It is early June but one would hardly know it, with temps ranging from the high eighties to the mid nineties. It certainly feels like mid July or August. The nice thing is that you can rapidly do the few necessary chores outside the house in a short time and quickly retreat to the cool air-conditioned inside for some iced tea or cold beverage of your choice.
All of the above was not possible in the thirties and forties while growing up on the farm on Queens Creek, Post Office, Prichard, West Virginia. There was no air conditioned inside to retreat to when the heat became oppressive nor was there an iced beverage waiting in an electric refrigerator to cool ones insides. A major reason was that there was no electricity. You simply would retreat to the outside well and draw a cool bucket of water and dip up a large dipper of fresh water to consume and perhaps dash a little of the what was left in the dipper over the top of your head. You might then retreat to the shade of a large walnut tree nearby or head for the porch swing and swing back and forth to stir up the semblance of a breeze. However, the problem was that many times you might be a fair distance away from the above comforts and then it was simply a drink of warm water that you had taken into the field in a large canning jar or similar container. With no means of keeping it cold it was usually as warm or warmer than the temperature of the thermometer.
Speaking of thermometers, I am not sure that we owned one on the farm. There may have been but I don’t recall it. Today our lives today are sometimes ruled by whatever the outside temp is, whether it is going to school, going to work, performing some leisure activity. We are so negatively influenced by numbers. When I was a kid, you knew when it was cold and when it was hot but it did not have an effect on what you did or your life. Things went on whether the temp was 40 or 80. You didn’t check the weather forecast for rain, thunderstorms, snow, or whatever. Someone in the family just instinctively knew when these things were likely to happen. I don’t even know if there was a weather forecast. We not only did not get the weather channel because we had no TV. Our nearest radio station was probably Huntington and I doubt we got a very strong signal from it plus I am sure that they did not give out frequent forecasts. There was no weather radar or similar electronic monitoring devices to forewarn of approaching weather changes.
By this time of year, you were out of school, fear of frost or freeze had passed, crops were planted and up, and it was time to cultivate. Cultivation of crops on a non-mechanized farm was very hard work. When cultivating on the farm, you walked behind a horse pulling a plow, swung a garden hoe, or thinned corn. You might say, “That doesn’t sound so hard”. Well, I am here to tell you it is hard. There are many out there, who did the above, that would vouch for what I am saying.
First let’s take a look at the cultivating plow. Large farms might have had a plow that had wheels and a seat to on ride and was towed by a team of horses and plowed a wide swath with each pass of the plow. The kind of plow I am talking about using was called a “double shovel” plow and it did one row of corn or whatever crop you were cultivating at a pass. Doesn’t sound to hard, but try it for a while when you are ten or twelve years of age. You have to guide the plow, guide the horse, and dodge things you might plow up and not want to step on, all of the while being very careful not to destroy the rows of crop you are plowing. Speaking of things you might not want to step on, in following a horse through the field you are pretty close to the “business end”. They don’t choose when they want to “go to the bathroom” they just do it. As Colonel Potter used to say on the TV show “MASH”, you might need to dodge a little “horse hockey” on occasion. Then, there was always the task of wrestling the plow around at the end of the row and heading back in the opposite direction. Pretty boring, hard, and not very creative work to say the least, but as they say, “it went with the territory”.
Speaking of cultivating, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how the soil got to the condition it would be in for planting. During the winter and early spring, preparation of the field for planting would be done by spreading lime, fertilizer, or barn manure (that’s the stuff produced by politicians) or a combination of the above. The plow we used was a turning plow that was pulled by a team of horses. It was a heavy plow that would be used in both directions by releasing a catch with your foot when you reached the end of the furrow and then lifting the plow and turning the mole board to the other side permitting you to go back in the other direction thereby having the furrows all fall in the same direction, either right or left. You would plow up lots of things, perhaps an indian arrowhead, a long-lost pocket knife, and occasionally a nest of snakes. Just watch where you put your feet. Try doing this on a hot day in a large field.
The next step in soil preparation would have been to get out a machine that we called a disc. It consisted of rows of round steel discs with a sharp edge. Fortunately this machine had a seat for the operator to drive the team of horses from and was not a bad job at all. The device looked a bit dangerous, sort of like a giant “slice and dice” machine, but I never knew anyone that got injured on it, although I am sure that it happened. Falling under the discs was always a possibility.
The next step in soil preparation was to use something called a harrow. It was a wooden frame, usually in a “V” shape as I recall, with a lot of what appeared to be railroad spikes driven through the frame. Again a team of horses or mules would be hitched to this and it would be dragged through the field to further loosen the soil. Once this was done, a wooden platform, usually something made on the farm, would be hitched to the team of horses and weights placed on the platform. This would then be drug around the field to level the surface and finish the field ready for planting. Once this was done seed would be spread by hand or a shoulder carried spreader where one would turn a crank and the seed would be broadcast about the field. If it were to be a row crop, the field would then be laid of in straight rows by a small plow called a layoff plow pulled by a single horse or a mule.
If the row crop were to be a corn crop, a corn planter would be used. It was a device in which corn grains would be put and when the handles were pulled apart a measured amount of corn grains would drop out of the hopper into the lower portion of the planter which would be then plunged into the ground and the handles closed together thereby leaving the corn grains in the ground. The planter would then be retracted allowing the grains to be covered with dirt and the cycle would be started again. I can almost hear someone operating a planter today. The sounds would be a rhythmic “clack”, “chunk”, whack”. The rhythm exactly in step with the person operating the planter. Try those sounds around an old person and he is apt to say: “Child you sound like you’re planting corn”.
Thinning corn alway seemed to me to be useless labor. It was always assigned to the youngest family members. When planting corn, the farmer always set the planter to plant four or five grains. When about four or five inches high, one would go through and pull up all of the corn plants but two. I suppose the theory was that any more than that the ground couldn’t sustain. I never asked why, I just did it. Ask a young person today to that and you had better be ready to explain it. After thinning the corn, it would be hoed. You simply went through the field and chopped the weeds out and loosened the soil around the plant. This procedure was done two or three times during the growing season. All of this back-breaking and strenuous work. If farms were operated in this manner today, there would be a great shortage of food crops.
Growing up on a small farm with not a lot of creek bottom land, it was necessary to do a lot of hill-top farming. This was done by selecting a tract of hillside or hilltop land and removing all of the trees, brush, and whatever else might be in the way of cultivation. These tracts were known as “new ground” and were generally a distance away from the home. This presented logistical problems when lunch time or dinner time came. On the farm we had three meals; breakfast, dinner, and supper. I don’t know where the term lunch came from but it was never used around the farm. My mother would prepare full meals for dinner for the workers and transport it to the hill-top field by carrying it or if there were a spare horse around the barn, she might place the food on a sled and deliver our food in that manner. I don’t think men ever really appreciated the role the farm wife played in seeing that everyone was fed three meals every day. In the absence of paper plates, she had to haul all of the dirty dishes back to her kitchen, wash them, put them away, and then begin preparation for supper (city folks called it dinner).
Along about 5 or 6 o’clock in the afternoon, whomever was in charge of what you were doing would usually call a halt to the days work, at least work in the field. Now the rest of the work day would begin. After watering livestock and putting things away it would be time to do the milking, feed cattle, feed hogs, and gather firewood for the kitchen woodbox so that everything would be ready for food preparation to begin for tomorrows workday. By then supper would be on the table and everyone sat at the table, not in front of a TV, a blessing would be asked and we would restore our bodies with energy in preparing for another work day tomorrow. If there was a few minutes of daylight left you would head for the nearest water hole in Queens Creek. There was such a water hole within a couple of hundred yards of our house so all of the kids would head for it for a cool soak. By the time you returned to the house it would be bedtime and you would go to sleep quickly because you were tired and 6 AM came quickly.
If this sounds like a boring existence, well, it wasn’t. There was lots of love floating around, appreciation for what God had given you, and the part that you played in making it all possible. It truly was, “A Kinder, Gentler, Time.” A time in which I learned many, many lessons that have enabled me to live a life filled with good memories and few regrets.
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As the lead-in to the Lone Ranger radio shows began with “return with me now to the days of yesteryear” and then from the distance would be heard “Hi Yo Silver, Away”. Well, maybe I didn’t get it exactly right but it is pleasant to remember those times. Perhaps it is because we were young then and we long to be young again, or perhaps it is that in spite of all that was going on then, economy, no jobs, etc. it was a great time to be alive. Those were the times, even though we were unaware of it then, that were heralding the impending death of Patriotism, love of our country right or wrong, and a population and government that still believed that the United States was founded on and practiced religious beliefs and principles.
The Viking Chronicles 