Fredericka Adickes Alexander

Excerpt 2 from
Recollections of William Lennox Kirkland

In this excerpt, Fredericka's son writes:

My mother made me learn to swim the 'hard way' - she made my older brother Lawrence throw me over board in deep water, where I had to swim or else. That is the quick way to learn. She applied the same theory to other things, such as riding a horse - if you were thrown or fell off, you had to immediately get back on the horse. That happened to me on more than one occasion. I was terribly afraid of thunder and lightning and during a severe thunder storm would run and put my head under a pillow. My mother would not put up with that. She had no use for a coward. I recall once, lightning struck a tree in our back yard about 50 feet from the house and I started for the bedroom to get under a pillow. My mother hauled me out and forced me to go out in the back yard and stand in the rain until the storm was over.

Going back to earlier days, when there were only four children in our family and a fifth child was on the way; my mother was convinced she would not survive. So she spent a lot of time making clothes for all of the young ones. There were a dozen shirts made for me and my younger brother Randolph, we being near the same size. My mother moved her bedroom downstairs and had the four young ones in two larger double beds in the next room. There were sliding French doors between all the downstairs rooms, but due to the furniture arrangement in her bedroom, they could not be opened, but all sounds and noises came through, allowing her to keep some check on goings on. We kept all sorts of creatures in our bedroom, such as snakes, land turtles, baby rabbits, etc.

After the baby was born and mother realized she was going to live, she began to show an interest in the noises coming from the adjoining bedroom. She had a colored nurse she would send to investigate, but she reported nothing. When my mother could walk around, she came in one morning on an inspection tour to find a snake in the water pitcher, several turtles in the wash basin and stop jar, and in a bureau drawer containing the dozen shirts were six young rabbits. While we fed them, they had not been out of the drawer for any length of time for about ten days. The new shirts were deep yellow. At that time, nearly all the clothes worn by children under fourteen were made at home. I think I was twelve before I owned a pair of shoes. They were not needed.

Fredericka and Thomas Jefferson Kirkland had nine children:

• Lawrence Alexander Kirkland, born July 8, 1890 married ^1st in 1911, Leila Boykin and ^2nd Henrietta Shannon.
• William Lennox Kirkland, born Oct. 22, 1892, married. Eliza Lucas Frampton.
• Randolph Withers Kirkland, born November 18, 1894, married Louise Richardson on December 31, 1918.
• Marion Adickes Kirkland, born April 24, 1897, married Daisy Lee Ferguson.
• Elise Kirkland, born February 16, 1899, married Sherborne Dougherty Yardley and resided in Birmingham Alabama.
• Mary Withers Kirkland, born April 9, 1901, died in 1999, in Columbia, South Carolina.
  
• Thomas Jefferson Kirkland, born August 1, 1903, married Celeste Rowlette.
• Fredericka Kirkland, born August 24, 1909, married James H. Sanders.
• Lucy Kirkland, born May 28, 1912, married Thomas William Smith Davis.