Having four pretty daughters was a real asset whenever it came to hay making time. Every young male in the neighborhood came asking for a job in the hayfield that first year (1939). Of course, then, it all had to be done with horses, but we had help and more help. In a few short weeks the hay went up in a hurry but all this help also had its disadvantages. The table had to have all its leaves to get the help seated. Then the boys all went off to war and getting help was something else. I get tired yet when I think of all the miles I walked hunting help. Frank would be away from Sunday evening until the next Friday and of course we had no transportation for he had to take the car. We depended a lot on the Wright brothers, Twisty and Ray-neither one too smart, but both excellent workers if there was a girl in the field. (Now, years later, both are in insane institutions and have been for twenty years). Ray was in ways very talented-he could do anything –from half-soling shoes, to black smithing to carpentry. Once we had to replace a door for a window on the front of the house. Ray would only consent to do the work if Joanne would stay up there with him. She would sit inside and talk to him while he worked. Joanne was never an idle sitter, so while she entertained Ray, we all got the best shoe shines ever. Ray made the change (not the neatest in the world) but it works fine yet.
Twisty imagined himself a preacher, and loved to sing hymns. He could never carry a tune, and had no ear whatsoever for music. Joanne would play “chop sticks,” her only accomplishment on the piano, and Twisty would sing “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul” or “The Old Rugged Cross,” all to the tune of Chop sticks- and how he could quiver his voice! Twisty thought Jo a real virtuoso and he would turn the pages in the hymn book and found her able to play all of them.
Coming back to hay making, one year we had so little help and two neighbor boys, Every and Jerry, brothers, both very light for heavy work, but their willingness to help outweighed their pounds. Sometimes we would all get so tired we’d get “giggly.” We could count on Emery to turn hay pitching into showmanship. He had committed every kid’s Christmas recitation to memory and even each kid’s delivery. One that we got such a laugh from was a little girl’s part. The child couldn’t talk plain and Em could lisp her part exactly like her. We would all laugh ‘till we’d forget how tired we were.
One day we were trying to outrun a storm that we could see brewing. Getting our hay wet when it was dry enough to be stacked was a catastrophe. We would work doubly hard to get all the sixty socks to the stack before the rain caught us. Well, it was one of those days that we had finished and was running toward the house so as not to get wet. Margie and I were together and when we got to the foot of the little slope the house stands on, II looked at the hill and it looked like the “Matterhorn.” I felt I couldn’t lift a foot to climb it and both Margie and I stood there crying. The rain soaked us as we went to the house.
Frank would spend his weekends running all over Nicholas and Braxton counties hunting men, both for farm and mill work. Many of the men didn’t enjoy working “petticoat rule” and they would take advantage of me, thinking I didn’t know they were “goofing off.” When we’d get an able bodied man that couldn’t build a hay sock as fast as I, or would lie down behind a far out sock, thinking I wouldn’t miss him, it didn’t take me long to tell him I didn’t need him. Poor Frank would then spend another week end hunting men for me. Now, one would think all that hay lifting far too much for a mere woman, but you know I never once thought I was having it too hard. We had always lived in towns where we had electricity and when we came to the farm, even thought we had our own gas well, and plenty of good gas lights, we had no way of using our electric washing machine. I did my wash on the wash board and carried my water from the creek, as our well furnished only enough water for cooking and drinking. We had an outside toilet and our bath came from a plain old wash pan, yet we were clean, or at least as clean as others, for no one on the creek had a bathroom. Our old outside toilet was the WPA vintage, pretty neat for a privy and not too far out. We sheet-rocked it with some leftover’s and equipped it with magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Country Gentlemen and Ladies Home Journal). The magazine rack was built against the wall. There was always a Sears Roebuck catalog there in case we ran out of toilet tissue. The toilet sometimes had to be moved a few feet to a new pit. One time when we were in the process of moving it, Junior had tipped it over on its back while threw dirt from the new pit he was digging into the partially filled old pit. Mike was about two years old and when he saw the toilet laying on the ground he came in very excited saying “Mamma, big potty broke!”
An outside toilet has its compensations. Always at dish washing time the girls had a great need to go. Sometimes I think about the extent of their reading came at those times. We had built a little brick walk from the end of the porch to the toilet with the old brick we’d taken out of the big chimney that supported the grate and when a stranger asked where to go, we’d say “follow the little brick road.”
One time we had visitors, a friend with two little boys. One of them had a toilet call early one morning and when he came downstairs he decided rather than go outside he would use the grate covering the furnace. It no sooner happened than the scent of the hot urine permeated the entire house. That was one morning I had no trouble getting everyone downstairs! Speaking of getting everyone up in the morning reminds me, I used to call to them, “everyone up, there’s thousand things to do today!” I’m sure all the members of the family will remember that the rest of their lives.
Now, we weren’t early rising farmers, ever. Eight o’clock was about our time to get up, unless school was in session. I guess those who knew how late we slept thought we were a lazy bunch.
We used to feed cattle for other people, before we bought a herd of our won. Every fall a Mr. Ball from Clay County would drive 50 head of two year olds here to be fed through the winter. We had around fifty hat stacks, which was plenty for that many cattle. Mr. Ball and Mr. Boggs brought their cattle together. Cousin Arch Hill fed the Boggs cattle. Well, Mr. Boggs was telling me he liked his cattle fed at six in the morning and four in the afternoon. I turned to Mr. Ball and said, “Mr. Ball, if you want your cows fed at 6 A.M., you can drive them elsewhere, for I don’t feed my family at that hour and I’m sure not going to live my life to suit a cow.” Mr. Ball assured me that any time we fed would be all right with him. We fed the Ball cattle every year until we bought our own herd. I think it was 1943 when we bought our first Herefords, possibly fifteen cows, all young. Now, finding names for that many wasn’t easy, for we wanted the name to match the cow’s looks or disposition. Don’t think for a minute cows don’t have personalities. They’re as different as people. We had some especially pretty ones and they were named Poise, Bouquet, Fashion Fortune, Friendly and a lot of them I’ve forgotten. One of them, old Nuisance, we all well remember and her name suited her to a T. Her mother was one of my father’s cows that he had at his boy’s camp. The camp was in session in the summer only, and we took care of his Jersey through the winter months. Anyway, Nuisance seemed a fairly normal calf until her mother had to go back to camp and we put her with another cow for milk, twice a day. Now, to teach a calf to like a foster mother is like teaching a child to like a step-other. It ain’t easy! That calf would fly from one cow to another to find milk equal to her own mother’s rich Jersey milk. Believe it or not, she chose my good butter cow. I wasn’t about to let her have that cow, so each morning when I opened the gate to let her with the cows, I’d rush back to my cow, spread my legs far apart, and shoo her to another cow. Well, one morning Nuisance decided she’d go through the barricade and before I knew it, she ran between my legs and there I was sitting on her back, facing her tail end. Well, riding bare back was one of the feats I never learned in my circus days and had a calf gone any further, I’d have been dumped. After riding horseback all my life, I still had no idea how to dismount a calf. Instead of leaning forward and getting off, I leaned backward, raised my leg and tumbled off in the dirt. I looked up and down the road to be sure no one saw me, then I cried, then laughed and cried some more. I picked up my milk bucket and went to the house and told my family the awful experience. In doing so I called her that awful nuisance, so the name stayed with her to the end. She was never dehorned and a cow with horns can freeze then. When Nuisance had her first calf, she decided at once she wouldn’t have the little old we thing, so it had to forego the first love bath. Then, there was the feeding that we had to force her into. We had to tie the hind legs together and someone had to hold the calf to her until we milked a little into the calf’s mouth, then being real hungry, as all new born animals are, we got it to fasten on to a faucet and eat. It took several days and at least two people, twice a day to teach old Nuisance that we were her boss. Once she got the idea, she wasn’t a bad mot her. We kept her until she died but she really never go over her belligerent disposition I suppose, had we had her psychoanalyzed the Analyst would have explained it all as having to live with a foster mother and being used as a beast of burden at such a tender age. Nuisance’s horns came in handy and made her popular, on one way, with the rest of the herd, for despite her bossy attitude, she could lay down a fence with those horns, or lift a wire off the gates and open then with ease. Wherefore, she could give all the cows a treat to the tender fresh corn, or the meadow grass we were saving for future hay. Nuisance gave good rich milk too, or I’m sure she would have gone to market and never have been allowed to rule so long. Nuisance’s calves, being part Jersey, didn’t command the biggest prices, but being started on rich milk, their weight compensated. Most cows love their calves and one cow usually babysits with several calves, feeding close by while the rest of the herd wanders off. While I’m on the subject of cows, they are also great tattlers. If one cow finds a way to greener pastures and the rest of the herd can’ find the way out, the whole herd starts bawling. It always pays to investigate when one hears cows bawling for there’s always a reason.
Our Friendly was a very smart cow, she did all but talk. One very cold zero night when I turned the TV off and was getting ready for bed, I kept hearing a cow at the barn bawling. Again I’d hear her down in the meadow across from Jr.’s bawling. I knew there was something wrong and that I’d never go to sleep, hearing that cow bawl. Since it was so cold and the snow deep, I put on the clothes Frank had taken off, heavy trousers, wool socks, and flannel shirt and then I put on his boots over mine. I didn’t even wake him as he wasn’t feeling well, then I took my flash light and went to the barn. Friendly met me at the gate and mooed low as she would to a calf. As soon as I went through the gate, she turned and started to the creek. I followed her and she went to a bank and kept mooing. I saw a big tear in the ice and felt sure she was showing me where the calf went under. I went back to the barn and looked for the calf in the hay, but Friendly kept going back to the creek. The next spring we found the calf in the water at the lower end of the meadow. Friendly had tried so hard to tell Jr. and me. Junior had cut a hole in the ice for the cows to get water and the baby calf had followed her mother to the creek, went out on the ice and fell through and drowned.
Often at calving time a cow would wander into the woods to have her calf. As soon as we would miss her, I’d drop anything to go hunt for her, since sometimes a cow has trouble delivering her calf. Both she and the calf would die. As I think of it now, I know I’ve walked a hundred miles looking for a missing cow. I’d never think of glancing down to look for snakes but would always be looking for the cow. Some cows would go to the same place every year and I always thought of those areas as maternity wards. When one cow is missing, you think nothing of the rest of the herd. That one cow looms so important. I’m always reminded of the ninety and nine, such rejoicing when the one cow and her beautiful calf are found.
It’s the dead of winter now and there are few days that I can get out, especially this winter for we’ve had a few extremely cold days. Well, I’ll correct that and say we’ve had extremely slick walking for really my thermometer never went below zero, but in the coldest weather the water in my gas line froze up and shut off the gas. The house was chilly but there is always a way. I hurried to get my coal stove ashes shaken down and fresh coal on, then I went upstairs and got my one long suit of insulated under pants. I put on a pair of Frank’s summer pants to keep the underpants clean, then my slip, heavy dress and a sweater, and still wasn’t warm enough so put on the outer lining of a rain coat. I pinned draperies over the opening to the living room and kitchen and stayed in the warm room. I carried two tons of lump coal in buckets in my cellar in the fall for such cold days. It was surely a good feeling not to have to venture out to the coal house.
With all my magazines and Reader’s Digest books, my telephone so I could talk to others, I felt so snug. For two days, only my face, hands and feet got a bath. It was much too chilly to undress. One night, I slept on the couch fully dressed, then I got out my electric blanket and now my bed is warm as summer time with the heat on the lowest setting, such luxury!
Junior wasn’t working those cold days and he found where the gas line was frozen and thawed the line for me. What a welcome sound when I hear that gas pressure! I sure wouldn’t want company on days like these. Almost anyone else would consider this a real hardship, but I think of it more like camping. It’s not nearly as bad as some would look at it. Sure, I have to carry water in from the well to use for everything, but it sure beats sitting in an outside toilet, or going out to empty the potty. I’m no better than my grandparents. They didn’t have it nearly so good.
Twisty imagined himself a preacher, and loved to sing hymns. He could never carry a tune, and had no ear whatsoever for music. Joanne would play “chop sticks,” her only accomplishment on the piano, and Twisty would sing “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul” or “The Old Rugged Cross,” all to the tune of Chop sticks- and how he could quiver his voice! Twisty thought Jo a real virtuoso and he would turn the pages in the hymn book and found her able to play all of them.
Coming back to hay making, one year we had so little help and two neighbor boys, Every and Jerry, brothers, both very light for heavy work, but their willingness to help outweighed their pounds. Sometimes we would all get so tired we’d get “giggly.” We could count on Emery to turn hay pitching into showmanship. He had committed every kid’s Christmas recitation to memory and even each kid’s delivery. One that we got such a laugh from was a little girl’s part. The child couldn’t talk plain and Em could lisp her part exactly like her. We would all laugh ‘till we’d forget how tired we were.
One day we were trying to outrun a storm that we could see brewing. Getting our hay wet when it was dry enough to be stacked was a catastrophe. We would work doubly hard to get all the sixty socks to the stack before the rain caught us. Well, it was one of those days that we had finished and was running toward the house so as not to get wet. Margie and I were together and when we got to the foot of the little slope the house stands on, II looked at the hill and it looked like the “Matterhorn.” I felt I couldn’t lift a foot to climb it and both Margie and I stood there crying. The rain soaked us as we went to the house.
Frank would spend his weekends running all over Nicholas and Braxton counties hunting men, both for farm and mill work. Many of the men didn’t enjoy working “petticoat rule” and they would take advantage of me, thinking I didn’t know they were “goofing off.” When we’d get an able bodied man that couldn’t build a hay sock as fast as I, or would lie down behind a far out sock, thinking I wouldn’t miss him, it didn’t take me long to tell him I didn’t need him. Poor Frank would then spend another week end hunting men for me. Now, one would think all that hay lifting far too much for a mere woman, but you know I never once thought I was having it too hard. We had always lived in towns where we had electricity and when we came to the farm, even thought we had our own gas well, and plenty of good gas lights, we had no way of using our electric washing machine. I did my wash on the wash board and carried my water from the creek, as our well furnished only enough water for cooking and drinking. We had an outside toilet and our bath came from a plain old wash pan, yet we were clean, or at least as clean as others, for no one on the creek had a bathroom. Our old outside toilet was the WPA vintage, pretty neat for a privy and not too far out. We sheet-rocked it with some leftover’s and equipped it with magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Country Gentlemen and Ladies Home Journal). The magazine rack was built against the wall. There was always a Sears Roebuck catalog there in case we ran out of toilet tissue. The toilet sometimes had to be moved a few feet to a new pit. One time when we were in the process of moving it, Junior had tipped it over on its back while threw dirt from the new pit he was digging into the partially filled old pit. Mike was about two years old and when he saw the toilet laying on the ground he came in very excited saying “Mamma, big potty broke!”
An outside toilet has its compensations. Always at dish washing time the girls had a great need to go. Sometimes I think about the extent of their reading came at those times. We had built a little brick walk from the end of the porch to the toilet with the old brick we’d taken out of the big chimney that supported the grate and when a stranger asked where to go, we’d say “follow the little brick road.”
One time we had visitors, a friend with two little boys. One of them had a toilet call early one morning and when he came downstairs he decided rather than go outside he would use the grate covering the furnace. It no sooner happened than the scent of the hot urine permeated the entire house. That was one morning I had no trouble getting everyone downstairs! Speaking of getting everyone up in the morning reminds me, I used to call to them, “everyone up, there’s thousand things to do today!” I’m sure all the members of the family will remember that the rest of their lives.
Now, we weren’t early rising farmers, ever. Eight o’clock was about our time to get up, unless school was in session. I guess those who knew how late we slept thought we were a lazy bunch.
We used to feed cattle for other people, before we bought a herd of our won. Every fall a Mr. Ball from Clay County would drive 50 head of two year olds here to be fed through the winter. We had around fifty hat stacks, which was plenty for that many cattle. Mr. Ball and Mr. Boggs brought their cattle together. Cousin Arch Hill fed the Boggs cattle. Well, Mr. Boggs was telling me he liked his cattle fed at six in the morning and four in the afternoon. I turned to Mr. Ball and said, “Mr. Ball, if you want your cows fed at 6 A.M., you can drive them elsewhere, for I don’t feed my family at that hour and I’m sure not going to live my life to suit a cow.” Mr. Ball assured me that any time we fed would be all right with him. We fed the Ball cattle every year until we bought our own herd. I think it was 1943 when we bought our first Herefords, possibly fifteen cows, all young. Now, finding names for that many wasn’t easy, for we wanted the name to match the cow’s looks or disposition. Don’t think for a minute cows don’t have personalities. They’re as different as people. We had some especially pretty ones and they were named Poise, Bouquet, Fashion Fortune, Friendly and a lot of them I’ve forgotten. One of them, old Nuisance, we all well remember and her name suited her to a T. Her mother was one of my father’s cows that he had at his boy’s camp. The camp was in session in the summer only, and we took care of his Jersey through the winter months. Anyway, Nuisance seemed a fairly normal calf until her mother had to go back to camp and we put her with another cow for milk, twice a day. Now, to teach a calf to like a foster mother is like teaching a child to like a step-other. It ain’t easy! That calf would fly from one cow to another to find milk equal to her own mother’s rich Jersey milk. Believe it or not, she chose my good butter cow. I wasn’t about to let her have that cow, so each morning when I opened the gate to let her with the cows, I’d rush back to my cow, spread my legs far apart, and shoo her to another cow. Well, one morning Nuisance decided she’d go through the barricade and before I knew it, she ran between my legs and there I was sitting on her back, facing her tail end. Well, riding bare back was one of the feats I never learned in my circus days and had a calf gone any further, I’d have been dumped. After riding horseback all my life, I still had no idea how to dismount a calf. Instead of leaning forward and getting off, I leaned backward, raised my leg and tumbled off in the dirt. I looked up and down the road to be sure no one saw me, then I cried, then laughed and cried some more. I picked up my milk bucket and went to the house and told my family the awful experience. In doing so I called her that awful nuisance, so the name stayed with her to the end. She was never dehorned and a cow with horns can freeze then. When Nuisance had her first calf, she decided at once she wouldn’t have the little old we thing, so it had to forego the first love bath. Then, there was the feeding that we had to force her into. We had to tie the hind legs together and someone had to hold the calf to her until we milked a little into the calf’s mouth, then being real hungry, as all new born animals are, we got it to fasten on to a faucet and eat. It took several days and at least two people, twice a day to teach old Nuisance that we were her boss. Once she got the idea, she wasn’t a bad mot her. We kept her until she died but she really never go over her belligerent disposition I suppose, had we had her psychoanalyzed the Analyst would have explained it all as having to live with a foster mother and being used as a beast of burden at such a tender age. Nuisance’s horns came in handy and made her popular, on one way, with the rest of the herd, for despite her bossy attitude, she could lay down a fence with those horns, or lift a wire off the gates and open then with ease. Wherefore, she could give all the cows a treat to the tender fresh corn, or the meadow grass we were saving for future hay. Nuisance gave good rich milk too, or I’m sure she would have gone to market and never have been allowed to rule so long. Nuisance’s calves, being part Jersey, didn’t command the biggest prices, but being started on rich milk, their weight compensated. Most cows love their calves and one cow usually babysits with several calves, feeding close by while the rest of the herd wanders off. While I’m on the subject of cows, they are also great tattlers. If one cow finds a way to greener pastures and the rest of the herd can’ find the way out, the whole herd starts bawling. It always pays to investigate when one hears cows bawling for there’s always a reason.
Our Friendly was a very smart cow, she did all but talk. One very cold zero night when I turned the TV off and was getting ready for bed, I kept hearing a cow at the barn bawling. Again I’d hear her down in the meadow across from Jr.’s bawling. I knew there was something wrong and that I’d never go to sleep, hearing that cow bawl. Since it was so cold and the snow deep, I put on the clothes Frank had taken off, heavy trousers, wool socks, and flannel shirt and then I put on his boots over mine. I didn’t even wake him as he wasn’t feeling well, then I took my flash light and went to the barn. Friendly met me at the gate and mooed low as she would to a calf. As soon as I went through the gate, she turned and started to the creek. I followed her and she went to a bank and kept mooing. I saw a big tear in the ice and felt sure she was showing me where the calf went under. I went back to the barn and looked for the calf in the hay, but Friendly kept going back to the creek. The next spring we found the calf in the water at the lower end of the meadow. Friendly had tried so hard to tell Jr. and me. Junior had cut a hole in the ice for the cows to get water and the baby calf had followed her mother to the creek, went out on the ice and fell through and drowned.
Often at calving time a cow would wander into the woods to have her calf. As soon as we would miss her, I’d drop anything to go hunt for her, since sometimes a cow has trouble delivering her calf. Both she and the calf would die. As I think of it now, I know I’ve walked a hundred miles looking for a missing cow. I’d never think of glancing down to look for snakes but would always be looking for the cow. Some cows would go to the same place every year and I always thought of those areas as maternity wards. When one cow is missing, you think nothing of the rest of the herd. That one cow looms so important. I’m always reminded of the ninety and nine, such rejoicing when the one cow and her beautiful calf are found.
It’s the dead of winter now and there are few days that I can get out, especially this winter for we’ve had a few extremely cold days. Well, I’ll correct that and say we’ve had extremely slick walking for really my thermometer never went below zero, but in the coldest weather the water in my gas line froze up and shut off the gas. The house was chilly but there is always a way. I hurried to get my coal stove ashes shaken down and fresh coal on, then I went upstairs and got my one long suit of insulated under pants. I put on a pair of Frank’s summer pants to keep the underpants clean, then my slip, heavy dress and a sweater, and still wasn’t warm enough so put on the outer lining of a rain coat. I pinned draperies over the opening to the living room and kitchen and stayed in the warm room. I carried two tons of lump coal in buckets in my cellar in the fall for such cold days. It was surely a good feeling not to have to venture out to the coal house.
With all my magazines and Reader’s Digest books, my telephone so I could talk to others, I felt so snug. For two days, only my face, hands and feet got a bath. It was much too chilly to undress. One night, I slept on the couch fully dressed, then I got out my electric blanket and now my bed is warm as summer time with the heat on the lowest setting, such luxury!
Junior wasn’t working those cold days and he found where the gas line was frozen and thawed the line for me. What a welcome sound when I hear that gas pressure! I sure wouldn’t want company on days like these. Almost anyone else would consider this a real hardship, but I think of it more like camping. It’s not nearly as bad as some would look at it. Sure, I have to carry water in from the well to use for everything, but it sure beats sitting in an outside toilet, or going out to empty the potty. I’m no better than my grandparents. They didn’t have it nearly so good.
written by: Anna Mary Gawthrop
1 comment:
Hey Deb!
Jerry forwarded this on to me cuz he didn't see me on the list...could you add me, girlfriend? I so enjoy reading these letters - are they from her journals? What was the date this one was written?
Keep this up, Deb - it means the world to those of us that love the farm and its rich history. Thanks so so much for putting our family stories out there!
Love you,
Val
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