Charles Mabry Brown marks 102nd year
Charles Mabry Brown, who just turned 102, has a remarkable memory. Listening to him is an experience as he sits in his Grandfather Mabry’s rocker and relates various stories of people and events of by-gone years.
Brown was born June 4, 1902 in Ladonia, Texas when wheat was the crop of choice among farmers. His dad died as a young man so his mother brought her daughter and little toddler to Tennessee in 1903 to be near the family and to teach school at Wesley’s Chapel. There was another son who died in infancy.
When Charles was eight, his mother married Dr. Farriss of Tullahoma, who also had a large farm on Elk River in Franklin County.
Education was always important to Mrs. Farriss. She enrolled her children in a Tullahoma school and later in Winchester where Charles graduated from high school.
“I made good grades, had a paper route and was always busy,” Brown recalled.
His sister went to college in Murfreesboro to become a teacher and he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. While there, construction was begun on the Shields-Watkins football field and he helped build the football stadium, best known as Neyland Stadium, by moving dirt with a team of mules. He paid room and board at a boarding house by making biscuits on a coal stove.
As a young man, out of respect for his mother, he promised never to “put a bottle [of alcohol] to my lips” and today he has never even tasted a soft drink.
His first job was in Tullahoma pulling a wagon to deliver groceries for a store. Selling cattle and mules at local stock sales for decades, he became known by cattlemen and farmers from Chattanooga to Huntsville.
In 1921, Brown purchased a farm in the Viola Valley near the edges of Warren, Grundy and Coffee counties and moved into his present home at the foothills of Ben Lomond Mountains. In 1927, he and the former Jessie Stubblefield were married at Sedberry Hotel and they raised a daughter, Mary Ann, and a son, Charles Jr., who contracted polio in the 1950s and died as a teenager. Now, Mrs. Krickle lives nearby and he shares the house with a grandson, and two of his nine great-grandchildren.
“I got to talk with Dinah Shore when she came back to Winchester for its centennial celebration,” Brown said. “She was Fannie Rose when I taught her momma to drive a car. It was a Buick that we drove to Dechard and back where the road was wider.”
The elderly gentleman attributes his longevity to never drinking, living right and believing “in the Good Lord.” He wears no glasses and brags he still has all his own teeth, except one that he swallowed.
He was well-known around the nearby communities for his old green, 1970 Dodge Coronet automobile registering more than 300,000 miles, which he, at 97, finally quit driving for “safety purposes.” At 98, he had to stop driving his tractor because of his “old” knees.
When Brown reached the age of 100, he was honored by friends and family at a big celebration dinner to mark the occasion. His 102nd birthday was observed quietly at home as visitors dropped in or called by phone to wish him well.
Brown remains Viola Valley’s unofficial historian. People frequently travel from other states to ask him questions about their ancestors and old acquaintances stop just to chat.