Conversations with Augusta

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On a pleasant May weekend in 1978, Augusta Pflug Thorp celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday with her family at her home on Black Creek in Clay County, Florida, where she had lived since the spring of 1911. Shortly after that, author Alice Marie Thorp Duxbury interviewed Augusta about her life in Florida and her family history.

In Conversations with Augusta, Duxbury shares the history of a German family who adapted to a new lifestyle in rural northeast Florida in the 1900s while dealing with the effects of two world wars and the Great Depression. This memoir shares some of the lessons the family learned while setting down new roots:

• If your passenger boat from Jacksonville turns over in the St. Johns River, swim ashore and take the midnight train, keeping your hat properly on your head.
• If you are pregnant and a neighbor says, in your hearing, "Miss [Gussie] sure looks good. She's fatten'in' up like an old sow hog," smile and accept the compliment.
• If your neighbors cut your fence to permit their stock to graze in your cornfield, replace the fencing-again and again.
• If the neighbor boy plowing your field picks up a snake, twirls it like a whip and snaps off its head, look the other way.

Conversations with Augusta narrates one family's story while providing insight into life as immigrants in the 1900s.