dren, this old lady keeps
posted on current events from those around her. With no stoop or bent
back and with a firm step she helps with the housework and preparing of
meals, waiting, when permitted, on others. In odd moments, she like to
work at her favorite task of "hooking" rag rugs. Never having worn
glasses, her eyesight is the envy of the younger generation. She spends
most of the time at home, preferring her rocker and pipe (she has been
smoking for more than eighty year) to a back seat in an automobile.

When referring to Civil War days, her eyes flash and words flow from her
with a fluency equal to that of any youngster. Much of her speech is
hard to understand as she reverts to the early idiom and pronunciation
of her race. Her head, tongue, arms and hands all move at the same time
as she talks.

A note of hesitancy about speaking of her past shows at times when she
realizes she is talking to one not of her own race, but after eight
years in the north, where she has been treated courteously by her white
neighbors, that old feeling of inferiority under which she lived during
slave days and later on a plantation in Kentucky has about disappeared.

Her home is comfortably furnished two story house with a front porch
where, in the comfort of an old rocking chair, she smokes her pipe and
dreams as the days slip away. Her children and their children are
devoted to her. With but a few wants or requests her days a re quiet and
peaceful.

Kentucky with its past history still retains its hold. She refers to it
as "God's Chosen Land" and would prefer to end her days where about
eighty years of her life was spent.

On her 101st birthday (1935) she posed for a picture, seated in her
favorite chair with her closest friend, her pipe.

Abraham Lincoln is as big a man with her today as when he freed her
people.

With the memories of the Civil War still fresh in her mind and and
secret longing to return to her Old Kentucky Home, Mrs. Anna Smith, born
in May of 1833 and better known to her friends as "Grandma" Smith, is
spending her remaining days with her grandchildren, in a pleasant home
at 518 Bishop Street.

On a plantation owned by Judge Toll, on the banks of the Ohio River at
Henderson, Ke., Anna (Toll) Smith was born. From her own story, and
information gathered from other sources the year 1835 is as near a
correct date as possible to obtain.

Anna Smith's parents were William Clarke and Miranda Toll. Her fathe