The Pucketts seem to have come to the Carroll County area in the early 1800's. Lizzie Ben was born during the Civil War, June 13, 1863. She was called "Lizzie Ben" to distinguish her from her dearest friend Lizzie Bowman. She remained active and alert all her 91 years. She had fallen many times and broken many bones. Only once, did she let a doctor set a bone for her. She set them herself and held them in place while they healed, meanwhile keeping up her houselhold and farm chores.

It was an experience to hear her soft, mild voice speaking Elizabethan English not hillybilly. "I never knowed nothing but hard work, and saving up to make ends meet. My Pa was a cooper. He made things for people: barrels, churns, and things like that. He made me a little bitsy churn and by the time I could stand up to it, I was doing the churning for the whole family. Ma would take up the butter, 'gin she come home from work."

"One day Ma went to Sam Bolt's store way over to Laurel Fork and left me home to keep water in the soup beans and keep them biling 'ginst dinner time. They growed a little white soup bean then, that really made the best kind of soup - jes' as thick and good. A man came to rive shingles for the house. With Ma gone, I didn't know what to do - I warn't yet nine years old. Well, I flew in and got 'inner, made corn bread like I'd seen Ma do it, fixed the beans and a few little things. Ma was powerful surprised to find dinner cooked; already et; with the dishes rid up, for it was a good piece to walk and tote the eggs to the store and vittles back."

"I have hired out all my life and worked beside the men in the fields. The highest wages I ever got was twenty five cents a day. I feel proud when I remember that all who hired me said I was a 'peart move', I could do more work than any man, but they didn't pay as much."

"One of my childhood chores was to tote the babies to the field at nursing time. It seemed that there was always a baby to carry."

She told many interesting stories about the Civil War, which sound just like reading a book about the "War".

In March, 1954, Aunt Lizzie contracted pneumonia and died. She had prepared for death many years ago, and told a neighbor just what to do.

Gazing on Aunt Lizzie as she lay in death made one feel as though she had stepped back into another century, when she was a young, beautiful bride, dressed in her beautiful white wedding outfit, placed on a sheet covered barn door, exactly the way she specified - one hand by her side and the other across her breast. Funeral rites were performed by her neighbors and she was laid to rest in a "store boughten coffin" beside her husband, Ben.

Lizzie Ben was truly one of the brightest pages in God's Book of Time.

(this article appears in the Carroll County Heritage, Volume I, 1842 - 1994 and was submitted by Raleigh Puckett. The article was written by Ninevah Jackson Willis from an interview while preparing for her Masters Thesis, 1953. Note Words, for the most part were not spelled in dialect in order to prevent misreading. She really wanted to "be in a book".)