Hay

Hay was an important crop on our farm.  The crop started with a planter called a Lister, which was a row-crop planter.  In the Spring, the fields were prepared and planted.  We used a row-crop tractor called a FarmAll H.  I spent countless hours driving that machine in all kinds of  weather.

The crop we used was called Kafir Corn---it was a cane sorghum crop that some farmers chopped up and stored in silos.  They ran it through a chopper and blew it up to the top of the silo where some unfortunate worker tromped around to pack it down.  We harvested it in the field with a binder which tied it up in bundles with twine and left them on the ground for us to come along and arrange them in teepee-shaped piles called shocks.  They remained there until we had time to gather them and haul them to a stack near the feeding corral.

Each morning when we did chores, we had to pitch these bundles off the stack and into the feeding troughs.  We also used alfalfa hay, but we did not grow it because our upland soil didn't suit it.  We purchased it from neighbors who had bottom farmland, and pitched it into our hay mow.  It was from there that we fed the barn animals: calves, the milk cows, and the horses.  The real modern ones baled their alfalfa and used machinery to do most of the work.  I sometimes hired out to work with harvesting alfalfa.  Someone else always did the baling and  I worked with someone else to pick up the bales, toss them onto a hay rack, and lift them into the hay mow. Pitching hay or lifting bales was very hard work.

In the Fall when all the shocks had been collected from the field, we stretched an electric fence around it and turned the cows into it to graze on the stubble.  The cane stalks were full of juice and made excellent fodder.  In the Spring, we tilled the fields, cleaned out the corrals.  Feeding all that livestock over the winter produced a prodigious amount of manure, so each Spring we had to shovel out the stables and corrals and spread the manure on places that needed fertilizer, and the process started all over again.

Chores

Chores:  If it was winter, the day started with Grandpa stoking up the fire from embers banked from the night before.   Ashes had to be shaken  down and put in a coal bucket to be hauled out to the ash pit.  Although grandpa did the fire, the boys hauled ashes out and coal back from the coal pile.

We lit the kerosene lantern and went out to milk the cows while Mom prepared breakfast on the kerosene cook stove.  She had an ice box for a refrigerator.  When oil was discovered on our property and six well were  brought into production, we installed a propane gas tank, got a gas cooking stove and a gas refrigerator, and a gas heating stove.  We thought we were very well off.  Aunt Inda was still cooking on a wood-burning stove and using the well as a cooler.  Eventually, they got propane, too.

It was while we were out at the  barn that she emptied the chamber pot, since she was the only one who used it.  Us guys just went out back and peed on the limestone wall.  For some reason, there were rust stripes spreading down the wall from about waist high and the grass did not grow along that wall.

After milking the cows, we brought the milk to the wash house where we kept the  separator, and separated the cream from the milk. It got tiresome turning the crank, but in the winter time at least we were in the wash house where it wasn't too cold.

 We fed most of the milk to the calves and pigs.  We put the cream in 5-gallon crocks in the cellar where we kept it cool until we could take it to town and sell it at the local creamery.Selling the cream and the eggs she gathered gave Mom her household money.  It was the only cash flow we had between harvests or  stock sales.

After doing the milking and taking care of the milk, we went in for breakfast; then it was back out to feed the rest of the stock. The older calves had to be fed hay, and the cow herd had to be fed bundles of kafir cane whhich had been harvested and stacked in the Fall harvest season.

 

We fed the chickens by scattering wheat or milo in the out for them to scratch.  Even though they were free-ranging chickens, they almost always went to the hen house to lay their  eggs, so gathering them was no big chore and could be left until later if things got too busy.  After chores were done, we went to school.  When we got to high school, we liked to go to social activities.  Grandpa didn't care how late we got home the night before  if we were attending a school activity, and he would   do the night chores for us, but he always expected us to get up for morning chores.

Laundry Day back on the farm

Monday was laundry day. We started early in the morning by hauling water to the big boiler on a gas flame in the wash house.

We pumped it into buckets from the cistern and hauled it to the fire.  Mom's best friend lived on a farm that had the cistern under the house and there was a pump right  over the sink in the kitchen.  How lucky can you get?

 (My other grandma had to heat her water in a large black kettle over an open fire.)















We had a wringer washing machine that had a gasoline engine to run it.

 We filled the washing machine with hot water and two wash tubs for rinse water. After one load was washed, we ran everything through the wringer into the first rinse tub; then through the wringer into the second tub; and then through the wringer into the wash basket. We toted the finished laundry to the back yard where we hung it out to dry on the clothes line or hung things like rugs or overalls over the bushes of the yard fence.

You could learning some interesting things from looking at laundry on the line.

 After they dried all day, we brought it into the house to prepare for ironing. The shirts and fine linens were starched (another operation done in the wash house.) The ironing had to be sprinkled and set aside for ironing. We used flat irons heated on the gas stove in the kitchen. After the cleanup---including draining all the water out onto the outside lawn, we put everything away. Our ears were ringing from hearing a gas engine all day in the wash house, we were tired from hauling the water and wet laundry and hanging it on the line. How much easier it is today. It is still good to hang things out on a line because they smell better.

We still had to do chores morning and evening, and during the school year, we had to go to school.  When we went to Jay one-roomed school for three years while Chalk Mound School had no teacher, all three of us boys rode a horse to school.

 Thinking about all of this makes me realize how much we had to work in those days. I don't know if we are any better off today with all the labor saving devices. I thing if I could go back to farming like we used to, I would if I could make a living at it.

Wheat Harvesting in my past

I was born on Uncle Clarence's farm and I grew up on Grandpa's farm.  Wheat was the main money crop.  My first experience with harvesting it took place in 1940, when I was three years old.  Grandpa had three teams of horses hitched to a reaper he was moving into the West field to cut wheat. It was a push machine rather than a pull machine, and I have a very clear mental picture of that rig as it  moved out to cut wheat.  It was called a header, and it cut the wheat heads off and bundled the wheat into a big wagon, called a barge, which hauled the wheat to the threshing machine.  This machine was run by a donkey engine that ran a huge pulley belt out to the thresher, where men pitched the wheat from the barge to the thresher.  The straw was blown into a huge pile while the cleaned grain was poured into bushel-sized burlap sacks.  It was a noisy, hot, and hard job, with lots of danger lurking everywhere.  Most pictures of this operation show a reaper or combine pulled by multiple teams rather than  one that is pushed.

My next memory of wheat harvest was one of mobile harvest crews coming in at harvest time and doing the work for pay.  The crew harvested the wheat, scooped it into storage bins, or hauled it to town to sell at the elevator.  The only job for the farmer was to provide meals for the crew.  It was quite a job to feed a hungry harvest crew.  The menu included iced tea, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, roasting ears of corn, string beans, corn bread with butter and honey, and apple pie.  This is where I learned to cook. We did not have running water so we had a bench set up in the yard with wash pans and buckets of cold water.  The crew made quite a scene washing the chaff out of their hair, from under their collars and flushing sweat off their torsos, all accompanied with lots of huffing and spitting and splashing, and boisterous talk. There was no swearing because everyone knew Quakers didn't approve of it, and we were Quakers. 

One Spring Grandpa took his tractor to town and came home with a gleaming new Baldwin combine.  It was beautiful. It had an extension cord from an electric motor up to the tractor so the tractor driver could operate the level of the cutting bar while pulling the harvester.   Now one man could do the work of much of  harvest crew, and we never hired the cutting done again.  Grandpa fixed a seat on the harvester for an operator and hired my brother and me to operate it while he drove the tractor.   Only later did I realize he could have done it all himself without hiring us.  While my brother ran the harvester, I hauled and scooped wheat with the help of a neighbor with who we partnered to share harvesting duties.  One year my brother hired out to work on a harvest crew for 85 cents an hour, and I got the duty of operating the harvester.  I never realized how hot and dusty it was and how irritating the chaff was getting in your face and under your shirt with all the sweat.  It was hard work.

My mother remarried and moved away when I was 16, so my brother and I were left to do the work, along with the neighbor.  It became my job to  drive the truck to town to sell the wheat, and the neighbor did the scooping.  I had to quit work early to cook dinner for the crew, which consisted of Grandpa, Farrell, Mr. Krob, the neighbor, and me.  It wasn't that big of a deal because I got out of the heat and dirt early to fix the meal. Guess what the menu was---Fried chicken, roasting ears, potatoes and gravy, cornbread with butter and honey, green beans, and apple pie, all washed down with lots of iced tea.

The year before I went away to college, the landlord of the share-cropper farm next door to us asked me to take over the work of his operation.   I bought a tractor, and using Grandpa's machinery, I did the cultivating and harvesting.  It was from my share of that year's harvest that I had nearly enough money to go to college, so I enrolled in Friends University, bought my first car (a '41 Plymouth in mint condition),   Of course I still farmed with Grandpa because my brother moved away right after he graduated from high school.  Sometimes we even worked at plowing the same field.  Grandpa did all his own machinery maintenance and repairs, and he taught me how to do it.  After he had confidence in my work, he always excused me from field work to be the resident mechanic.  There were times I would be plowing up stubble in the same field where he was harvesting.   Now, he used the extension cord and did all the work himself.  I just hauled the wheat  to storage and ran the  tractor pulling the plow.   One day he broke down and when I came around he switched rigs with me---he would drive the plow tractor while I repaired the breakdown; then he would trade back again.

I went away to college but would come back in the summer and harvest with Grandpa until he retired.

In 1955, Grandpa offered to set me up in farming if I would take over the land.  He would provide all the machinery and a home to live in.   He had put together a 620 acre farming empire. It was tempting, but it could only provide subsistence living  unless I could get more land, and I decided the Government was exercising too much control and didn't want to do subsidized farming, so graduated from college financed from wheat money and  I went into teaching instead.

We moved to California in 1963.  In 1972, we took a family trip back East, including a stop off at the old farmstead.  By then, all the structures were gone and the old barnyard was part of the West field.  As luck would have it, harvesting was going on in the West field.  I took the girls out to the combine harvester and let them ride in the grain hopper of the combine.  I took a bushel of wheat from that hopper and brought it home so we could grind it into flour and have home made bread from  wheat harvested from the old farm where it all started for me.  I still have some of that wheat stored in our pantry, and it is as good as it ever was.

Barns

My love for barns originated on my grandfather's farm ten miles south of Woodston, Kansas where I grew up.  Long before I was old enough to saddle the horses or milk the cows, I would play in the barn.  The hay loft was an especially cozy place on a wintery Sunday afternoon when there was too much snow outdoors to allow any playing in the yard.  Later, I worked hard in this  barn feeding the  calves, mucking out the stalls and milking the cows by hand, but it was an enjoyable effort because the barn was dry when it rained, quiet when it stormed, cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  To my young mind, the barn has always been a haven where one could work out one's problems as he prayed by talking to the animals; an island of security and order in a life in turmoil. 

In my 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, I rode a horse to school, so my day started with saddling up the horse, riding to school, stabling  the horse there, in school all day, and riding home in the evening.   The ride home often entailed a quarter mile race with a friend who also rode his horse.  Upon arrivng home, I took care of the horse, fed the stock, milked the cow, and battened down the doors for the evening.  I liked the barn.

Ever since, I have enjoyed  exploring barns.  When I retired, I toured the countryside taking pictures of barns, and preparing such albums as Barns of My Youth, Barns or the San Juan Valley, Barns of the Central Coast, and Barns of the West.  Now, it my hope that I can share some of my barns with you and let you experience some of the peace and order of a bygone era.