Back to Table of Contents|email the author royjNOSPAM@webster.edu (remove the NOSPAM)

Chapter II – Farm Life

1.      Making a living a.       Dairy b.      Beekeeping c.       Chickens and eggs d.      Walnuts e.       Grain Harvest and Threshing 2.      Water: Two wells and a spring 3.      Daily Life ·        Bathing and Sanitation ·        Heating and cooking

·        Laundry ·        Hog Butchering 4.      Nature and our surroundings 5.      Nights and Night Sounds 6.      Our First Radio 7.      Farm buildings ·        The barn ·        The two houses ·        Farm animals

 

It is hard for people today to visualize life on a farm such as ours, with no electricity, running water, telephone, or (at first) not even a radio. In hard times, this can actually be an advantage—no bills to pay, and since my father owned the farm outright, no mortgage payments. We did not live in fear of bankruptcy, as many farmers of that era did. We produced most of our own food and my mother made most of our clothing. We cut our own wood for heating and cooking, so had no fuel bills. We weren’t really poor, we just didn’t have money. We were self sufficient. 

Making a living

Dairy

 

“Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket” was a favorite saying of my father, and he had always had a number of projects for bringing in money. The main one was always the dairy operation. He milked several cows by hand (joined by Billy and me at about age 11 or 12), separated the cream with a cream separator, and sold the cream to the Cudahy Creamery in Neosho. A cream separator is a hand cranked device about four feet tall, with a large stainless steel bowl about 18” in diameter at the top. The bowl is actually a funnel with an open bottom. Fresh milk is poured into the bowl and it funnels into a centrifuge turned by the crank. There are two spouts coming out at different angles, with platforms under each spout for containers to catch the liquids as they emerge. Milk being heavier than cream, the skim milk exits first, from the top spout, and the cream remains and comes out the bottom spout.

 

Dad took the cream into Neosho himself in the early years, except for what we needed to churn into butter. Our churn was quite “modern”; we didn’t have one of the old fashioned plunger types and I never did see one except in museums. We had a “Dazey” churn, which had a squarish glass jug about a gallon in size with a large threaded top. The heavy screw-on lid had an apparatus on it with gears and a hand crank, and a shaft with a paddle that extended down into the churn. We put the cream into the churn and turned the crank, which turned the paddle, until the butter formed. Then we would put the butter into a half gallon metal pail (actually an empty Karo (brand) syrup container) and hang it on a long cord down into the dug well, until the pail was almost but not quite submerged. This was our “refrigerator.” We would drink the delicious buttermilk.

 

There is no better taste than that of freshly churned butter. However, even with our “refrigeration”, the unpastuerized butter would begin to taste slightly rancid in a few days. We had to eat it anyway.

 

 Later, Dad switched to selling whole milk to the Pet Milk company in Neosho, where it was made into condensed milk. We would milk the cows, dump the milk through a strainer into ten gallon milk cans, then wheel the cans on a cart to the dug well, put them into containers made from large metal oil barrels cut in half by a torch, and draw and pour water over them to cool them. We usually had about four ten gallon cans of milk, which required two of the half-barrels. Each day, the milk truck would come and take the cans to Neosho to the milk plant, where they would test the butterfat content and record the amount, and at intervals (monthly? I don’t remember) we would get a milk check in the mail. The half-barrels had to be emptied at the end of the day to be ready for the next day.

Beekeeping

Another means Dad used to bring in money was beekeeping.  Unlike soap making and hog butchering, beekeeping is still widely practiced (there are even hives on balconies of Manhattan apartments), and detailed information on how it is done is widely available, so a brief summary will suffice. If you want more, it is easily available on the Internet.

Dad had from fifteen to eighteen “stands” of bees clustered in  a corner of our farmstead. Each box-like hive had a small slit at the bottom for bees to enter and exit. Dad bought prepared wax foundations for the bees to build on; otherwise they will build honey comb on the walls or wherever they can, making an unorganized mess. The foundation material is a thin sheet of beeswax with hexagonal cells already started, contained in frames approximately six by eighteen inches. The bees will build the wax cells out from that foundation and fill them with honey.  All that is necessary to use the honey is to lift the frames out and cut the honey from the frames. To remove the honey from the honeycomb, a centrifuge can be used, but Dad just sold the honey in the comb and we used it that way at home.  I liked it that way, and would just eat it, chewing the sweet honey from the comb then chewing the comb for awhile like chewing gum.

Each hive has one queen, several drones (males) who are completely useless except to fertilize the queen’s eggs, and thousands of sexless worker bees. When a hive becomes overpopulated, a second queen will come forth and leave the hive, and a large number of bees will follow her to form a new colony. They form a swarm in the air, move out en masse, and settle on a tree limb or other handy object. Then they send out scouts to locate a likely place for their new colony, then move to that place and begin building wax honey comb and filling it honey.

The trick is to find the swarm while it is on the tree limb and move them into an empty beehive and get them to accept it as their home. We stayed on the alert for swarming hives. We wanted them to settle on limbs near the house rather than zooming off somewhere where we might not find them. Noise seems to make them settle, so when we spotted a swarm, we would all get pots, pans, pieces of metal, and bang on them. It seemed to work. If we detected a swarm in time, they would usually settle on a tree limb near the house.

Dad would then get into his bee gear. This consisted of a bee hat with a mesh enclosure around his face and a long sleeved jumper over his overalls, and sometimes gloves (although they are hard to work in) so that no part of his body was exposed to be stung. Swarming bees are not usually aggressive unless they feel threatened, but you can never tell when that will occur as you try to coax them into the hive.

He would fill his hand-held bellows smoker with old rags and get them started smoldering. Bees don’t like smoke and, if used gently, it can coax them to move in a desired direction. (If over-used, they may become angry or excited and fly into the air.) He would get a new hive filled with foundation filled frames, take the top off, plug the entry slot so the bees could not exit through it, and place it (as far as possible ) under the limb where the bees had settled.

A swarm of bees on a limb is usually the size of a football or larger, and the mass of the bees is very liquid-like, flowing like golden honey. If the limb was a high one, Dad would cut it and use a rope to lower it onto the hive. There are of course a few bees flying around, but if you get the queen into the hive they will eventually come to her. The bees then will usually crawl down into the hive onto the foundation wax. Dad used the smoker and his hands to gently coax them to do so.

As we grew older, we would help with the bees. Bees can smell fear and are more apt to sting if you are afraid. Billy was afraid to work with swarms, but I was not. I had no bee gear, but I would work with Dad hiving the swarm. When bees start to get excited, the pitch of their buzzing wings goes higher, and you can hear it. Sometimes that would happen and Dad would say “They’re getting mad, son, you had better leave”, and I would. He would finish hiving the swarm. I was stung only a very few times.

When the bees were in the hive (except perhaps for a few stragglers, who would probably follow and join later), Dad would put the top on, carry the hive to its permanent location, and replace the plug in the entry slot with a queen trap. Queen bees are larger than workers, and a queen trap lets the workers in and out but won’t let the queen out in case she doesn’t like her new home. Workers will stick with the queen.

Dad got stung sometimes when working with bees, but as he was with everything else, he was quite stoic about it. Once he dropped a swarm and they came up under his loose jumper. He got over sixty  stings, and was in bed for two days.

In my senior year of high school, points were given at a school carnival for donating products to sell to raise money for a project. Cash could also be donated. There was a prize for the class that accumulated the most points. I brought in two pounds of honey. The points given for honey were in pints, not pounds. Our school superintendent, H. W. Smith, thought a minute then said, “Well, a pint’s a pound the world around” and awarded a pint for a pound. Actually honey is heavier than most liquids and a pound is considerably less than a pint, so this was a bonus. I figured out that money our class donated would bring more points if we bought honey with it and donated the honey instead. Our sponsor gave us permission to leave school, and drove us to our farm to buy honey from Dad. Our class won the competition. The other classes accused us of cheating, but the points held and we won. Nya, nya, nya!

Chickens and eggs

 

The chicken house was a metal roofed building on the west side of the barn. Inside, a pole arrangement made from saplings cut in the woods provided roosts for the chickens, as they are birds and do their sleeping perched on a rounded object like a tree limb. Eggs were gathered twice a day and taken to market each Saturday.

 

Of course we also ate them ourselves, and the chickens provided us with meals as well. On a farm, the first step in having a chicken dinner was catch the chicken. The next part is not for the squeamish. The chicken must be first beheaded, and the most efficient way is to place a stick over the neck and just pull the head off. Then the disembodied chicken jumps and flops around for awhile before quieting down. The chicken must then be scalded and dressed, by removing the feathers and cutting out and discarding the undesired parts. As a child, I could never understand why removing the feathers was called “dressing”. It seemed more like undressing to me.

 

Chickens were sometimes used as money. Sometimes peddlers found our off-the-beaten-track farm. One of them was a seller of Rawleigh products—ointments, vanilla, all sorts of condiments, which my parents liked. Quite often, they paid for all or part of their purchases with a chicken.

Walnuts

The abundant black walnut trees on our farm provided another source of income. The walnuts had to be gathered then the green outer hull removed, after which  the walnuts were dried in the sun and taken to market in Neosho. When it came to income producing activities, keeping a nice home was secondary, and one of my earliest memories in the “old house” (before the fire) is of walnuts in piles on the floor in the combined living room-bedroom on chilly late fall days. My father and mother pounded the green hulls off and then took the walnuts outside and spread them out to dry. The only spanking I can ever remember came when Billy and I began playing and scattered the pile of walnuts.

As we grew up, the walnuts became a project for Billy and me, and a source of income that we could use for whatever we wanted. We found that the best way to hull the green walnuts was to place them in the drive where the milk truck on its daily run would crush the outer hull. The inner hull of course is much harder and the truck did not crack them. Then we would pick up the walnuts and spread them to dry before taking them to market. The green sap in the hulls is a potent dye and if no gloves were used, they would stain our hands a brownish-green color which could not be washed off and required weeks to wear off. At school, you could often tell the farmers from the “townies” by the dye on their hands, and sometimes the “townies” poked a bit of fun at us. I think by the time we were in high school, we became more careful and found ways to pick up the walnuts without dying our hands.

Grain Harvest and Threshing

 

Our hill area was one of the last in our vicinity to harvest and thresh grain in two separate operations, instead of using the newer “combines” (combination harvester-threshers) used on the prairie not too far away. The first stage of this operation, in late June or July when the wheat or oats had ripened, Dad would get the binder out of the shed and hitch the horses to it (using a tractor would require two persons, one to drive the tractor).  The details of the construction of such an implement has slipped in my memory over the years, so I consulted the Internet and found the following:

Grain Binder

After the grain has reached maturity in the late summer, it needs to be harvested so that it can be sold by the farmer. There are several implements that can be used to harvest grain, one of which is a grain binder. Typically, grain binders were most common in the humid Midwest where the grain dried unevenly, and it was necessary to have additional drying before it was threshed. Early grain binders were all ground-driven and pulled by a team of horses around the field. As the horses pulled the grain binder forward, the driving wheel was rotated, which powered the sickle and reel of the grain binder. As the reel rotated, it bent the grain stalks inward towards the sickle, and the sickle cut the grain stalks off a few inches above the ground. A cloth canvas then conveyed the grain to a gear driven knotter which tied several stalks together into a small bundle. After the grain bundle was tied, it slid onto the bundle carrier, and was dropped onto the field. Following close behind, field workers picked up the tied grain bundles and placed several of them together to form a small tipi, which was called a "shock." The grain bundles were placed in shocks so that the unripened grain would have a chance to dry, and so that they would easily shed water if they were rained on[1].

This government source on grain  binders stated that they were used on the Great Plains from the 1880s to the 1920s. We were still using them in the 1950s.

 

What I remember most is that Billy and I had the job of following the binder and shocking the grain. The bundles were bound with “binder twine”, a heavy twine that found many uses around a farm other than binding grain. We would pick up the bundles by the twine and stand them on end, leaning inward, until we had a shock about 3 feet in diameter built. (Each bundle was eight or ten inches in diameter.) Then we would take three or four bundles, spread the tops and bottoms by hand, and put them on top of the shock as a roof. The shocks would be fairly impervious to rain until time came to thresh them. This was one of the most hated jobs on the farm for me, as spreading the bundles would rub my forearms raw, even if I wore a long sleeved shirt, and the chaff would stick to my sweaty body and itch. It was one of the reasons I resolved never to be a farmer.

 

Next came the threshing phase. Someone who owned a threshing machine would move through the area threshing each farmer’s grain in turn, and the farmers would help one another, as it was a labor-intensive operation. Additional help would be hired as well.

 

Threshing machines were huge metal dinosaurs that had evolved from the smaller model invented by a Scottish millwright in 1786. The early machines were powered by horses on a treadmill, then by steam engines, then by 1900 on the Great Plains, huge steam tractors like locomotives were used. We used my father’s Model B John Deere tractor, purchased after World War II. The threshing machine separated the grain from the chaff and straw, dumped the grain into bags or a waiting wagon, and blew the straw and chaff onto a straw pile that became a small mountain. The machine had an insatiable appetite and the person who fed the bundles into the machine had to keep up a steady pace all day long. My father usually did that job. It was hard and dusty work, and my father always took the hard jobs. I would hear him say, “stay out of that dust, it isn’t good for you.” Then I would see him go right into it to pick up some fallen bundles or check on equipment. He protected us but not himself.

 

Keeping the thresher supplied with bundles of grain required at least two wagons, used in tandem, one being loaded in the field while the other was being unloaded at the thresher. Loading a wagon was an art, especially on our land where the wagon might have to cross Dry Branch or several ditches before reaching the thresher. The edges of the load had to be kept straight, with bundles arranged butt outward, and tied in at the inner ends by other bundles laid crossways and tamped well by walking on them. Then the whole load had to be ‘topped out” with bundles in the middle to hold the lower ones in place.  Loading was my job, and I was a good loader. My wagons were loaded higher than any others, and I never had one to shift or lose part of the load crossing a ditch. Billy usually drove the tractor; he was an excellent tractor driver.

 

One of my cousins usually helped pitch the bundles onto the wagon, and he enjoyed pitching them hard and fast and hitting me with them, trying to get ahead of my loading if he could.  He never did, and I got even. As the load got really tall, he had trouble getting the bundles all the way on top and would sometimes have to throw them two or three times.  He would say, “isn’t that enough?” “No,” I would reply, “this wagon won’t make it to the thresher if I don’t top it out.”  I worked him hard topping  out those wagons, and I don’t think he ever realized that I was just getting even.  I didn’t need all of those extra bundles.

 

Despite the hard work, I actually enjoyed the threshing season because of the camaraderie of the threshing crew, and the food. Several women, including some of my aunts who were marvelous cooks, would come to help my mother, and the table literally groaned with a feast fit for a king, necessary to feed a hungry threshing crew. The threshers would come in at noon, wash their hands and faces outside in pans of water that we would provide, and dig in. “Enough food to feed a threshing crew” was an expression commonly used to indicate sumptuous amounts.

 

One summer I especially remember was in 1954, the year of the record heat wave.  The weather man reported temperatures of 113, but our thermometers said 116. My father had to hire two crews that summer, one crew resting and cooling while the other crew loaded wagons. Several of the crew members were older men, who said their legs would not hold up to loading the wagons, so I loaded for both crews and did not take a rest. My skinny frame, about 130 pounds at six feet tall, seemed to be ideal for hot weather, and I could always take a lot of heat, but in that temperature, I won’t say it was fun. I was the only loader. As far as I know, I am the youngest person anywhere in our area to know how to load a bundle wagon. After that, the combines took over.

 

Water: Two wells and a spring

 

The farm buildings were on a small hill overlooking Dry Branch Valley. For water we had two wells, a “dug well” and a “drilled well”. The dug well was excavated by some earlier resident, and it was about seven feet in diameter, reaching down to the bedrock about fifteen feet below ground level. The sides were shored up with native stone from the area, and ferns grew between the stones above the water level. They were beautiful, and it was fun to lean into the coolness of the well and look at them. The well was at first topped by a wooden platform, later replaced by concrete. The opening was a square, perhaps three feet on a side, walled in to a level of about three feet high. Above that was a frame with the well wheel, and an oaken bucket (later metal) that we lowered into the well on a rope to draw up water. The well wheel usually squeaked, and sometimes a mocking bird would add the squeak to its repertoire. We would wonder who was drawing water from the well and find it was just the bird. This well was near the barn lot and was used only for livestock and to cool milk, but the water was sweet and cool and good to drink and once in awhile we would drink from it instead of walking to the house or the other well.

 

The well filled with about 8 feet of water when the weather was normal, but when it was dry, the water level would decline to about two feet and become muddy. At these times, Dad would usually decide to clean out the well, as sediment accumulated over time at the bottom. He would descend into the well on a rope and dip up the muck in the well bucket, and it would be our job to draw up the bucket, pour the muck into another bucket, and carry it a distance away and dump it. He would dip out as much as he could, leaving the bedrock at the bottom as clean as possible.

 

The drilled well was dug later, I think shortly before my father moved there, and was the one used for drinking. It had a casing about eight inches in diameter that extended down about 20 feet to somewhere below the water line. Later technology called for drilled wells to be cased all the way down, but ours was not. The bucket in this well was a cylinder about six inches in diameter and about three feet in length, holding about three gallons of water. It had a ring at the top and a long rod the length of the bucket, leading to a valve on the bottom. We would draw the bucket up hand over hand on a rope, then hold it over a pail and pull the ring, and the water would flow into the pail. This was our “drinking water well.” Since we had no ice, the cool water was welcome in summer. We also made Kool Aid and lemonade with it, always when it was freshly drawn. The well was about fifty yards from the house, down a small hill, and all of the water we used in the house had to be carried in buckets from the well. When company came, Billy or I would have to go to the well to get a fresh bucket of water to offer them a cool drink. We kept the water bucket in the kitchen with a dipper in it. Everyone, including visitors, drank from that same dipper. We probably traded a lot of germs, but it didn’t seem to kill any of us.

 

This well seemed to be connected with a spring, and in rainy times, we could hear water running. We also sometimes drew up small blind fish or crayfish, always white and semi-transparent, of the type found in underground caves and springs. On a line between the well and an always-flowing spring that ran in part of dry branch, a “wet weather spring” would gush out in rainy times in one of our fields. I always suspected all three were part of the same system.

 

A third source of water for the cattle was the spring. Dad’s 120 acres lay east-west, three quarters of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. Dry Branch entered the property on the east, about midway, then flowed west, curving gradually northward to exit on the north side at the edge of the west forty. About where it began to curve, there was always a standing puddle of water, even in the driest weather. No water could be seen to flow into the puddle, but a trickle continuously flowed out and on down Dry Branch for perhaps 200 yards, where it flowed into the last puddle and vanished. It was a “seep spring”, seeping out of the underlying rock layer then seeping back in at the other end.

 

The existence of the spring meant that we rarely had to draw water for the cattle, unless for some reason we were keeping something penned up. In the very driest weather, the spring could scarcely be seen to flow at all, standing in a string of apparently motionless separate puddles, but there was always fresh water there when a cow went to get a drink, so the water was obviously seeping through the gravel and replenishing itself. In a pinch, and when there were no cows in or near the spring, humans could drink it as well, and the water was sweet and cool. The spring had obviously been used by previous inhabitants—we sometimes found arrowheads in the adjoining fields. There were small perch and minnows in the spring, and sometimes a bullfrog. In one place it was sometimes almost waist deep, and this was our “swimming hole”. Sometimes we would “noodle” fish by reaching in holes and under rocks where they hid, although they were too small for eating. Once I reached under a rock and pulled out a water moccasin’s tail. Jesus wasn’t the only person to walk on water as I got out of there, and that ended my “noodling” fish.

 

When we were pre-teens, sometimes Mom would let Billy and me and Carol Gene Alexander take potatoes, bacon, eggs, maybe an onion, some salt, and a skillet and go to the spring for a cookout. We would build a fire in the rocky stream bottom next to the spring and arrange rocks around the fire to hold up the skillet. We decided it was too complicated to cook each item separately, so we would cut up the potatoes, start the bacon and when we got enough grease, put all the other ingredients at once., stirring them well and salting them. Sometimes they burned a little, and sometimes a stick or leaf might fall in for added flavor, but to us that unusual omelet was a gourmet meal.

 

Daily Life

Bathing and Sanitation

 

In summer, the water in the milk cooling barrels would become quite warm from the sun, and after a hard day in the fields, Billy and I would take soap and a towel and use them as a bathtub before emptying them. If company came driving up, we might have to stay in the barrels until they got in the house before we emerged.

 

When the weather was too cold to use the barrels for baths, cleanliness became more difficult. We would have to carry bucket after bucket of water from the well and put it into various containers on the cook stove to heat. Then we would bring in a “number 2 wash tub”, a tub about two feet in diameter at the top and a little narrower at the bottom. Before there was a washing machine, this was the same tub used for laundry. We would pour the hot water into the tub and then some cool water until it was the right temperature, and we would take baths in the kitchen. Because it was so hard to carry and heat, we all used the same water. In later years, as I grew tall and skinny, I had to sit in the tub with my feet out on the floor and wash my body, then sit in a chair and put my feet in the tub and wash my feet. We felt one “tub bath” bath a week was quite enough; in between we would just wash as best we could with a pan of hot water, which we called a “spit bath”.

 

Today, all farms in our area have flush toilets and septic tanks, but waste disposal was handled differently in those days. Our outdoor john was a “three-holer” and actually had three holes, two larger ones on the right and left ends and a child-sized hole in the center. Usually, only one hole was used at a time by one person, but I can remember when I was very small sitting on the center hole with my father on one side and my mother on the other. Necessity forced people to be more casual about body functions in those times. Toilet paper was the Sears Roebuck catalog, made usable by crumpling a torn-out page and then straightening it out. It was then tossed through one of the holes down into the pit.

 

That pit had to be cleaned out about once a year, a messy and smelly job. The toilet was simply tipped over and the pit’s contents shoveled out. Usually, it was done right after we loaded the manure spreader with cow manure from the barn in preparation for spreading it on the fields, and we just shoveled the human manure on top. Many countries of the world use human manure as fertilizer. We were always careful not to use it on any kind of food crops, only on the corn or grain fields that would be turned into cattle feed. I am sure that after being mixed with the cow manure and then washed by rain and plowed under, it would be harmless and even organically beneficial to the plants.

 

On winter nights, it was too cold to go to the outdoor john, so we kept a chamber pot (which we called a “slop jar”) under each bed. It was a porcelain container made specifically for that purpose, with a diameter designed for the average human derrière, and was about 14 or 15 inches high. A flanged top provided for comfort, and a lid kept the smell in (except when it was being used). In the unheated bedrooms in winter, sometimes a skim of ice would freeze over the contents. Every morning, we would carry the chamber pots a goodly distance from the house, empty them, then wash them well. We are more squeamish today and turn up our nose at the thoughts of such tasks, but they were just taken for granted in those times. All our neighbors did the same thing.

Heating and cooking

 

All of our heating and cooking was done from wood cut on our own land. Every fall, while we were in school, Dad would spend several days cutting trees with an axe, trimming the limbs, and hauling the poles to the house on a wagon. Then, on a weekend, with help from the neighbors, we would saw the wood into lengths of about two feet for use in the cook stove and heating stove. We would cut and stack year’s supply at one time.

 

In the early years, my father’s wood saw was made from the chassis of an old Model T Ford automobile. He had built a frame on the chassis with a large circular saw about three feet in diameter on a spindle with a smooth wheel at the other end of the spindle. He would jack up one rear wheel of the Model T, put it in gear causing the back wheel to spin (the differential gear kept the other wheel from spinning), and use a lever to bring the wheel on the spindle into contact with the spinning Model T tire, causing the saw to spin. The poles would then be sawed into proper lengths. The saw could be dangerous; we heard of deaths and injuries, but we were careful and no one was injured at our “wood sawings”. Later, when Dad bought a tractor, the saw was run by a belt attached to a wheel on the tractor designed for that purpose.

 

The left picture shows neighbor Carl Stussy, Daddy, and Billy sawing wood. The right picture is "Preacher" Lewis, Daddy, and Billy. I believe these pictures were taken in the early 1950s.

 

 

Heating with wood is not an easy thing and is both an art and a science. A wood heating stove is a fairly simple device with sheet metal sides and a cast iron top, bottom, and front. A large door in front with semi-transparent small windows opens to put in the wood, and under that door is a smaller door hinged at the bottom for removal of ashes. The small door has a round hole in the middle and a device about the size and shape of a tea saucer that screws in and out to control the inflow of air. The other control, a damper, is in the stovepipe above the stove. An external metal device allows the internal damper in the stovepipe to be turned to a vertical position to let air through the stovepipe, and to a horizontal position to completely block it, which you never want to do. When starting a fire or encouraging a low burning fire to burn brighter; both devices need to be open, and sometimes the bottom door was opened wide instead of just screwing the saucer shaped damper out. If the fire burns too brightly or you want to slow the burning, the top damper can be closed down partially, or the bottom one, totally. Closing the top one too much brings a roomful of smoke. An article in The Ozarks Mountaineer described it well: “Building and maintaining a fire…was like trying to control a dragon by pinching his nose and twisting his tail—sometimes there was either not enough, or, less often, too much heat. Although the stove was a simple, and often contrary, contraption, it was expert at thawing frozen toes, at drying wet socks and gloves, at warming cold boots and jackets.”[2] Billy and I were assigned the daily chore of carrying wood in from the woodpile and stacking it alongside the stove. We carried in a day’s supply at a time.

 

Most country farmhouses were not insulated, so the side you turned toward the heat would be too warm and the side away from the heat, too cold. However, we learned to maintain the right balance most of the time by changing positions. And there were advantages. When the electricity was off in town and the furnace fans would not run to distribute the heat, we had no problems.

 

Wood was also used for cooking. The cook stove was cast iron, with round manhole-cover like plates on top (but much smaller, only perhaps ten inches in diameter) which could be lifted off by a detachable metal handle to insert the wood. Skillets and pots and pans for cooking were simply placed on top of these plates. There was an oven, no different from the ovens on gas or other stoves. Baking required constant attention to keep the fire burning at the right temperature, but I did not know of any one who used a thermometer for the oven. Country women learned by experience, and could bake superb meals regulating the heat “by guess or by gosh”. Opposite the fire chamber was a reservoir which held several gallons of water to be kept hot for washing hands and face and other purposes. The wood for the cook stove had to be split into narrower sizes, unlike most of the wood for the heating stove, much of which could be burned just as it was when sawed.

Laundry

 

In a sense, it could be said that ours was a 19^th century farm until after World War II, after which we began to move into the 20^th century. The changes that were occurring in other nearby areas – the coming of electricity in the 1920s and 1930s, the advent of radio, the use of tractors and powered equipment – these changes (except for radio, which came to our farm in 1939) did not impact our farm until the late 1940s and the 1950s.

 

One of my earliest memories is of my mother washing clothes on a washboard in a “Number 2 wash tub”, which I have previously described. Washing clothing was one of the most dreaded tasks of farm women. Since it was usually done on Monday, it gave rise to the expression “Blue Monday”. First, sufficient water had to be carried from the well and heated, which my father probably did. Farm work is dirty work by nature, and it required most of the day to scrub the clothes until they were clean, wring them out by putting them through a hand-crank wringer with rollers, and hang them on the line to dry. This was especially hard in winter. My mother was always exhausted at the end of the day. Of course meals still had to be cooked and dishes washed. “Man’s work is from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done” was an expression that my mother often repeated.

 

Tuesdays she would iron. This was done with irons heated on the wood cook stove. Several had to be heated at a time, as they would inevitably cool while she worked. I have seen irons with permanent handles on each one, but my mother had the type with a separable wooden handle that had a metal catch to hook into the top of each iron, and she used the same handle for all of the irons. In winter the irons did double duty—wrapped in an old sock, they warmed our beds and our feet until they cooled and our body heat took over to last (hopefully) the rest of the night. While she was ironing, she would put aside clothes that needed mending or buttons sewed on, and Wednesdays would be mending day.

 

I don’t recall when it was that my father found a gasoline powered washing machine at a sale—probably the early 1940s—but my mother thought it was the most wonderful thing that could have happened. The motor was similar to all small motors, with a pedal to “kick start” it. It was hard to start for my 98 pound mother, and as we grew up, that became our job. The clothes still had to be wrung dry in a hand wringer and hung on the line. There was a drain hose to empty the water into a bucket, and we would carry it a distance from the house and dump it. “Blue Monday” was much less blue after she got her washing machine.

 

My mother was an excellent seamstress and she made our shirts and underwear and her dresses, often from the colorful print bags that the cattle feed came in. I have read “city slicker” accounts of farm life whose writers assumed “feed sack” clothing was rough and coarse, but not so. Feed manufacturers learned that they could sell more feed by bagging it in muslin cloth with various bright floral and print designs, as farm wives would exhort their husbands to buy an extra bag or two of a specific print to have enough cloth for some needed item of clothing. Wives often accompanied their husbands to feed stores and picked out the patterns that they wanted. I wore “feed sack” shirts to college and received compliments on the unusual prints and the “tailor made” look. I didn’t always explain their origin, and indeed, they were “tailor made” with my mother as the tailor.

 

I also remember the making of lye soap. As with the “feed sack” clothing, some writers have assumed lye soap to be harsh, but it is not. It is a mild creamy white soap which can be used in the laundry or for bathing. My parents only made lye soap prior to World War II, when I was a very young child, so I had to browse the Internet for information to refresh my memory a bit. I found a site which was engaged in teaching people of third world countries how to make lye soap which said that “old pioneering methods” had to be researched, and that such soap was made in the English speaking world “up to the end of the last (19^th) century.”[3] On our farm it was made up to the middle of the 20^th century. It was interesting to me to review how it was made, as it was exactly as I remember it.
 

There are only five main things needed to make soap. They are: 1) White (wood) ash, 2) Rain water (because of “hard water” impurities in any other water) 3) Animal fats (grease) 4) Plant oils, 5) Salt. For us the animal fats came from butchering our hogs, and the white wood ash from cooking and heating the house. The rain water was captured in buckets set under the gutterlless eaves of our house. I do not recall about the plant oils. Sheep or beef tallow could be used in their place; perhaps my mother and father did that.
 

I found 22 pages of detailed instructions on making lye soap—it is a difficult process. I will not burden my readers with this much detail, but a summary may be interesting. It is an illustration of how our ancestors could use only materials that they had at hand and create a product that we purchase at the store and assume requires “modern” techniques to manufacture.

First the lye must be prepared (which will later be neutralized by the alkaline animal fat to produce the soap). The soft rain water was poured through the ashes collected from our stoves, sometimes several times, and collected in a bucket or container. I can remember the white ash water running down a wooden trough to that container. The resulting lye water must be at the correct strength. My source said “If an egg or potato will float just below half way, or a chicken feather starts to dissolve in it, then the lye water is at the right strength.”[4] I do not remember that part, but I’m sure my parents would have known about it. Of course lye water is very caustic and dangerous. I was not allowed to get very close.

The animal fat must be rendered shortly after butchering an animal, either a pig or a steer, but beef fat makes the best soap. Preparation of the fat proceeds as follows:
 

Once the meat of the animal has been cut away, the fat is chopped into bits and placed in a cast iron frying pan or a (not too deep) wide pot. Melted slowly over a low heat, each pound produces about one cup of useful grease. Pour the melted grease through straining cloths. The grease must now be "washed". Add an equal amount of water, and bring to the boil, take off the heat, and add one quarter (1/4) as much cold water. Leave the water and grease to cool. When the fat has hardened, scrape the dirty stuff off the outside. If the fat still looks dirty, "wash" it until clean. On the last washing use twice as much water, and before boiling add one table spoon of salt.[5]
 

Simple hard soap making has these main steps:

1. Getting the right mixture of lye and grease, called "proving".
2. "Boiling down" -removing unwanted water, and checking for what is called "doneness".
3. Treating with salt to remove water, impurities, and glycerin.
4. Pouring into cast iron kettles to harden.
5. Cutting the soap into usable sized pieces, and removing it from the kettles.
6. Drying and airing the "green" soap.
    

Freshly made soap is called "green soap". It is not green in color. It needs to be dried and aired for a few weeks before using or storing. It is creamy white in color and is quite mild provided it was processed properly. My mother used it to wash clothes and we used it for bathing.

 

When the war started and my father started working in the mines, he had money to buy soap and less time for making it at home, but during the depression, there was little money and it was necessary to be self sufficient. Perhaps this explanation will give some idea of what our ancestors had to go through to produce the things that we can acquire by a quick trip to the store.

Hog Butchering

Do you enjoy barbecued ribs, pork tenderloin, or a juicy slice of ham? If you knew how those products are processed, it might destroy your appetite—but on the farm, we could not be squeamish about these activities if we wanted to eat. Hog butchering was one such activity.

Dad raised hogs for the market, but always kept one for our own meat supply. Butchering was usually done on a frosty clear fall day—it had to be cold weather to keep the meat from spoiling. Dad would get the .22 rifle and with help from Billy and me, we would maneuver the hog into position so he could stand directly in front of it and shoot it between the eyes for a quick death.

After draining the blood, the hog was then loaded on a wagon (or into the bed of our pickup truck after he bought it in 1947) and hauled to the local butcher, “Possum Tom” Burrus, who lived at the edge of Granby. Tom scalded the hog to make the hair easier to remove, which was then scraped off. The hog was then hung spread-eagled by it hind legs from a tree limb. Tom then removed the “innards” and cut the hog into pieces—ham, shoulders, sides of bacon. These were salted down and we hauled them home to be smoke-cured. Lard was made by boiling the fatty parts in a kettle and straining out the crumbly renderings. Parts were put aside to be ground for sausage, and “head cheese” was made from the brain.

There is a saying that the pioneers used  “all of the hog except the squeal” but we didn’t quite do that. We did not eat pig’s feet or “chit’lins” (chitterlings, made from the entrails after they are thoroughly scraped and cleaned.), or the ears and head except for the brains.  However, all of the rest of the hog was used. Even the skin was cut into pieces and fried crisp. The skin itself was tough and inedible, but the fat that adhered to it was crunchy and delicious and we would simply chew it off the skin with our teeth. This, and the fried renderings from lard making, were called “hog cracklin’s.” Many years later, when I was led high school students on  a study tour to Thailand, we were told we would be served a very unusual Thai peasant delicacy. I took one taste and said “These are just good ol’ Ozark hog cracklin’s!” Seems the country folk of all lands figure out how to get the most out of everything.

To smoke cure the meat, the pieces were hung from the rafters, first in a side room used for the purpose then later in a smokehouse that Dad built. Small fires of hickory wood were contained in “lard stands”, large tins that had held lard, purchased only when the homemade supply ran out. Smoked meat will keep a very long time. However, it tends to lose its flavor after a time and even taste a bit “old” but it is edible and we had to eat it anyway. Farmers had the best and the worst of it in this respect—there is nothing more tasty than fresh tenderloin, and nothing more tasteless than cured ham that is past its “prime”. We had no refrigeration to help out. For that reason, as winter wore on, a freshly killed rabbit or squirrel or raccoon was a welcome dish. Raccoon is quite good, with a flavor similar to chicken.

Smoking meat was the cause of the demise of the original two room house with the tiny hallway which I have described. When I was in second grade, I had a long bout with pneumonia and was out of school for seven weeks. My bed was next to a side room (which I did not count as a third room because it was an unfinished room not used for living) where Dad was smoking meat. During the worst of my pneumonia, Mom brought my food to me. Finally, I was well enough to eat my first meal in the kitchen with the family. I was positioned so I could see out the window to the porch that was next to the “smoke room”. I could see smoke drifting by but I thought it was just from the fires that smoked the meat. Others at the table included Billy, my mother and father, and Granddad Pace.

I don’t know who noticed the fire at first, but on investigating, my father found that one of the chunks of meat had fallen and turned one of the lard stands over, and the fire had already spread. My mother bundled me in blankets and she, Billy, and I went out into the yard while Dad and Granddad fought the fire. They drew buckets of water from the well, but it was too late. They would have been better off saving the contents of the house. They carried out what they could, but we lost most of our furniture, a lot of clothing, and many family keepsakes.

My mother took Billy and me to Granby to stay with her brother, Tony Pace, and his wife Eula and daughter Dorothy until some kind of arrangements could be made. Dad and Granddad slept in the old school house that Dad had purchased and kept the farm operation going. They sifted through the ruins and actually found a few useful objects that had resisted the fire. They put in temporary partitions in the schoolhouse dividing the former classroom into three parts, creating a kitchen and bedroom and leaving the back part where the blackboard was as a storage area. The cloak room became our living room and the back part where the blackboard was became a storage area. The podium, raised about 8 inches from the floor and about six feet wide just below the blackboard, was where the teacher’s desk formerly sat, and Dad did not remove it. The storage room later became a play area for Billy, courin Dorothy Pace, and me. We played “school” using the blackboard and the podium with two of us as students and one as teacher. The blackboard, just separate boards painted with glossy black paint, was hard to write on, not like the ones at Granby school which were designed for chalk.

After clearing the debris of the old house, Dad arranged to have the school house moved from the neighbor’s property about 40 yards to approximately the same location as the old house. My memory is a bit dim but apparently my recovery was not set back too much and I was able to be there during the move, as I remember the house being jacked up and several wheeled dollies put under it, and the slow move to the new location about 50 yards away.  What I mainly remember is the generosity of friends and neighbors, as they brought clothing, chairs, tables, and other useful items as gifts. Of course the chairs and tables were of different designs and only a few matched, but that didn’t bother my parents. I have a hazy memory of a Model T Ford driving up one day with something big in the back and Mom saying, “Why there’s Uncle Tom!” (Her uncle from Carthage, 30 miles away). I did not remember what he brought. Many years later, when I was refinishing a dresser that had belonged to my parents, I found on the back the notation “T. Bottom, Carthage, Missouri.” Mystery solved!

After the war, Dad remodeled the schoolhouse into a five room house, which Billy and I then grew up in and Dad and Mom lived in until their deaths. It was a practical remodeling job with not much concern for décor, as was my father’s wont. The partitions were plaster board covered with wallpaper. He put in new ceilings under the high ceilings of the old schoolhouse, leaving the old one in place, creating a “dead air” space that served as insulation—no houses in our area were insulated in those days. He painted all of the woodwork and the kitchen chairs dark brown, so that they wouldn’t show dirt easily. If  part of a door facing was too short, he would “piece it in” rather than buying a new board. Some of the boards were a bit rough. My carpenter father-in-law smiled at his work in later years, but Dad got the job done and it served our needs quite well. This is the dwelling that I mainly remember as “home”.

And all of this because of hog butchering!

Nature and our surroundings

The valley south and west of our house was relatively clear of large vegetation, but all around it were extensive woods, mostly oak forest with some sycamores and hickories and an occasional walnut grove.  I liked to go walking in these woods and would sometimes be gone for hours. This is an activity that Billy did not seem to enjoy as much and we rarely did it together. I didn’t mind the solitude; it was a time to meditate and gather my thoughts.  All of the woods were interesting, but there were some special places.

 

Many times, I would start my sojourn by crossing the valley to the south and climbing to the top of the “hay hill”, which grew wild hay (sometimes called “prairie hay”) each year without our having to plant it. Our fence line there was a quarter mile from the house, and there was a beautiful vista of the farm and the surrounding fields.

 

On the east side of the hay hill was a small bluff, and I would descend that bluff to the “big sycamore”, a tree which, although it grew at the foot of the bluff and was half hidden from the house, still towered over the trees on the hilltop. It was more than six feet in diameter and was hollow. I could crawl through a small opening and stretch out my six foot frame inside without touching the edges of the tree. In later years Billy’s family would walk to the tree with the young grandchildren, Billy would sneak out ahead of them, and get inside the tree.  His grandchildren would then talk to the tree and ask it questions, and it would answer them. I don’t know if they recognized their grandfather’s voice or not, but it must have been an interesting experience. Billy’s daughter Mary Beth said later that this was her favorite spot to escape from the world and meditate. The first major branches on the tree were each a full three feet in diameter and were twenty feet from the ground.  It was an awe inspiring sight. Unfortunately, hunters and possibly just plain vandals built fires inside it—it acted as a natural chimney since there was a hole about 20 feet up—and it died and fell over. Sprouts from the roots, themselves trees of respectable size, and a stump are all that remain.

 

Then I might take a swing south  through a neighbor’s tall oak timber behind the hay hill and circle back west to the spring and explore the rocks in Dry Branch. They were full of interesting fossils.  I would take a hammer along and break rocks open and see the tribolites and shellfish that had once inhabited the Ozarks when the area was a shallow sea, before nature pushed it up into a mountain range then wore it down by erosion to the present mixture of prairie and hills. I still have a small collection of those fossils.

 

A few times while I was absorbed in the fossils, I looked up and saw a three foot wall of water coming at me down Dry Branch.  Oh-oh, the mines were pumping!  The lead mines on the high prairie pumped water out of their shafts and into the headwaters of Dry Branch. Three feet of water in that swift stream was enough to sweep a person off his feet, and sometimes I just got out in time. When the water subsided a bit, a new swimming hole was created just below the house, deeper and not as cold as the spring (which was inundated by the rush of water).  Billy and I learned to swim there. (You could do about three strokes.)

 

In flood times, Dry Branch could be both adventuresome and scary. It would spread over the valley to a width of several hundred feet, a respectable river. If the cows were on the other side when the flood came, they could not get to the house to be milked until the water subsided. They would try—they wanted to be milked as well as fed, as a full udder is just as uncomfortable as a full bladder. There were two wagon crossings where the banks sloped down and sometimes a cow would enter the water at the upstream crossing and come out at the downstream crossing 200 yards or so away. I was told that , in the days when my grandfather rented the place before my father bought it, my young uncles would jump from a tree into that torrent and come out wherever they could grab a limb downstream.  They were braver than I was.

 

Here is Dry Branch Valley looking south and slightly west. The building is the chicken house. Looks like we had put in a good supply of wood for winter. You can see Dry Branch running from behind the chicken house to the right (west) as a dark area lined with trees.

 

 

Sometimes Billy did go with me into the woods, usually doing something active rather than my passive meditations. A favorite thrill and pastime was to climb a tall, slender hickory sapling and bend it to the ground.  Hickory is tough and won’t break, and one of us would climb twenty or more feet up, start the sapling swaying back and forth until it started to bend, then ride the topmost slender branches until they bent to a few feet off the ground, and let go.  Sometimes the tree didn’t bend all the way and the climber would be hanging ten feet or more up. Decision time—drop the ten feet or try to climb back along the slender trunk to the ground? It was a challenge either way.

 

Or we would go hunting just with a shepherd dog and a stick. The dog would tree a squirrel up a sapling, one of us would climb up and shake it out, the dog would “jump” it, and whoever was on the ground would help with the stick. This may sound cruel, but it was fresh meat for the table, very important as the cured meat from butchering grew tasteless in late winter and spring.  Unlike many in my family, I did not enjoy hunting for sport. Once I remember some hunters came and went to the tall timber with rifles and a trained hound.  We took our shepherd dog and stick to the short timber where the saplings were.  They came back with no squirrels; we got several.

Nights and Night Sounds

It is difficult for today’s young people to imagine what nights were like on a farm like ours. There was no “light pollution”; the stars were so close and bright on clear nights that it seemed you could touch them. The Milky Way, our galaxy on edge, invisible in city lights today, was like a silver path across the sky. With a star chart and flashlight, I learned to name most of the constellations and many of the stars. It was easy to believe there could be life out there, and I became an avid reader of science fiction, which took me far from my farm background and stirred my imagination to the possibility of civilizations far different from that of my farm life and our neighbors. A few miles south of our house there was a beacon, actually a modified searchlight,  that circled round and round as a marker for planes, and it turned across the southern sky at fixed intervals and seemed a part of the starry universe.

 

And the silence—the unbelievable silence, so quiet that sounds miles away could be heard clearly. There were coyotes, with their quavering wail, and sometimes fox hounds baying. Sometimes Billy and I would sleep outside on warm summer nights and I would listen to the faint train sounds from Neosho seven  miles away and wonder where they were going. In my mind I would follow them along the steel rails to all sorts of imagined exotic destinations. I hoped that some day I would be able to leave that farm and see some of those exotic places for myself.

Our First Radio    

One day in my first year of school, I got off the school bus and went to the living room, to see my mother and father gathered around a box that was talking! I probably knew about radios before that, but we didn’t have one.  The year was 1939, and radio was not a new thing, but it was new to us on our farm. It was in a small wooden cabinet about a foot square and perhaps 18 inches long—we didn’t have one of the pricier “upright” models that sat on the floor like a piece of furniture. Inside was a dry cell battery about the size of a shoe box. Actually, torn open, it was a series of round dry cells each the approximate size of a beer can, hooked together in tandem. A battery would last six months to a year. To get good reception, my father had to string a wire antenna from the outside of the house to a tree about 40 feet away.

 

As we grew up, Billy and I would rush in from the school bus to listen to a series of fifteen minute serial programs—Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong “The All American Boy”, The Shadow (with its sign-off in sepulchral tones “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shaaaadow Knows!) Such shows, I believe, helped to develop our imaginations, as we learned to actually “see” the scenes and the action in our minds. Today, it’s too easy and little imagination is required. We could usually manage two or three of those fifteen minute shows before it was time to do the chores.

 

There were also shows that the whole family listened to. There were great comedians in those days, and I particularly remember Jack Benny.  In real life Jack was a generous man, but he portrayed himself as a tightwad who worshipped money.  I remember particularly one show in which he was held up by a robber, who demanded, “Your money or your life.” This was followed by what seemed like an eternity of absolute silence, in which the laughter just grew and grew as the audience gradually picked up on the idea that Jack was thinking it over and it was a difficult decision. I wonder if today’s comedians could get that audience reaction out of two minutes of absolute silence.

 

Then there was the “Fibber McGee and Molly” show, a family sitcom.  Fibber had a closet that was so packed with junk that when he opened the door it would all fall out on the floor. This was done by sound effects, and it could continue for quite some time. There would be some variation in the time and the sequencing of the clatter each time. After apparently everything possible had fallen out, there might be a pause then a “thunk” or a “thunk-thunk” as one or two other items fell. Even though it was done over and over and everyone knew what was coming, it always brought a laugh, and everyone always waited breathlessly for that last “thunk” or “thunk-thunk” or sometimes even a third “thunk” after we thought it was all over. We would have been disappointed if Fibber didn’t open his closet at least once on each show. Still today, when someone my age has a cluttered closet, I sometimes hear the expression “Fibber McGee’s closet.” Younger people probably wonder what we are talking about.

 

We also listened to the “Grand Ole Opry” on Saturday nights, broadcast on a “clear channel station” that reached the whole eastern United States from Nashville, Tennessee. There were sometimes classical programs right before the Opry, and we might catch the tail end.  Hearing a classical violinist, my father would grouse, “Well, he’s a durn good fiddler, but I wish he’d play a tune.”

 

Sunday afternoons in the summer, my father would doze under the radio while Harry Carey and his side-kick, color man Gabby Street, announced St. Louis Cardinals baseball. I asked my father how he could hear the game if he was dozing.  “Harry will wake me up if anything exciting happens,” he said. Harry Carey always called an exciting game (whether it was or not, I’ve been told). Gabby Street was from Joplin, and they named a street after him.  So as not to be redundant, it’s just Gabby Street, not Gabby Street Street. I am still a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan.  I believe it is one of the few really storied franchises in baseball, and always out to contend.

Farm buildings

The barn

 

There was a house and a barn on the farm when my father bought it, but by the time I reached my teens, neither was left. The house burned and Dad remodeled an old schoolhouse for our new dwelling. The barn collapsed and Dad build a new one. He also added chicken houses, a smokehouse, and a garage.

 

First came the barn. When I was four years old, the summer my grandmother Mary Elizabeth Pace died, the old barn just gave up the ghost and fell over. It didn’t cave in; it just leaned over to one side and lay down, like a tired old man. So my father set about building a new one. He was not a skilled carpenter but the structure he ended up with was featured in the local newspaper in 2003 as one of the remarkable barns of the area. How he built it is quite a story. While it was being built, he and my Grandfather Pace milked first in the open, then in a temporary shed built probably from wood from the old barn.

 

He built the new barn on the slope just to the south of the old barn, probably so that he could use wood from the old barn without having to dismantle and rebuild on the same location. He had to first make a terrace on the hillside. He used a horse drawn scoop which worked like a scraper and had handles on the back. It was a strenuous task and he made trip after trip until he had a fairly level location for the new barn. He also excavated on the north side of the terrace so that this side of the barn would be dug into the hillside. He banked up the terrace with native stone (of which we had a plentiful supply from the farm and Dry Branch) to make it steady.

 

His next step, and a feature that made the barn unique, was to use concrete and native stone to build a foundation which reached up to the level of the loft, so that the whole lower “story” was stone encased. Stone on our property was fossil rich, and I was always fascinated by the petrified seashells and tribolites in our barn walls. To think that these shells which had provided protection to tiny creatures millions of years ago were now part of a larger “shell” providing protection to us and our animals against both the cold of winter and the heat of summer!

 

Next was the building of the upper part of the barn. It was a “hip roof” barn, which provides more storage for hay than a simple A-frame type of roof. In this type of structure, the first section of the roof rises at a steep angle, then there is a “hip” and the upper part is at a more gentle angle until the rafters meet in the center. But my father’s joint at the “hip” went one step further. He studied how other barns were built and found that by notching the rafters at the hip, they would fit into one another and not depend on nails or braces to be self supporting (although of course both nails and braces were used for additional strength). This called for a tremendous amount of sawing—which, like all the other cuts for the entire barn, had to be made entirely with a hand saw. I remember watching my father climb around on those rafters as he worked, and I worried that he might fall. But Dad was a squirrel and ‘coon hunter, and he was accustomed to climbing the highest trees in the forest. He apparently had no fear of heights.

 

I’m sure Dad used as much of the old barn as possible, but for much of the remainder, he cut trees from his own land, hauled them to the sawmill, helped saw them into boards, and hauled them home. He nailed in every stud, floor joist, rafter, and support, then added a railing down the middle under the peak of the roof for an apparatus to raise hay into the barn, and put on a sheet metal roof. I do not recall if he had help, but I’m sure at some stages he must have. Granddad Pace probably helped some, but his health was beginning to fail and he was no longer young. I do know that I saw my father, all by himself, rig ropes, ladders, and an apparatus to raise two by fours and two by sixes to an incredible height and hang out over empty space many feet above the ground to nail them in place.

 

 

That barn is a remarkable feat for a man with no training in carpentry. I think it says a lot about my father’s character. How long did it take to build it? I wish I could remember—but I was too young to pay attention. This picture was done in magic marker by Allan Johnson, Billy's son, about 1970. The barn hadn't changed much from the time my father built it in the 1930s. The picture is from the back, looking north and slightly west. The farmhouse is to the left and behind the little building showing at the left, which housed the grinder used to grind grain into feed. At the left end of that building, out of sight and attached to it, was the chicken house.

The barn in 2000 AD. The current owner has not kept it up but it is still a sturdy building. He uses the ramp to store equipment in the loft. The jonquils were planted by my mother with my "help" when I was about four. When we loaded hay, the wagon was pulled up to this side of the barn, the top door let down, and the horses that pulled the rope were on the back side of the barn.

The tree at one time held a basketball hoop and backboard. Billy always beat me. Dry Branch was about 50 yards below the barn. The "hay hill" mentioned in this narrative is in the far distance on the right. The timber behind the hay hill was on a neighbor's property.  Memories! \

 

The method of loading hay into such a barn is hard to imagine in this day of round bales that are water resistant and can simply be left in the field or stored in a metal building. I mentioned the heavy steel rail running through the center of the barn lengthwise along the peak of the roof. There was a hanging wheeled apparatus that could run along the rod from one end of the barn to the other. There was a huge door high up on the west end of the barn that could be let down, and the wagons of hay were driven up directly under that door.

 

The horses were then unhitched and driven to the opposite side of the barn to be used to pull the hay up. An operator on the wagon pushed a fork like apparatus (called a “double harpoon” hay fork because the two tines were harpoon-like) down into the hay and pulled a lever that turned two prongs from vertical to horizontal to hold the hay. The top of the hay fork was attached to a pulley through which there was a rope reaching up to another pulley at the peak of the roof (which was overhanging), then through the entire barn and out the other side through a small opening, then through another pulley down to the ground, where it’s direction was changed back to horizontal by another pulley anchored to the ground in concrete, and the horses were hitched to the end of the rope.

 

At a shout from the “hooker” on the wagon, the helper would drive the horses and pull the hay fork and hay up to the peak of the roof, where it would latch- into the wheels on the rail and be pulled along through the barn. There was a light release rope that the “hooker” held on to as the hay rose and ran along the rail. Helpers in the barn would shout when to release the hay, and the “hooker” would pull the rope and down it would dump. Then the inside helpers would move it to the desired location inside the loft to keep the hay level as the loft filled. The rope would go slack when the hay released and the person driving the horses would know to stop, turn the horses around, and go back, being careful to keep the rope from kinking on the return. The “hooker” would then use the release rope to pull the hay hook back down out of the loft and go again. When the hay was all loaded into the loft, the horses were hitched to the wagon again to go for another load.

 

Later, when we began to bale hay instead of harvesting it loose, Dad bought a new type of hay fork that would lift hay bales instead of loose hay. It had four large L-shaped hooks that clasped 16 bales of hay at a time.

 

(((Diagram of this apparatus to be included in illustrations and perhaps a picture of a hay fork.)))

 

The two houses

 

In the city, a house can be a status symbol. On a farm, this is rarely the case.  A farmer’s status symbols are the signs of success—his barns and buildings, his cattle, his equipment. My father’s John Deere tractor was widely admired in our immediate community. But houses were less important. Our neighbors the Rambos were the nearest thing to “rich” farmers around. People talked about their fine barn and their extensive land. But their house was very ordinary and was not considered too important. It was a utilitarian place to live and sometimes, in winter, it was used for some otherwise “outside” purposes.  In an earlier section, I described using the floor in the living room of our first house to hull walnuts.

 

Some aspects of our second house have been previously described, but there is more to be said. My father divided the classroom part of the old school house into four rooms—living room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. One side of the classroom became the front of the house, facing the road, and he built a spacious roofed front porch there with comfortable seating where visitors could chat on hot summer days. The other side of the classroom section became the back of the house, and he built a concrete back porch along the entire length of that section and enclosed it entirely with windows. That became the laundry room and a general storage room. A trap door led to a cellar with a bit of space dug out where we stored potatoes, onions, and other foods that would keep for later eating.

 

The former cloak room, which was the front of the schoolhouse, was now the side of the house, and it became a kind of den and was where we actually lived. It was a long, narrow room across that end of the house. We called it the “dog house.” Later, when Mom had the ladies of the church out for a meeting, the men would retire to “Bob’s dog house” to socialize in a male bonding meeting of their own. It had a stove for heating, two rocking chairs, a couch, and a shelf above the couch for the radio. Also above the couch was a wind-up Seth Thomas clock that struck the hours and the half hours. I still have that clock today. At the opposite end of the room was a table where Billy and I did our homework.

 

 High above that table on the wall was a gun rack with a rifle and a shotgun. At this point, I believe I should say something about guns and their usage on our farm. I am neither a lover nor a hater of guns, and I believe there should be restrictions on handguns and high powered weapons. Our guns were not for use against humans, not even for self defense. None of us ever gave a single thought to that problem—our house was never locked, and my parents were of the opinion that material things were not worth a human life, not even a robber’s. The guns were there entirely to shoot “varmints” – and lest this be offensive to animal rights groups, I need to point out that this was a matter of livelihood on our farm.  Hawks are fine in the wild, keeping the rodent population in check, but if a hawk discovers a flock of baby chickens (500 was a large number in those days), in two or three days—no more chickens.  A raccoon could decimate a chicken house, eating all the eggs and even killing mature chickens. Our guns were very rarely used, but when they were needed, they were needed. On occasion, they were used to hunt for food, but although I had relatives who hunted, our family did not do much of it and I never particularly enjoyed it.

 

 

 

In constructing the other buildings (smoke house, chicken houses, garage), my father showed his frugal side. He could not always afford enough lumber, so he would go into the woods and cut small trees for the corner posts and imbed them in the concrete foundations. He would build a shed on the side of an existing building to save lumber for one side. The lumber was all of unpainted rough oak boards. They were not fancy but they did their job. He took good care of his machinery and equipment, housing it inside these buildings when possible, when not, covering the machinery with sheets of metal roofing held on with wire and painting the metal parts with liberal coats of used motor oil. He was very talented at making a little go a long way.

 

Just south of our house was the cellar where we kept canned fruit and vegetables—the closest thing we had to an ice box. It was actually the basement of a previous dwelling, and my father covered it with a concrete roof peaked like a house roof and banked dirt over that, so that grass grew on it and had to be cut at times. Billy and I always liked it on hot summer days when Mom would send us after a jar of fruit, as the cellar was always cool.

 

Farm animals

More to come

 

.