unknown.

Educated people at the time knew the world was not flat, and Columbus’ crew never feared that they might fall off the edge of the world (that myth was invented by Washington Irving, a fascinating story that will be the subject of a future Dose). But as they sailed farther and farther west, driven by stiff winds, the crew did begin to become unsettled and potentially mutinous, concerned that they had traveled too far to safely make it back home. To keep them calm, Columbus deliberately understated the distance they had traveled.

After 36 increasingly tense days at sea, the ships finally sighted land on October 12. Columbus had reached the Bahamas, but for the rest of his life he was convinced that he had reached Asia, believing he had discovered the new route to India that he had been seeking (which explains why he called the people he found there “Indios.”)

Nowadays of course Columbus and his expeditions are highly controversial topics. Future Doses will address how he and his crew treated the natives, and the fascinating story of how Columbus Day came to be a national holiday in the United States. But for today, we will close with a quote from historian Charles Mann about the “Columbian Exchange.”

“Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, Columbus alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life: beginning the Columbian Exchange…. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Columbus a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Columbus’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.”

Five hundred thirty-four years ago today, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, under the command of Christopher Columbus, sailed from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, beginning a voyage that would change the world.

07/30/2026

Today in History: July 30, 1619, The Virginia House of Burgesses is Established.

If you were standing in Jamestown on July 30, 1619, you probably would not have guessed that something world-changing was about to happen inside the colony’s wooden church. There were no television cameras, no marble capitol, and no patriotic music swelling in the background. Just a small group of colonial officials and elected representatives gathering in the church choir to talk through the business of governing Virginia.

And yet, that meeting marked the beginning of something big: the first elected representative governing body in the English colonies that would later become the United States.

The House of Burgesses grew out of reforms outlined in the Virginia Company of London’s Great Charter of 1618. That charter—issued as instructions for the colony’s new governor, Sir George Yeardley—ended the harsher military-style rule that had shaped Virginia’s early years and authorized a General Assembly to help govern the colony.

In practical terms, the Great Charter gave colonists a limited but meaningful role in public decision-making. Yeardley then called the assembly to meet at Jamestown in 1619, putting that new framework into action.

The assembly included the governor, his council, and 22 elected burgesses chosen from Virginia’s settlements and plantations. In other words, for the first time in English America, colonists had elected representatives who could speak for local communities in a lawmaking body.

July 30, 1619, was not just another date in colonial Virginia. It was the day representative government in the English-speaking New World took a formal step forward. The assembly met in the church at Jamestown and began considering laws on topics ranging from to***co prices to public behavior and religious observance.

That may sound ordinary now, but at the time it was a remarkable shift. Instead of rule flowing only from a company or a governor, local communities were given a voice—limited, imperfect, and far from democratic by modern standards, but still a meaningful beginning.

The early General Assembly initially met as one body, but over time Virginia’s government developed into a bicameral legislature, meaning it had two chambers. By the 1640s, the elected burgesses met separately from the governor’s council, creating a lower house and an upper house.

That two-house structure should sound familiar. It echoes through later American government, including state legislatures and the United States Congress. The House of Burgesses did not create modern democracy overnight, but it helped establish a pattern: elected representatives debating laws, raising concerns, and shaping public life.

Like many moments from the early colonial period, the first meeting of the General Assembly reflected the world in which it was created. The new representative system was an important step forward, but participation was limited by the laws, customs, and expectations of the time.

Seen in that context, the House of Burgesses is best understood as a starting point rather than a finished model. Its legacy lies in the idea that local communities could have a voice in government—an idea that would continue to grow, change, and expand over the centuries.

More than four centuries later, the founding of the House of Burgesses still matters because it shows how deeply the idea of representative government is woven into Virginia’s history.

July 30, 1619, was not the finish line for democracy. It was a starting point—one that was limited, contested, and incomplete, but also undeniably significant. The Virginia House of Burgesses helped introduce elected lawmaking to English America, and its legacy continues to invite us to think about representation, responsibility, and the ongoing work of self-government.

*Image depicting the first meeting of the Virginia Burgesses, unknown author or date.

07/26/2026

Today in History: July 26, 1947, President Truman Signs the National Security Act.

If you could point to one summer day when the United States government quietly reorganized itself for the Cold War era, July 26, 1947, would be a pretty good candidate. That was the day President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law—a sweeping measure that created or formalized several institutions that still shape American policy today: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At first glance, that may sound like a dry bureaucratic reshuffle. But it was much more than that. The Act was a response to a world that had changed dramatically after World War II. The United States had emerged as a global power, the Soviet Union had gone from wartime ally to strategic rival, and Washington needed a new way to coordinate military strength, intelligence, and presidential decision-making.

World War II had proved that modern national security could not be handled in separate boxes. Army, Navy, air power, intelligence, diplomacy, technology, and presidential strategy all had to work together. During the war, the United States had built enormous military and intelligence capabilities, but many of those arrangements were temporary, improvised, or scattered across different agencies.

Truman believed the country needed a peacetime structure that could keep up with global responsibilities. The National Security Act was designed to do exactly that: coordinate policy, reduce duplication, unify military planning, and give the president better advice in a fast-moving world.

So what departments did the National Security Act create and what were their original roles?

The Central Intelligence Agency

The CIA was one of the Act’s most consequential creations. Before 1947, the United States had wartime intelligence organizations, including the Office of Strategic Services, but it did not have a permanent civilian agency dedicated to foreign intelligence. The new CIA gave the federal government a central organization for collecting, analyzing, and coordinating intelligence related to threats beyond U.S. borders.

That distinction mattered. The CIA was not meant to be a domestic police force. Its role was foreign intelligence, while domestic law enforcement remained elsewhere in the government. In other words, Truman and Congress were trying to build intelligence capacity while also drawing boundaries around it.

The Department of Defense

The Act also reorganized the armed services under what was initially called the National Military Establishment, headed by a Secretary of Defense. This was a major step towards what became the Department of Defense. The idea was not to erase the separate identities of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, but to bring them under more unified civilian leadership.

One especially important change was the creation of the Department of the Air Force. Air power had transformed warfare during World War II, and the Act gave it a permanent institutional home as a separate military department.

The National Security Council

The National Security Council gave presidents a formal forum for discussing security policy with top advisers. That may sound obvious today, but in 1947 it represented a new level of coordination. Instead of national security decisions being pushed through disconnected channels, the NSC was meant to help bring the key players into the same conversation.

Over time, the NSC became one of the most important institutions in the White House orbit, helping presidents weigh military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic factors before making high-stakes decisions.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had roots in wartime cooperation, but the National Security Act gave them a statutory place in the national security system. Their job was to advise civilian leaders on military strategy and planning, helping ensure that the services could work together rather than talk past one another.

That mattered because modern warfare required more than separate Army, Navy, and Air Force. It required joint planning, unified command concepts, and a shared understanding of how different military tools fit into national strategy.

The National Security Act of 1947 did not simply create new offices and titles. It gave the United States a new operating system for the postwar world. From Cold War strategy to modern counterterrorism, from intelligence briefings to Pentagon planning, the basic architecture built in 1947 remains deeply familiar.

Of course, that architecture has evolved. The Department of Defense was strengthened and renamed through later reforms, the intelligence community changed after major events like September 11, and the NSC process has looked different from one administration to another. Still, the foundation was laid when Truman signed that law in 1947.

It is easy to overlook July 26, 1947, because it was not a battlefield victory, a dramatic sp*ech, or a crisis broadcast over the radio. It was a bill signing. But that signature helped define how the United States would organize power, gather intelligence, advise presidents, and manage military strategy for generations.

So, the next time you hear references to the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, or the Joint Chiefs, remember that they share a common origin story. In the uneasy aftermath of World War II, Truman signed the National Security Act—and in doing so, helped build the backbone of America’s modern national security state.

Image: President Harry S. Truman, painted by Martha Greta Kempton, 1947. From the White House Historical Association/White House Collection.

07/24/2026

07/10/2026

Zach Barberio

🙏

10/23/2025

Harvey Owl story

This story was told to me by Herman Harvey, son of David Harvey, who was the brother to May Harvey Farley.
When Herman was little, he and his father typically went to the bathroom off the front porch, at nighttime. This kept them from having to go down to the outhouse. One night, they stepped out onto the front porch, unzipped their pants and proceeded to p*e. A screech owl up, in an adjacent tree, mistook their private parts for something delicious and flew down to try to grab what it could. Dave Harvey, the father, grabbed the screech owl as it was attempting to grab his private part. David took it into the house to show his wife, who was in bed with a new baby. The screech owl got loose flew around the house quite a few times and then landed on the picture frame. Every time Dave tried to get it, the owl would fly way. After about half an hour, he finally got it by throwing a blanket over it, took it outside and let it fly away. Herman commented that the screech owl probably thought he was going to capture a mouse!