Her first swain was T. Carl Hamrick's brother, C. Rush Hamrick, who would not only later be Edie's uncle but would go on to own The Kendall Drug Company for whom her father T. Carl would work in his later years.
According to Edie's sisters, Margaret and Mett, their mother and their Uncle Rush were seriously courting at the time T. Carl Hamrick returned to Boiling Springs from the coalfields of West Virginia to care for his father Elijah Bly.
Legend has it -- and that is exactly what this story has become over the last century -- it was at this time that T. Carl Hamrick first noticed Marietta Holland Moore.
We're told that theirs was a whirlwind courtship culminating with their marriage at the Moore home on May 27, 1908.
Being the children of Elijah Bly Hamrick and John Franklin Moore, their wedding was a major social event with most of their neighbors in attendance as well as their extensive families.
Whatever Rush's disappointment in being supplanted by his brother in Marietta's affections, he had the last word though I doubt he meant it as such having known Rush to be a fine and self-effacing person.
While the other guests had arrived via "standard" transportation for the day, horse and buggy, Rush showed up at the wedding in a new automobile, one of the first if not the first in Cleveland County.
When Rush drove up it caused great excitement among the huddled hordes and the wedding was impinged upon when the men of the crowd became decidedly more interested in the first automobile they had seen up close than in the wedding itself.
This meeting of the 19th and 20th centuries seems a likely place to wind up our story on the family of Edith Holland Hamrick Bridgers and this book of The Shaggy Dog Chronicles.
