Summary

I, Kristal Tameka Cozart, interviewed Mrs. Barbara Anne Boyd Jones. She was born in 1931 at home. Her parents were Roy Benjamin Boyd and Elizabeth “Lizzy” Woodlief Boyd. She is married to David Jones and they have two daughters. She has served and is currently serving on a lot of Granville County committees and organizations. I chose to interview her because she is very knowledgeable about the history of Granville County and what goes on today. Below you will find a few clips from my interview with her.

Questions

Thank you! I’ve heard of a lot of stores that were in Oxford before my time, some are still here and some are not. What were some of the major stores?
I guess the first I remember was Roses, what we used to call Roses Dime Store, because during my teenage years I worked at Roses and I worked at Newberry’s. And then we had Fox’s Department Store, William Breedlove, JCPenney’s, Leggett’s, we had Bergens; they particularly specialized in selling shoes, and I guess they’re the old stores. Then you move up to into the newer stores. We have places like Super 10, then there’s um we have all the big grocery stores now, we have Food Lion, and Lowe’s, we used to have a Winn Dixie but that’s no longer here. We had a Granville Feed Store and a Harris Meat Market. They were back in the war years. Then you move on up into the meat now, they are sold in the grocery stores instead of individual markets.
Ok, and as far as restaurants, what kind of restaurants did we have in Granville County in the past?
Well we used to have little drive in restaurants where you could pull up and they had a little microphone where you could speak in. You could order hotdogs and French fries and drinks and they were like, we’d call those drive-ins. But then there was Taylor’s Resturant, Tyree’s, and they were the older ones. But now we have like the 96 and Tony’s which are our more dated restaurants.
Ok, as far as government, how would you compare and contrast the way county
government was set up in the past to how it is now?
Well, you know, the first county commissioner I remember his name being mentioned was Elmo Blackley and I’m sure they existed before that time, but now, also we had, we didn’t have the county managers and all of these people in finance and so forth and so on. It was just a small group of people that managed the monies and the taxes and so forth and so on. I. W. Bullock, I know, was our tax man for years and years. But now we have like seven county commissioners, we have the sheriff’s office, which consists of the sheriff, deputies, and I don’t know the exact number of force. But we have a big jail and we’re always overcrowded there. We have the Clerk of Court, Register of Deeds. We have, also, the finance committee that takes care of the money for the county. And, well, it’s just grown from like just a handful of people maybe just a very few six, eight, or ten people to where there are hundreds probably working for them at this time.
I know that in downtown Oxford the locations of a lot of places have changed, such as the jail. I know that it hasn’t always been where it is now. What are some of the changes that have been made to Downtown Oxford?
Well the jail used to be located behind the district court building and that’s where the Oxford Granville County museum is located now. The fire station was located right next door to where the planning board is located now and the election board. Um, the courthouse has been remodeled and fixed very pretty, the brick has been redone on it and as long as I can remember that courthouse has been in the same place. But we did have a magistrate court across the street right where the county commissioners meet in. And we have, the juvenile and district court is upstairs in the newer part of the building. And the superior court is located in the old courthouse upstairs on second floor above the clerk of court and the register of deeds. The fire station is located on McClannahan Street now and the school’s superintendent office now is located on Delocroix Street, so there has been a lot of changes made over the period of the last fifty years.
Health Care Quality: Was the quality of healthcare back then as well as it is today?
Well, a lot of the women had their babies at home. Some of them were fortunate enough to have midwives. We had at that particular time back in the grade school we had health nurses to come around to the schools and gave us our vaccinations and checked our heads to be sure that our hair was clean and that we didn’t have any head lice or anything like that. The doctors visited people in the homes when they were sick. They’d come to your home and visit you. As time went on, it became to where they’d set up their offices and I remember about the first doctor’s office I ever went to. It was probably about the last part around (19) 47 or (19) 48. And the dentist, we had dentist at that time and the dentist used to go to the schools and pick the children that needed work done on their teeth and so forth and recommended. Now, its grown through the years to become more modernized and the medical field has grown to the point that we have all types of high technology. We have different scans, radiology, and different lab tests that are performed to be able to more completely diagnose people. And we have the medications for a lot of the illnesses that we have that people are treated with now where back in the thirties and forties a lot of home remedies were used. Like, I remember specifically, my mom used to take the bark off of wild cherry trees and boil it to make cough syrup out of it. It was terrible tasting. And then of course we had castor oil that they’d take. If we had an orange in the house, we were very poor people, we had oranges in the house, if we got sick we had a dose of castor oil and orange juice and I don’t drink orange juice today because of that. As the time has grown, a definite pride has taken place in Granville County of our medical facilities and our health department and also in our exercise programs for people. We have a lot to be proud of.