The Jeff Donaldson Family Story
by Don Draughon - March 2004
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Somebody has to tell their story and since they are all gone now I guess it’s me. The Jeff Donaldson family lived on an eighty-acre farm located in southeast Alabama in Covington County. County Road 40 runs right through the middle of it, and if you drove down it today you wouldn’t know anything was ever there. County Road 40 runs east west between State Road 52 and US 331 just south of Opp Alabama. The community they lived in is called Beulah and at one time had a church, a school and a country store. The school closed in 1962 and the store belonging to Curt Adams is gone now too. Beulah Baptist Church is still there and occupies the renovated schoolhouse. Across the road where the old church once stood is the cemetery where Jeff and his wife Teresa and two of their children are buried.
Jeff’s father Jefferson Davis Donaldson Sr. was the 12th of 13 children born to John and Elizabeth Louise Beard Donaldson. They lived and farmed in neighboring Coffee County in the mid 1800s. Shortly after the Civil War John was killed by confederate deserters who resented him not going to war. Jeff’s father died before he was born in 1880 and his mother Mary Ann Garrett Donaldson remarried William Green Clark on 13 December 1883 in Elba, Alabama. Jeff had one brother named John J. Donaldson who appeared in the 1880 Coffee County census, but nothing else is known about him. Jeff also had several half brothers and sisters and grew up in the Clark family. Jefferson Davis Donaldson Jr. (Jeff) married Elvira Teresa Scofield on December 31, 1899. They immediately started having children and continued for the next 20 years until there were four boys and four girls. My mother, Valeria was next to the youngest, she was born December 8, 1916. She outlived all of them and their spouses and passed away on March 25, 2003 at age 86.
 Teresa’s parents Elbert and Mary Scofield gave her the eighty-acre farm in 1901. They built a log cabin from timber cut right there at the farm. Over the years they added more rooms to the side and back and a porch that went around the front and the other side. A large tin roof covered the entire structure. The original one room log structure was in the center and served as the living room and master bedroom combined. There was a fireplace in this room and one in the opposite bedroom that shared the same chimney. A kitchen was built separate from the main house with a walkway in between. That was the custom in those days, in case it caught on fire. Eventually a kitchen was built into the house and the old kitchen was moved down the road and made into a tenant house. Another tenant house was built further down the road on the other side of the creek. There were several out buildings added over the years including a smoke house, cannery, water tower, well, chicken coop, and of course an out house. Directly across the road were two other large buildings, a barn and a corncrib.
 The farm was almost completely self-sufficient. In addition to their cash crops, they had a vegetable garden, cows, hogs, chickens and a variety of fruit trees. The men worked the fields and the women took care of the house including making a lot of their own clothes. Life was hard for them, but they where better off than most people because this was a period of war, depression and more war. They didn’t even have electricity until sometime in the 1940s. Eventually the children grew up, married and moved away. Marietta was the first to leave home. She married Quincy Moore and after living in Birmingham for a while, they settled in Jacksonville, Florida. They had one daughter, Betty who lived in Tallahassee. John Bamble Donaldson married Edith Baker and lived in Defuniak Springs, Florida. John was the Chief of Police in Defuniak for 27 years. They had two children, John Harold and Linda. Glairvee (Donnie) Donaldson served in the Navy before WWII and was stationed in Key West. There he met and married Leona L. Sands a native of Key West. After the Navy Donnie convinced his brother James Coston (Dick) and his sister Katrine to move down to the Keys as well. They all lived near each other in the upper keys near the towns of Key Largo and Tavernier. Donnie later moved to Homestead, Florida where he lived in the middle of his ten acre avocado grove. Donnie was quite good at raising avocados and was sought out by the other farmers to help them with their trees. Donnie and Leona had three children; Glairvee Lee, Lavonne, and Jack Wayne. James Coston (Dick) Donaldson married a woman named Barbara in about 1932. She fell in love with someone else while he was overseas during WWII and when he returned they divorced. In about 1946 Dick married Ila Maria and they lived the rest of their lives on the Keys. Dick had no children. Katrine (Katy) Donaldson followed her brother Donnie to the Keys and married Ralph Bascum Gillespie in 1947. They had one daughter Kathy Teresa in 1950. She married John Flair and is living with her family in Nashville, Tennessee. J. D. Donaldson married Murtie Lee Sansom and they lived in Florala, Alabama. They had two children, Paul and Shirley Ann. JD had major heart problems and suffered two major heart attacks when he was just 36 years old. He also had Bergers disease (severe blood clotting) and lost a leg to the disease. He died in 1957 at age 49 and is buried near his parents, Jeff and Teresa in the Beulah Cemetery. Valeria Maxine Donaldson married Obie Leo Draughon from Samson Alabama in 1942. They had three sons, Douglas Leo, Jerry Michael and Donald Max (me). Shortly after they married, Leo joined the Navy and went to the South Pacific to serve in the Seabees during WWII. During this time their first son Douglas was born and Valeria moved back to the farm to stay until Leo returned from the war. Leo was a brick mason as were his father and brothers. They traveled around a lot laying brick in different cities in the southeast eventually settling in Tallahassee, Florida. Agnus Ukal Donaldson was mentally disabled and had the mind of a twelve year old. After her mother Teresa died in 1955 and all of her brothers and sisters had left home, it was just her and her father Jeff left on the farm. Jeff was too old to take care of her, so she was placed in an institution in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she remained until her death in 1975. Ukal is buried in the Beulah cemetery next to her mother and father. In 1959 Jeff fell ill and a family meeting was held in which it was decided that if Valeria (my mother) moved back to the farm and took care of him, she could have the farm. So my family moved to Beulah and took care of Big Papa (Jeff) until his death in 1960. We stayed on at the farm for another year or so and then moved back to Tallahassee. The farm was vacant after that except for a couple of weeks every summer when mom would go get Ukal and the other brothers and sisters would come up from the Keys and elsewhere to visit on the farm. Over the years the structures on the farm deteriorated and one by one were torn down. The farmhouse was the last to go after it was hit by a small tornado in the late 70s. Still my brother and I would take mom up to the farm every fall and we would picnic under the pecan trees where the house once stood. Those two years spent in Beulah during my early teens gave me an insight into what it must have been like for my mother and her brothers and sisters growing up on the farm. I picked some of the last cotton that was picked by hand. It paid four cents a pound and to be considered a man you had to pick fifty pounds in the morning and fifty pounds in the afternoon. That was four dollars a day! I attended the last classes taught at the Beulah school. They taught the first through the eighth grade in four rooms, two grades to a room. Each room had a large potbelly stove that burned coal, which was in a pile in the schoolyard. Also in the schoolyard was a large outhouse. I felt like I had stepped back in time fifty years. But as a teenager you adapt quickly to situations and looking back it wasn’t all that bad. Later in life though, I kept a picture of the old farmhouse on my office wall and when things at work got stressful, all I had to do was look at that picture to get some perspective. The Jeff Donaldson family of Covington County should be remembered as one of the last true pioneer families. The children of Jeff and Teresa Donaldson all left the farm looking for a better life, and found it. But life improved for everyone after WWII, even for those that remained behind. To live like they did before the war though, without electricity and indoor plumbing would be subject matter for a TV reality-survival show today. But yet they survived it and flourished!
Donaldson Graves in the Beulah Cemetery
Location of the Farm This page is a work in progress, please visit again for more. So if you have some history of the Donaldson Family you want to share please email it to me.
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