The Storyteller of Our Family: Remembering Aunt Chloe

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Every family has storytellers.

Some pass their stories down around the dinner table. Others leave behind boxes of photographs, faded letters, or handwritten recipes. Most of my ancestors, however, left only the usual paper trail like census records, marriage licenses, deeds, and headstones. Their lives have had to be pieced together one record at a time.

Then there was my Aunt Chloe.

Long before genealogy became my passion, Aunt Chloe did something very few people in my family ever thought to do. She wrote the story of her own life.

Her autobiography is one of my greatest treasures. Within its pages are childhood memories, family tragedies, humorous stories, descriptions of rural Wake County during the early twentieth century, and the everyday moments that history books rarely preserve. Reading her words is like sitting beside her in the living room, listening as she recalls a lifetime of memories.

This is her story.

A Baby Without a Name

Chloe Belle Hodge was born around nine o’clock on a hot Sunday night, July 30, 1916, in rural Wake County, North Carolina. Her parents, Arthur Randolph Hodge (31) and Valeria “Vallie” Holder Hodge (25), welcomed their fourth child into an unpainted wooden farmhouse along a dirt road connecting Poole Road and Rock Quarry Road, about six miles east of Raleigh.

Although she was the youngest child, Chloe later joked that the title of “baby” referred only to birth order.

“…the baby of the family, although that term, in relation to size, has never properly applied to me.” As she wrote in her book. 

That sentence perfectly captures her personality. She possessed a wonderful sense of humor and never seemed embarrassed by being a larger woman. In fact, when I found her high school yearbook years later, I smiled when I saw that beside her photograph she had willingly included the nickname “Chubby,” embracing it instead of hiding from it. She even titled her book A Whale of a Tale: My Life Story. 

For the first four months of her life, however, she wasn’t Chloe at all.

She was simply “Baby.”

Her mother wanted to name her after her youngest sister, Chloe Holder, who cared for the newborn and her three older siblings after her birth. Arthur wanted to honor his only sister by naming the baby Belle. Neither parent would give in until they finally reached the perfect compromise.

She became Chloe Belle Hodge.

Like many Southern girls of her generation, she was almost always called by both names: Chloe Belle.

Unfortunately, not everyone could pronounce it.

People regularly mashed the two names together into “Clobel.” Schoolchildren teased her by calling her “Cowbell.” Even her own sister Flonnie affectionately called her “Cluble.” Eventually, after beginning her first job, Chloe quietly dropped the second half of her name and signed everything simply “Chloe B. Hodge.”

1920 Wake County, NC Census

Growing Up on Poole Road

Although the Hodge family moved several times during Chloe’s childhood, they never wandered very far from home. Most of their houses stood somewhere along Poole Road or its connecting roads on the eastern side of Raleigh.

Those country roads became the backdrop for nearly every childhood memory she preserved.

When Chloe was only three years old, her first real adventure came unexpectedly.

After all three of her older siblings became seriously ill with colitis, her parents decided she should stay for several weeks with her maternal grandparents. Her cousin Emmett Hodge arrived with a horse and buggy to take her there.

Heavy rains had swollen the Neuse River until the bridge they needed to cross disappeared beneath the water. The horse refused to continue.

Emmett climbed down, rolled up his pant legs, placed blinders over the horse’s eyes, and carefully led it across the flooded bridge while little Chloe sat terrified inside the buggy.

A few weeks later, her father and Uncle Rufus arrived to take her home.

Not in a buggy.

In an automobile.

She had never even seen one before.

As they sped along the road at nearly twenty-five miles per hour, Chloe wrote that she felt as though they were flying.

A Childhood Changed Forever

The happiest memories of childhood were interrupted by unimaginable tragedy.

In June 1923, Chloe’s older brothers, Jasper and Thomas, known to everyone as Jack and Tom, accompanied their father to deliver lumber to a construction site. As they crossed a railroad track, an approaching train struck the wagon.

Overgrown embankments blocked their view of the tracks, while the noise of the lumber planer drowned out the sound of the train. It was later determined that the train never sounded its whistle before reaching the crossing.

Tom and the team’s two mules died instantly.

Jack was rushed toward Raleigh aboard the train but died before reaching the city.

Chloe was only six years old.

She vividly remembered the custom of the day as her brothers’ bodies were brought home in open caskets and placed in the family room until the funeral. For Chloe and her sister Flonnie, it became a memory they never forgot.

Despite the sorrow, life continued.

She remembered circus parades marching through Raleigh because admission to the circus itself was beyond the family’s means. She recalled her first telephone call, siblings chasing one another with eels caught in nearby creeks, walking home from school, and dozens of other moments that transformed ordinary life into lasting memories.

Each story reminds us that history isn’t made only by famous people.

Sometimes history lives in the memories of a little girl growing up on a dirt road in Wake County.

Aunt Chloe’s autobiography is a remarkable gift to our family, and there are still many more pages to explore. This is only the beginning of her remarkable story. 

Be sure to come back for Part 2 as we continue her story through her own words. Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Have you been fortunate enough to inherit a memoir, journal, or handwritten memories from one of your own ancestors?

Family group sheet from Chloe’s book A Whale of a Tale