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Granny Dollar - TPR's In Focus - June 4, 2026 · In Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson

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  Support comes from the Janice Hawkins Cultural Arts Park
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  on the main campus of Troy University,
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  featuring the International Arts Center,
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  the Fred Knoll Hollis Museum,
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  and the Huo Bao Zhu gallery.
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  More information at troy.edu slash arts park.
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  From Troy Public Radio, this is In Focus,
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  and I'm Carolyn Hutcheson.
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  If you've spent time in North Alabama and North Georgia,
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  you may have heard the legend of Granny Dollar.
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  For the Storyline book series on In Focus,
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  we're joined by journalist and author Neil Wooten,
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  who researched her 100-year life
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  and described the history she witnessed
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  in his book, Granny Dollar.
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  He joins us from Fort Payne, Alabama
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  at the Fort Payne Depot Museum.
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  And we first broadcast this program in November of 2024.
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  Neil Wooten, welcome back to Troy Public Radio.
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  Thank you.
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  Neil, so many of our listeners were intrigued
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  with your book, With the Devil's Help,
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  which is actually about your childhood family.
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  But another book has a lot of people
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  in North Alabama and North Georgia
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  remembering the person this book is about.
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  The book is called Granny Dollar.
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  Who was she?
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  Granny Dollar's real name was Nancy Emmeline Callahan.
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  And at age 79, she got married, finally,
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  to a man by the name of Dollar.
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  And later, she became known as Granny Dollar
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  because she was such a grandmother figure to so many.
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  Her dad was full-blood Cherokee, 6'5", 275 pounds.
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  Granny Dollar herself,
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  and she was the oldest of 26 brothers and sisters.
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  She had two mothers, which was very common
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  in the Cherokee culture back in that day.
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  She was six foot tall herself
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  and knew all the old Cherokee ways.
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  And she was just an extraordinary woman.
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  And once she settled in the Lookout Mountain area,
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  when she was 100 years old, she found herself homeless.
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  People sought her out because all of her great stories,
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  because of all the incredible things
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  that happened in her life.
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  So that's pretty much who Granny Dollar was.
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  Well, Neal, every time I go to Northeast Alabama,
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  the Fort Payne area and Northwest Georgia,
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  people talk about Granny Dollar.
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  So how did you track down her actual biography?
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  Well, there's a lot of stories
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  that had been written about her,
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  probably a dozen articles.
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  She was just a favorite of local journalists
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  back in the turn of the century, the early 1900s.
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  There was an original article had been written
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  in the Progressive Farmer, 1928, January and February issue,
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  and no one could find it.
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  And finally, I found it
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  at the Raleigh, North Carolina Public Library.
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  They had every copy of the Progressive Farmer on microfilm.
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  And we finally figured out by then
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  that it was two full articles about Granny Dollar.
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  And that's what kind of got the interest started
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  and everybody started seeking her out
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  and writing about her then.
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  And it took me about six months
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  to find everything I could written on her
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  to put it together in a chronological order
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  to write the novel.
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  To everyone's knowledge, when do you think she was born?
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  At the time of the forced relocation, she was 12 years old.
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  So she was probably born late 1825, is what they believe.
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  They didn't have records back then.
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  The Cherokee did not have records,
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  but she remembers being 12 years old
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  when they started marching people off on the Trail of Tears.
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  Her story reflects American history.
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  Can you share the history that she witnessed
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  and how she witnessed it?
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  You know, it's amazing what the woman witnessed.
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  Obviously, the forced relocation.
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  She was a midwife, even at age 12.
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  She had delivered babies.
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  But when Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act
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  in 1835, the Cherokee thought they were safe.
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  They had married with white settlers.
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  They were accepted.
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  You know, they had accepted the white settlers.
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  But in 1838, they decided it would include the Cherokee, too.
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  So her and her family actually hid out
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  during that time for three years.
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  They hid out in a cave.
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  So she witnessed one of the worst,
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  darkest points of our history, that forced relocation,
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  which would become known, of course, as the Trail of Tears
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  because so many Cherokee died.
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  And then finally, in her 30s, she got engaged.
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  She delivered goods to stores all across Georgia and Alabama.
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  She would pick them up in Martha's Ville,
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  which we now know as Atlanta,
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  and she would deliver them everywhere.
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  And for a single woman back in that day,
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  she had to be very tough.
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  She was never robbed.
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  So she was quite a woman,
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  but she lost her fiance and her dad in the same battle.
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  And that's when Sherman went through Atlanta.
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  And she describes that in one of her stories
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  as waking up in the middle of the night.
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  And they lived about 30 miles from Martha's Ville, Atlanta.
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  She describes it as waking up
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  because she thought it was thunder.
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  And she went outside to look,
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  and there were no clouds in the sky.
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  But the sound, it was Sherman's cannons,
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  30 miles away in Atlanta.
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  And so she lived through quite a time.
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  And then again, she didn't get married until she was 79.
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  And then she lost her husband.
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  The people that were renting her little house to her
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  needed it for family.
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  So she found herself homeless at the age of 100.
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  And she took her six chickens and one dog named Buster
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  that hated everybody on the planet but her.
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  And she just went walking through the woods
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  on top of Lookout Mountain.
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  And she came across what was known back then
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  as the Master School.
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  It was a school for needy boys.
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  She just walked out of the woods,
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  and these young boys are out there playing ball.
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  And they see this six-foot-tall Cherokee woman
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  with a dog and six chickens and a pipe in her mouth.
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  They just was mesmerized by her.
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  And then when she started telling them Cherokee stories,
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  they put her up in one of the cabins.
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  And that's where she lived the rest of her life.
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  She lived six more years until she died.
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  Neil, you mentioned a cave a minute ago.
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  And didn't her family hide out in a cave
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  when they were trying to round up all of the Indians?
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  The cave you talk about in the book,
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  it was Saltpeter Cave.
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  Did you actually track that down?
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  Yes, it's still there.
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  If you go off the side of the mountain, Sand Mountain,
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  at Buck's Pocket, where she lived with her family
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  in a little hut, down at the bottom,
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  right before the river.
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  Now, the river there, the Tennessee River,
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  is wider now because in 1940, the TVA,
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  the Tennessee Valley Authority, flooded that
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  to put in the dam for the electricity.
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  But the cave is still there.
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  Saltpeter is actually found in every cave in the South.
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  Saltpeter is what they used to make gunpowder.
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  In the Civil War, the North had learned
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  how to make it out of chemicals.
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  In the South, we were still using saltpeter.
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  Saltpeter is what happens when bat guano
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  mixes with the limestone sediments
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  that you find in any cave in the South.
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  And over time, it forms an explosive thing
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  called saltpeter.
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  But the name of that cave, and the cave is still there,
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  it's called Saltpeter Cave.
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  You know, when you think about Granny Dollar
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  and the places she lived, you could almost
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  track her route today.
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  Oh, yes.
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  Through Northeast Alabama, Northwest Georgia.
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  And you say she lived out her final years.
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  This school was actually near a famous state park,
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  wasn't it?
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  Yes, right before you entered DeSoto State Park, yes.
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  Right on the edge of Little River Canyon,
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  that's where the school was.
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  What's the takeaway to your thinking
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  of Granny Dollar's story?
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  Well, the thing that Granny Dollar tried to teach,
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  and when she came to the school,
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  the guy who had started the school was worried
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  that here's another mouth to feed.
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  But Granny Dollar was pretty self-sufficient.
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  She taught them all how to plant.
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  She had all the Native American,
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  the Cherokee folk medicines.
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  And she taught all the kids.
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  And pretty soon, she's actually helping the school.
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  So the thing that she preached herself
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  was that the white man wear shoes on his feet
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  so that he can't feel God's green earth,
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  then he works for so long and then retires
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  and he doesn't go to nature.
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  Her whole point was that you have to be one with nature.
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  If you're gonna be a Cherokee,
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  if you're gonna be a human being at all,
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  and she thinks that's a lot of the ills in the world
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  are caused by people staying out of touch with nature.
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  That may be a lesson for today.
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  Yes.
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  Well, Neil, I want to thank you
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  for sharing the story of a remarkable Cherokee woman.
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  Oh, you're very welcome.
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  Joining us from Fort Payne, Alabama was Neil Wooten,
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  author of the book, Granny Dollar.
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  At the time when we recorded this in fall of 2024,
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  Neil served in many capacities,
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  contributor to the Huffington Post,
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  columnist for the Mountain Valley News
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  and managing editor of Mirror Publishing
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  and curator of the Fort Payne Depot Museum.
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  Thanks for joining us for the Storyline Book Series
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  from In Focus.
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  Our program is a podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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  I'm Carolyn Hutcheson
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  and this is listener supported Troy Public Radio.