05/05/2026
The Medicine Woman
By Mary McCullen Savage (1908-2000)
“Cat Britt, it’s almost sundown, and you’d best rummage through those potato vines until you find your s***fbox,” chuckled Granny Susan.
“Don’t you recall that the last time that zealot reformed you, you couldn’t sleep a wink until you had dipped all of mine?”
Granny Susan Cashwell liked s***f and knew how to locate and soften first-rate black gum brushes for dipping. She taught us children how to make good brushes, too, but never shared her s***f with us. Instead, she let us dip brown sugar.
Once, while dipping away by the fireplace, she piled oak logs on the fireplace and placed lightard kindling on the coals. Fanning them to make a blaze, she cautioned me, “Don’t you ever do that, Honey, you might catch yourself afire.”
Granny had sound advice for not only children but adults as well. Born in 1830, she had shared in the development of Persimmon College (now Keener) community and often recounted experiences of and tales about the early British settlers in the area. She mastered their skills and crafts, too, especially the healing arts.
Until her death, she could demonstrate efficiency with her spinning wheel and loom. In addition to preserving food, making soap and the like, she even helped my great-grandfather, William Herring Cashwell, make brick in a kiln located behind the site of Halls School.
Convinced that self-sufficiency is a good policy, she used to say “Right here we can find, make, or grow anything we need except salt. Take a look at the house your great-grandfather and I built, for instance. Since nails were scare, we mortised and pegged together the entire framework, and used nails only for ceiling, weatherboards, and shingles. He hewed and rived a lot of the timber by himself, too.
Then she added, “That’s why he was lame in one leg – an ax glanced off a knot on a log and cut out a thick of a muscle.”
That turn of thought brought up the Civil War. “Herring (her husband) didn’t have to go but he went anyway,” she continued with pride. “Unable to march with the infantry, he cooked and helped keep up the strength and morale of others.”
“Take a look at this ring, child, it’s special: Your great grandfather was at Appomattox Courthouse when Lee surrendered. Agonized by defeat, General Lee thrust his sword into an apple tree. His soldiers hacked the tree apart so each man could have a memorial of the occasion. Look at this- your grandfather carved his piece of that apple tree into this ring.”
Recalling war years and reconstruction, she was a living history of how and why self-sufficiency enabled women whose menfolk were on the battlefields to survive. To save things from plundering Yankee troops, people buried supplies and their treasures in wooded areas and tried to conceal livestock where invaders would locate it.
Assuming that none lingered in the area by April of 1865, she dug up the cured meat and was storing it in her kitchen loft. “That was my mistake, “she reminisced. “Sherman’s men stormed in and climbing into the loft, took every ham and shoulder we’d cured. It was good fortune that I was washing clothes, though, and under them lay a piece of side meat, the only meat we had until hog-killing time.”
She paused but smiled, “Killing hogs was thin that December, too. Those Yankee soldiers ran down and took away every hog and chicken in sight.”
What made Susan Stanley Cashwell exceptional among her generation of hardy women was her medical knowledge and practice. Her grandparents who settled in the Keener area in the 1770s brought from England some medical books and plants for an herb garden.
She grew and knew the “virtues” of many herbs and barks, and long before a German scientist extracted aspirin from willow bark, made a concoction that eased the pains of neighbors. She also sought advice and information from any of the medical doctors in Sampson County that she might encounter.
Two testimonials illustrate why she was called “The Medicine Woman of Persimmon College.” When Mat Brewer, who lived on my grandfather’s farm, complained of severe abdominal pains, Granny Susan examined him, sent for Dr. Frank Holmes of Clinton, and scalded down a table for an operation.
She administered a sedative and Dr. Holmes removed Mat’s appendix. This operation was a remarkable achievement on behalf of all three; for with the publication of a paper on appendicitis published in 1886, “the modern surgical treatment of the diseased appendix was started.”
Some of us recall hearing Mat Brewer say years later, “I owe my life to your Granny Susan.”
When she died in 1913, her coffin was placed in a grave on Raleigh Road near the Halls Fire station, and a minister who had known her for decades reviewed her life. In a eulogy to her, J*p Weeks stated “Ada and I had 13 children, and Aunt Susie is the only doctor who has ever treated any of us.”
The sources of my information are Susan Stanley Cashwell and those who knew her well, attendance at her funeral, and a quotation from “A History of Surgery” published in 1843.
One of her children, Gaston B. Cashwell, was a well-known Holiness preacher from Dunn who led the Pentecostal movement in this area. He was well known as the “Pentecostal Apostle of the South.”
* From the Sampson Independent, October 27, 1982
