Shall We Gather at Three Rivers?

“Due to limited distribution and sales, we discontinued [Three Rivers] effective in early March of 2009. We understand that there are loyal consumers of this brand, and we are very sorry to disappoint those folks,” Maribeth Badertscher, director of corporate communications for the J.M. Smucker Co., said in a phone interview.

— Knoxville Sentinel, May 21, 2009

I lived in Tennessee when they stopped making Three Rivers Cornmeal Mix. I called Mom. She bought up what she could and put it in the freezer. We called my uncle, whom we barely talked to in those days due to politics coming between him and Mom. He went out to buy up what they had down in the Piedmont.

“I’m glad Mama isn’t here to see this,” Mom said.

I learned to make cornbread by watching my granny — my mother’s mother. And it was always that brown and yellow Three Rivers bag on the counter. Measure out two cups. Add an egg in with a fork while you heat oil in your skillet. Add buttermilk until it’s thin and pour it in the pan. The cornbread pan—a size five iron skillet- goes into the hot oven. 400 degrees. After it bakes, the cornbread pops right out. Brown and crispy on the outside. Moist on the inside.

I grew up next to Granny and Pa, and had cornbread at least three times a week until I left home for college. I tried cornbread wherever I went, but it was always sweet or had corn in it or was too soft. It wasn’t my granny’s cornbread. It wasn’t Three Rivers.

When I went to tell Granny that I was getting married, she gave me her cornbread pan. This was the iron skillet in which Granny made nothing but cornbread. She got it from her mother-in-law, who only ever made cornbread in it. I knew what it meant when she gave me the cornbread pan.

I’d stock up on Three Rivers on visits home. I perfected Granny’s method, doing more as she began doing less. One Thanksgiving, I was home from Boston, and Granny took me aside to tell me that I’d better make the cornbread for the dressing. 

“It’s better than your mama’s,” she said. It was a little mean, but I soaked up the rare compliment and spent the afternoon down at Granny’s baking cornbread, laying it out to cool, and then crumbling it to dry out overnight. It was some version of a quiet crowning, and I wore it with pride.

When they stopped making Three Rivers Cornmeal Mix in 2009, my crown lost its jewels. I tried White Lily. I tried Martha White. I tried fancy-ass stone-ground cornmeal mixed with flour and baking soda. Nothing worked.

I persevered, of course. It’s not like I stopped making cornbread. I just stopped making my granny’s cornbread. I stopped making good cornbread. 

In 2009, as Three Rivers ceased production, news was folded into stories about the closure of Knoxville’s White Lily factory, which had been operating for 125 years. The Union News wrote, in a piece called “Knoxville Brand Gets Run Into the Ground,” that “the company had lost a ‘co-packing agreement’ with J.M. Smucker Co., which bought the White Lily name in 2006.” Google Three Rivers and you’ll find yourself in chat rooms a decade old. Homesteading Today. Union News. Chowhound. Posts from 2009 show gun-hoarding preppers, somebody’s granny, and backyard-chicken hippies coming together over cornmeal.

In 2009, everyone could agree that the end of Three Rivers was the end of great cornmeal.

~~~

Ten years later, it’s my first Thanksgiving without Mom, who died in the spring. It is my first time making dressing. I seek the quiet and solitude of the early morning kitchen where I make cake after cake as the snow falls down. I check the weather back home in North Carolina and know that the reported 45 feels cold there. We’re bracing for 8 degrees on Thanksgiving in Maine, where I live now. I stream WNCW, my hometown radio station, knowing that my brother in Illinois is doing exactly what I’m doing. Crumbling cornbread, drinking coffee, and thinking of our Pa as the radio plays Little Jimmy Dickens.

Traditions connect us. I know without asking that my friend in Massachusetts will be cooking and drinking and streaming “The Last Waltz” the night before Thanksgiving. So will my friend in Afghanistan, who will text me when Levon sings “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” One day, my kids will make their kids listen to “Alice’s Restaurant” and remember me singing along while I press dressing into the pan. When we feel far apart from one another — whether the distance is physical, political, or emotional — traditions connect us to one another, and to generations before.

~~~

The grocery store of my youth has an aisle labeled Moonpies and one that says RC Cola. And now, it also has organic produce, an entire vegetarian frozen section, and an enormous beer selection. A lot has changed about that Ingles, but I can count on still seeing someone from high school whenever I return. We are back for Christmas, trying to fill Mom’s empty house with laughter and music, cocktails and toasts. It’s a big family trip to the store to stock up, and I’m wandering through the aisles when I see it. The yellow and brown bag. I leave the buggy in the aisle and run toward the bag of Three Rivers.

It has been 10 years since Three Rivers stopped production. How can this be possible?

My husband finds me in front of the cornmeal section, holding the Three Rivers bag with tears in my eyes.

An older lady passes the scene and says, “Now you don’t want to start to crying at the grocery store.”

I buy two bags. I don’t understand what sort of gap in time has happened. It’s like I turned the corner and bumped into my long-dead great aunt or saw our burned middle school standing like it used to.

A few weeks later, still baffled, I do what I should have done initially. I Google it. A search for Three Rivers leads me to the Facebook page called “Three Rivers Cornmeal—It’s Back!” I request to be added to the group (with over 1,000 members) and scroll through the posts — overwhelmingly celebratory pictures from New Year’s Day meals of cornbread, black-eyed peas and collard greens.

“Got mine the Sunday before Christmas. Had to drive 100 miles both ways. Worth it, though!” “Starting the new year off right, collards, black-eyed peas, deer tenderloin and of course cornbread. Three Rivers cornbread.”

Recipes, helpful answers to questions about skillets and heat, and praise for all the photos that members post of their cornmeal creations. Three Rivers has been bought by another company, I learn, and they are gradually rolling out at Ingles and Food City in North Carolina and Tennessee. Members offer to ship to those furthest away. Pictures of grocery stores alert others when it’s made it to a new store.

“I found mine yesterday at Kroger’s in Seymour, Tennessee. I could not be happier!!!! Love my Three Rivers!”

“Available at Canton, Ga., at Ingle’s! My grandmother bought me a 2 pound bag. It’s funny that she found it first, I was looking for it to surprise her and my momma with bags at Christmas. I can’t wait to make cornbread!”

For all the ways that Facebook divides us, I’ve also found it can bring people together. That uncle of mine, who we haven’t seen in years, and who sometimes yells in comments on a political post from my brother or me — we’re both in the Three Rivers Cornbread group. I can text him and my aunt a picture of cornbread and mustard greens, and Trump’s wall falls away for a minute.

Another page called “Remember Waynesville When” brings together unlikely folks who have connections to Waynesville. It was there that I met my cousin.

I’m not from a huge family. My Pa had one sister and three brothers. When I was young, I spent a lot of time with that side of the family. Everyone still lived in Waynesville. My Pa’s sister, Aunt Betsy, ran a junkyard, and it was an unlikely hearth for all of the kin. An easy place to stop by when you were out “loafing,” as my Pa called it. Arrive unannounced, sit around the kerosene heater at the shop, and you’d be likely to spend time with family.

After Pa died, my Granny didn’t keep up with Pa’s family much. The wives had mostly passed away, and we got to where we didn’t see any of the Milners much. I would ask Mom why, and I don’t think she was keeping a reason from me. I think there wasn’t a good reason. It just sort of happened. So when I saw someone post on “Remember Waynesville When” that their Papaw was a welder, I wrote in the comments: “That’s my great uncle!” We exchanged messages, and he remembered my Granny and Pa. Uncle George was always his favorite, he wrote of my Pa.

I sat in Maine, feeling like I’d dreamt up these days at the junkyard, these welding uncles and tobacco-chewing aunts, and now here was this stranger who knew the same stories. Who’d been brought up the same way. I added him as a friend on Facebook. Scrolling through his posts, I learned that he is a proud father, that he adores his wife, that he is church-going, that he hunts and fishes, that he supports the NRA and is against Planned Parenthood. Like a lot of people where I’m from. But really different than me now. What did he see on my Facebook page? Pictures of my kids and my husband. Videos of modern dance. Petitions against Betsy DeVos. Love letters to the mountains I miss.

A snowflake and a redneck. A liberal and a conservative. A Unitarian and a Christian.

Sure. But here’s what happened next. While we kept sharing on Facebook mostly about family with an occasional political perspective that some friend posted to our walls, we started checking in on each other. It sounded like his son had been sick, so I wrote and told him I was thinking of him. When I posted pictures of Mom after she died, he wrote sympathetically and we talked more about family we shared. Family that was gone, folks who shaped us both.

This cousin posted about how he missed Three Rivers Cornmeal, and I immediately wrote to tell him the good news. Later on, I saw a notification that he’d tagged me in a post. 

“With all the chaos around our house the last 2 weeks, we’re just now getting to our traditional Southern New Years meal. Big thanks to my cousin Meredith for letting me know 3 Rivers Cornmeal is available again, it’s like being a kid again. Hoping for a great year moving forward… ”

Every week or so, I look in on the “Three Rivers Cornbread—It’s Back!” page and see pictures of iron skillets and soup beans and read tales of someone’s giddy 87-year-old mother who is so glad it’s back. Strangers offer to drive Three Rivers to one another — Tennessee to Ohio with a drop off at the Cracker Barrel parking lot. Grounded in the past, with a reverence for grandparents and cast iron and slow meals and garden plots, these posts must be the most pure and good thing on the internet. On days when the world reminds me of all the ways that it is breaking, I take solace in someone’s picture of their upside-down cornbread, steaming on a plate, showing off the same crispy outside that Granny taught me how to make.

We remember our ancestors by the stories that they told, or the ones we remember to tell on them. I keep memories of Mom, Uncle Steve, Granny and Pa alive in these ways. But I also cook the food that they ate, and feel a connection that doesn’t need words. I let my boys taste what my Pa made for me, crumbling cornbread into a glass of buttermilk or pouring the pot likker over an opened piece of cornbread.

My newfound cousin just harvested a huge early load of morels and posted pictures. I wrote to him and we talked about spring tonic and creasy greens, and I remembered where Mom always found morels at her house. Right when the trillium bloom. This knowledge connects me to a place far away and reminds me of the roots that I still have there. And this remembrance, this connection, is taking place because of Facebook.

My cousin and I have plans to spend time together this summer when I’m back in North Carolina. We will bring out photo albums. We will trade stories. And even though I’m a vegetarian, and he’s a big hunter, I bet we can find a way to enjoy some Three Rivers cornbread together.

I wonder what his iron skillet looks like.

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