As told by John Rice Irwin:

Dollie Hoskins Turnbill lived at the foot of the great Cumberland Mountains some three miles from Oliver Springs, Tennessee and only a mile or so from the ancestral Hoskins homeplace in Hoskins Hollow. 

In a visit with Dollie in November of 1980, I chanced upon a tiny, tattered basket hanging on a nail near the open door of her wood shed.  I asked Dollie about it and this exuberant, feisty, and wonderfully warm and friendly lady of 86 told me about her little basket.  I am glad that she did, because she died a few days later. 

“Oh, that little ole basket!  Well, it was a present to me way back when I’s jest a girl.

“I took sick and liked to have died.  I was in the bed for 12 months [apparently of polio].  Then I got to where I could crawl for a few months, and then I got to where I could go a little on crutches.  And then finally I got to where I could go a little on crutches.  And then finally I got to where I could hobble around on a cane,” she laughed.

“Well, it was during that bad sick spell that a neighbor girl, Rhoda Ward, made the little basket and give it to me as sort of a present.  She made big baskets, of course, but she made this little un especially for me.

“I used it all the time to gather eggs in mostly.  But I’m so crippled up that I can’t get around and it’s been a’hanging out there in that ole shed for the past few years—ruining, I guess.”

She agreed to sell me the basket “before it gets knocked down and trampled up” so that it might be preserved in the Museum.  And although its economic value is not great, it has very special meaning to me, having learned of its history.  It is made entirely of white oak, and has been patched and mended over the years.