The smelter accident

Written by Annie's Grandson, Peter McDonald:
 
Tuesday evening, November 20, 1917

Annie's husband, Elmer, is seriously injured in a smelter accident.

Annie woke up to feed her boys breakfast on Wednesday, November 21, 1917 and recalls,
"I was feeding the children their breakfast one morning and heard a car drive up and I looked out of the kitchen window and saw a man get out of the car and start to come to the house. And I knew that he was a man who had been working at the smelter with Elmer and I just knew something had happened, so I stepped at the door and said, “What’s the matter, what happened?” And he acted like he didn’t want to tell me. And he came up closer and he said, “Well, Elmer got burned last night.” And I said, “Bad?” And he didn’t answer. But there was a voice just over my left shoulder that said, “Yes bad, but he’s not going to die”.

Months later, Annie's husband is starting to get better;

Annie said that her husband was starting to get better. It was probably in early or late 1918, “After Elmer got to feeling better, he took Mr. Dillman’s place for a year to farm. Mr. Dillman got discouraged because it got harder every year to raise vegetables because the cotton farmers had come in there and pumped the water, the underground water out until the wells lowered down and had to pump so much water for vegetables. And so Elmer didn’t make anything on the farm.

And it (the windmill) pumped more water than we needed, so we were able to make a little garden, so we dug up the ground with a shovel and made a garden and we raised quite a lot of vegetables. And I raised chickens, I bought the chickens from Mr. Sever, he lived there and he hatched his own chickens, had a little incubator, so I bought my chickens from him. Paid him ten cents a piece the day they were hatched. And I bought me a hundred chickens and so I raised these chickens. Then we had all our eggs, our milk, and our butter and vegetables and it wasn’t very much groceries that we had to buy. Then in the summertime, the creek would come down and water would come on part of our land and we planted beans. So, we raised all the beans that we needed.”

In the middle of a dilemma of her husband being unable to support the family with the money from the smelter and the farm he was trying to manage failing, Annie became resourceful and helped the family be self-supportive so that they didn't need any money for groceries. Truly, being in the country with land to grow crops and raise animals had proved to be another great blessing that came from Annie's prompting her husband to make good on the $50 he had put down on some land back when they had lived in Douglas.