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- HHFO: D0208100303 1963: 344 DW record number: 26436
The first son of Louis and Neely BRODERSON, James was named for both his grandfathers. Throughout his life he was called Jim.
When Jim was five he and his sister Sara found some matches and built a fire underneath their wood frame home. Thankfully their father noticed the smoke as he glanced out a window of the the nearby flour mill and was able to shout "fire" loud enough to attract his wife Neely's attention. She immediately doused the fire and wated no words on the kids about the danger of what they had just done. When Jim's father arrived moments later he gave them a whipping he and Sara never forgot.
Another misfortune occured that year when Jim fell out of the horse-drawn surrey and nearly bit his tongue in two. A trip to the doctor saved the tongue.
That same year Jim began doing simple chores around his father's flour mill. He seemed to have a knack for all the mchanical things around the mill and over the next few years he learned all about the milling process, becoming in effect his father's apprentice.
The next fall Jim started school and walked with his sisters Mary and Sara, packing books and lunchboxes along the dusty dirt road that led to the one-room Liberty School. "After a morning of lesson drills, they could eat their sack lunches and wash them down with good fresh water from the nearby spring, finish their work so there was no homework to bring home, and head back down the road toward home." A few years later, Jim attended the Paradise school where he contracted measles along with the rest of the family, and when the family moved to Franklin in 1924 he and his brother Henry would work a couple of hours with their father at the new mill before walking to the Franklin Grade School.
When Jim was 15 and had finished the eighth grade he decided to quit school and begin working with his father full-time at the mill, a position he eagerly took to. By 1931 he was considered "the real miller of the place. He was short, wiry, and stout, and he moved through the mill's machinery floors with grace and quickness. Always cheerful, Jim rally loved his work." He became half-owner of his father's flour mill in 1937 and ran the operation until the mill closed in 1950.
"In 1940 he married Ruth Lillian WAKEFIELD, a native of Pembroke, Kentucky. When brothers Henry and Sonny were taken by World War II, Jim operated the flour mill virtually alone, and the long hours of toil almost overwhelmed him. After the war he and his brothers built the "Simpson County Mills" grain elevator on Water Street; Jim did a lot of the manual construction and installed most of the machinery. They operated the mill until 1966, Jim running the elavators; for a while, his wife Ruth was the mill's bookkeeper. After that mill closed, Jim held several positions, including farm operator for the Methodist Home, Maintenance Director for the Lenk Company, and maintenance man for both the Bob James and Bill Roark farms. He spent one summer with his cousin, John Vible, working the ranch in Wyoming, and would loved to have made it a career for the rest of his life; but soon moved the family back to Franklin where he died in 1977."
For more information see THE HONEST MILLER OF SIMPSON COUNTY from which this summary was taken.
HHFO: D0102060712-S1F0303
DW record number: 26436
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Descendants of Hendrick Willemsz
1914 - 1977 (63 years)