Gardening, quilting keep her busy
Woodrow Wilson was president.
The first World War had just ended.
Prohibition began. Women were given the right to vote.
Cars had been invented, but were not common in the rural Ozark communities.
And on April 13, 1919, Mildred Gosvener was born in the Colbaugh Community, a small community near Clifty and Hindsville.
The fifth child of Andrew and Mary Gosvener, she was one of six daughters and two sons.
She married Nole Herron when she was 20. They raised six children. She didn’t learn to drive until she was 62, she said.
This past weekend, she celebrated her 100th birthday surrounded by her six children, 17 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren.
“I can tell you who she is,” one daughter-in-law, Judy McGinnis, said. “She’s the Proverbs 31 woman. I just love her so much!”
Widowed since 1985, she lives alone on the north side of Rogers in the house where she has lived for 60 years. She grows a garden, quilts and gives to others. She is a member of the Rogers Freewill Baptist Church.
“She was always a homemaker. She has always gardened,” daughter Marcella Hull said, adding that last year’s crop of green beans was a “sorry crop” and yet they canned 42 quarts of beans.
“She loves to dig in the garden. “That’s the way she was raised — works in the earth,” Hull said.
To what does she attribute living a century?
“Eating out of the garden,” Herron said. “My nephew plows it for me.”
She said this past year she canned beans, 88 quarts of beets, 17 quarts of bread and butter pickles, eight quarts of applesauce, okra and squash.
“I was raised on a farm and worked in the garden with my daddy. I was a tomboy,” she said, smiling as she added, “I didn’t learn to stir cornbread until I was married.”
She said her sisters worked in the kitchen with their mother and she worked outside with her dad.
And, when winter arrives and she can no longer work in the garden, she makes quilts.
This past winter, she made seven quilts to give to children at the Children’s Shelter in Vaughn.
“She pieces and sews them and I take them,” Hull said. “She was delighted when she learned that the children can take the blanket when they leave.”
“When I heard those children didn’t have a mama to wash their face or comb their hair,” Herron said, she was moved to make quilts for them.
On display at the party in the community room at the Pea Ridge Emergency Services building was a little coat she had made more than 60 years ago for her daughter, Marcella. It was made from pieces of men’s ties and embroidered with the brier stitch in black embroidery thread.
“I made it by hand,” Herron recalled.
Hull admits she’s proud of it now, but wasn’t so much when she wore it to school six decades ago. She likened it to the “coat of many colors” in the Bible story of Joseph.
A friendship quilt, edged with sharks-tooth edging, was displayed on a table. Squares were embroidered with names of friends. That quilt sold for $1,000 to raise money for a cemetery, Herron said.
“Back when I started quilting, white thread cost 25 cents. Now, it costs $3 a spool,” Herron said. “I’ve worn out three sewing machines.”
Her children are Sonny McGinnis of Springdale, Loyd Herron of Vaughn, Melvin Herron of Centerton, Marcella Hull of Centerton, Imogene Carr of Fairland, Okla., and Leon Herron of Avoca.