OLD TIMES THERE ARE SOON FORGOTTEN

[Jonathan Brooks and Nicie Elizabeth Kinnaird May (my grandpaarents) with children and some grandchildren. That little boy with the big black tie in the front row is my father, Jonathana Bryan. My guess is that the photo was taken in the first decade of the 20th Centuery.  The family is seated on the porch of the old May house on the farm west of Sawyerville. That house burned in 1934.]

​

​I still find it amazing that my great-grandfather, John William May, was among the first wave of settlers of Alabama, moving to that new state in 1819 from South Carolina as a 4-year-old boy accompanying his parents, James F. and Charlotte Willingham May. The family set up a homestead in Hollow Square, Alabama, but not in the small community that lay west of present-day Sawyerville where the only remains of the settlement is Hollow Square Cemetery. They lived on what became known as the Jud May Place, about 3 miles to the north of present-day Sawyerville and east of the Crackerneck community.

​Hollow Square. Sawyerville. For most purposes they can be considered as one, as they both served as the center of the same large rural area, a circle about 10 miles in diameter that includes the smaller communities known as Melton, Crackerneck, Wedgeworth, and Mason Bend. 

[John William and Martha Emily May, my great-grandparents.]

In 1841 John married Martha Emily May, who had been born to her branch of the May family after their move to Alabama. Her parents were Jonathan and Anna Windham May. They were cousins, and I have heard it stated that they were first cousins, which would mean that their fathers were brothers. In “Two May Families” Cousin Berenice May Fuller claims no knowledge of the relationship between the two families, other than they were friends and neighbors in South Carolina and Alabama.

​John and Martha had 7 children who survived infancy: Thaddeus Theodore, Melissa Ann, Albert Judson, Francis Taylor, Mary Statira, William Harrison, James Benjamin, and Jonathan Brooks.
 
Dying as infants were Martha Melinda, John Thomas, and Harriet Elizabeth. Life was hard on the young in those days, and on their mothers as well.

[4 sons of John and Martha:  L to R ​Albert Judson, Francis Taylor, James Benjamin, Jonathan Brooks. Brooks is my grandfather.]

Was this family what is referred to as “Old Southern Aristocracy”? Personally I take that term to mean “Our family owned a whole bunch of slaves.”  Did the Mays? Yes, I am ashamed to say. My assumption is that some enslaved people were moved to Hollow Square with their enslavers in 1819. As a child I was told that the Mays owned just a few slaves. I thought that didn’t make us as bad as some of the others, who owned many. Later in life I have been told that our family owned more than “just a few.” Does that mean that we were worse than I had thought? But later in life I have concluded that the sin was just as great if you owned 1 or 100. Aristocracy? Alabama had been a state for just 40 years when the Civil War broke out. That hardly seems time enough to establish an aristocracy. Mobile, maybe, and New Orleans, and states along the Atlantic. But not West Central Alabama, which was frontier. I believe the Mays were hard-scrabble farmers scratching a life out of the wilderness. They ended up with a good bit of land as various May holdings were consolidated by gifts, wills, and purchase. And if you had land you had enslaved people to work it. So: Aristocrat? No. Enslavers, yes.
 
Thaddeus Theodore (1841-1916), Albert Judson (1845-1926), the son from whom the Jud May Place got its name, and Francis Taylor (1846-1931) all fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and are buried at Hollow Square Cemetery. William Harrison May (1852-ca.1910), about whom not much is known, is thought to be buried in an unmarked grave in the Callahan cemetery next to his parents, John and Martha. James Benjamin (1851-1933) is buried with members of his family in Arkansas.

​When I was a child I was bemused that unlike many Southern families there was no May cemetery on the May lands. Now I know that Hollow Square Cemetery and the Callahan Cemetery served that function


​
[Hollow Square Cemetery. 3 great-uncles are buried in this row.]

[Jonathan Brooks and Nicie Elizabeth Kinnaird May, my grandparents. Below, the same couple later in life.]

[Below, their children later in life. L to R: Aunt Comer, her husband Will Stephenson, Uncle Ellery, Aunt Mamie, Uncle Stephen, Bryan (my father), Uncle Freeman, Uncle Albert. If I have mislabeled, I'm sure someon will corrrect me.]

​Jonathan Brooks May, my grandfather, was the youngest son of John and Martha. Born in 1857, he was a child at the time of the Civil War. His father would have been 42 at the time. The youngest son of Jonathan Brooks was my father, Jonathan Bryan, born in 1898, when my grandfather was 41. I was born in 1939, when my father was 41. This history of youngest sons of youngest sons and middle-aged fathers combined with my own advanced age in 2022 is what makes if feasible for me to have a great-grandfather who was in the first wave of people moving to Alabama in 1819, 3 great-uncles who fought in the Civil War, 2uncles who fought in World War One, many first cousins who fought in World War Two, and cousins who fought in later wars. One third cousin died at the Pentagon on 9/11. I’m a part of history, like it or not. Or maybe history is a part of me.

​Bryan. How did that name creep into the family? Jonathan Brooks was enamored with orator and politician William Jennings Bryan and used his last name as the middle name of my father. (He already had a son with Brooks as middle name, so that name was not lost. A family truism is that if you call out Brooks at a family gathering half the crowd will stand up, women as well as men, for the name can swing both ways.)






[Bryan, my father, in front of his store in Sawyerville, 1930s.]

​In 1883 Jonathan Brooks married Nicie Elizabeth Kinnaird, known as Bettie. The Kinnairds lived on a farm north of the Jud May Place (I hesitate to use the term plantation because of its connotations). Along about that time Brooks (as he was called) began to purchase land 4 miles to the west of present-day Sawyerville, gradually putting together a farm of some 1,100 acres, the seed of that being land known as Kimbrough Bottom. It was not until the early 1900s that the property was secured in his name. The history of that land is a history of mortgages: farming to raise money to pay off the mortgage needed for last year’s seed and supplies, a pattern that remained for many years. This land is generally called the Stephen May Place, since it was my Uncle Stephen who ended up with most of the land after the final division of property and funds among the children of Brooks. The cycle of mortgage and repayment continued for much of his lifetime. The last 50 acres of this property remained in May hands until Uncle Stephen’s grandson finally sold that property in the spring of 2021. The Jud May Place, however, still remains in May hands, owned by the Blue Shadows Corporation set up by descendants of Ellery Brooks, oldest son of Jonathan Brooks.

 
Brooks died in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins after a long illness. His body was returned home and interred at Hollow Square Cemetery where his brothers lay, but later Uncle Ellery had his father dug up and moved to Greensboro to lie beside his wife, who had died at the home of Uncle Ellery on Tuscaloosa Street in Greensboro on Christmas Morning 1925. 

Here endeth this history lesson. You will note that I have seriously neglected the women in this history. That is not because they lack importance or that their descendants lack history, because there is a lot. To make this brief account manageable I had to limit myself, and my basic theme is how little old me fits into this line.
 
But thank goodness we have “Two May Families of Hollow Square, Greene County, Alabama, Including Some May – Windham – Harrison – Dargan Ancestors and Descendants” compiled by my first cousin Berenice May Fuller. Because of her failing health Berenice had to proceed with publication in 1988 before she was 100% happy with the work. In spite of that, it is an impressive accomplishment and is filled with family information, including photographs, newspaper articles, and other documents. I have it as a PDF document and would be happy to share it with anyone who lacks a copy of the original. It is truly the May Family Bible.