Lyle Ingle
By Beverly Belcher Woody
I recently spoke with Lyle Ingle, who will be 97 years old this October. It is a pure joy to talk with Mr. Ingle. He has a fabulous memory and has great stories to tell about growing up and living in Patrick County.
Mr. Ingle’s father was originally from Greenville, Tennessee. In 1905, his parents purchased the Tyler Dollarhite farm that sits on the headwaters of Peters Creek. Mr. Ingle is very proud that the farm still remains in the Ingles’ family to this day.
Lyle Ingle was born to James Britten Ingle and Mary Jane Belcher in October of 1924. At the time of his birth, his father was 68 years old, and his mother was 45. Mr. Ingle had two older siblings, Maude Ingle Handy, who was 23 and George Lee Ingle, who was 21 when Mr. Ingle was born. I asked him if he felt like he grew up as an only child, but he said that he had a nephew that was four years older than him that was a playmate.
Mr. Ingle attended the Dobyns School when he was a boy. The school was located where Dobyns Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery is now. He recalled that several of the Hanby sisters taught there during his time at the school. Mr. Ingle said that one time he and several of the boys got into a terrible fist fight. His teacher sent the oldest boy at the school (that wasn’t in the fight) to cut the biggest switches he could find. As Mr. Ingle said, “I wasn’t sprouting wings about that time.”
Mr. Ingle grew up during the Great Depression, so things he witnessed as a child made a lifelong impact on him. He said that his father kept bees, grew apples, and made apple butter and honey to sell. He said that his parents would put the apple butter on to cook at first light and it was often dark before they finished. They would travel to Leaksville, North Carolina to the train station to sell what they had made.
Mr. Ingle said that the family ground their meal and got most of their supplies at Vipperman’s Mill and Store, which was close to the Ingles farm. He recalled that Mr. Vipperman used waterpower to generate electricity for lights in his home.
When Mr. Ingle was sixteen years old, he went to the courthouse in Stuart to get his driver’s license. The following is his account of the experience: “I had a 1934 Plymouth with suicide doors. If one of them blew open while driving down the road, you could forget closing it until you got stopped. Well, I went in the courthouse and paid the man 50 cents for my license. He went ahead and gave me the license and then made me show him that I knew the hand signals for left turn, right turn, and stop. Then we went out for the driving test. I had to make a circle, drive downtown, then uptown and parallel park. When we parked, the man told me that it was a good thing that he had already went ahead and gave me my license, because I probably would not have gotten it after he rode with me!”
Mr. Ingle was a sawmiller for years. When he started cutting timber, there was no such thing as gas powered chainsaws. He said that all the timber he cut in the beginning was done with a crosscut saw and horses to pull the logs.
In addition to sawmilling and running a store, Mr. Ingle worked at Alexander’s Food Market for sixteen years. He said that he worked in the meat department and was also the designated “chicken cooker.” I am sure that anyone who has shopped at Alexander’s in the 1970’s and 80’s, can remember the delicious rotisserie chickens.
Mr. Ingle married Brooksie Ola Bowman in the spring of 1943 when they were both 18 years old. They had two children, James and Janice. After Mr. Ingle and his wife retired from public work, they opened an antique shop in the old Watson Joyce store on Route 8, near Five Forks. The couple worked together at the antique shop until they were both 85 years old. The Ingles enjoyed more than seventy- two years of marriage before Mrs. Ingle’s passing in 2015.
Thank you, Mr. Ingle, for sharing some of your memories with me. We can learn so much from your generation, the Greatest Generation.
(Woody may be reached at rockcastlecreek1@gmail.com.)
