As I Was - Early Teen Age Years

Alfred has moved from the city to the farm.  To forewarn you, this post is long and tells about the operation of the farm.  Considering Alfred is writing this more than fifty years after it occured, he remembers the tasks required to run a farm in great detail.  So I don't blame you if after a few paragraphs you give up.  It certainly does give you an idea of just how much work is required, even on a small farm, or maybe especially on a small farm.

Early Teen Age Years

"It was a new life for me to begin.  I was approaching my 14^th year and I had to adjust myself to a new environment.  Grand Parents, Uncles and Aunts took over the task of my future.  It was not easy to conform to their way of life.  I never was mistreated but it seemed hard to please everybody.  I soon learned I had various chores to do and I was called on by all of them to perform these duties.

In the first place the folks were poor but not by any means destitute, so work was the main thing for survival.  I soon learned to handle horses and was eager to do this.  Plowing was a hard task for I was not strong enough to drag the plow around the ends of the field and I had to learn to drive the horses so that they would drag the plow to where the next furrow was to be made.  Of course to learn to harrow and prepare the soil was not difficult.  Long hours and a lot of walking made this no easy task. 

And then there was the chore of tending to the horses.  They always had to be taken care of – feeding, watering, bedding and grooming.  We got up at 4 o’clock each morning and didn’t matter if the horses had to be worked or not, they were attended to befor breakfast.  The cows had to be milked and that was done after breakfast and befor supper.  I always had to get the cows up from the pasture and usually got wet from the dew in the morning.  I tried to train the dog to “fetch” them up but didn’t have to much success. 

I had to do a lot of hoeing – in the garden, potato patch and in the corn field.  This job of hoeing seemed to be a long drawn out affair.  If I was not called on to work in the garden, I would have to go with uncle Dietz to the corn field.  He would plow the corn with a walking cultivator and I would follow with the hoe and chop out weeds and crab grass that he failed to cover up or plow out. 

The farming equipment in those days were crude in comparison to those of today.  One thing that was hard for me to take in the summer was to hear the town kids hollering and yelling while swimming in Buck Creek, not to far away and me out in the hot sun with my hoe.  Many were the times that I wished the corn was “laid by” the wheat and oats had to be harvested.

By the time I made my home in Linton, progress was on the march.  The wheat cradle was hung up and the Binder was used.  It was a big improvement and much faster.  We never could afford a Binder so one was hired.  It cost 1.⁰⁰ per acre to get the grain cut.  Usually two or three followed the Binder and put the bundles in a shock.  Usually 12 bundles made a shock of grain.  Those shocks were left in the field from 10 days to 2 weeks to dry out.  Then they were loaded on a wagon, hauled to threshing lot and stacked in ricks.  When loading the wagon there usually were two “pitchers” or men to throw the bundles on the wagon with pitch forks.  The job for the man on the wagon was to place the bundles, butt end out and to tie them by placing bundles cross ways over the grain ends to tie them.  It was an art to learn how to do this, for if it was not done right, the jostling and jolting of the wagon would cause the load to slip and fall off.  I soon learned how to do this job but occasionally I would have the misfortune to have a load slip.  I never learned to stack or make a rick.  This seemed to be the job of older men.  It was done practically the same way; the middle of the rick always had to be higher than the outside and the bundles had to be slopping downwards so that the rain would not run to the middle.  Great care had to be taken in building a rick so that the inside was not built too high, for this would cause the rick to bulge out.  The best man I ever saw do this job was a neighbor, W^m D. Kramer.  W^m Bovenschen who eventually was my father-in-law was also very good at this task.

Threshing Machine

Along mid-summer, thrashing rigs came around to thread out the grain. There were 3 pieces of equipment that made up this rig – a steam engine, a separator and the water wagon.  The first seprators I saw didn’t have a blower to blow the chaff and straw in a pile, but has what they called a carrier, which was something like the elevators used by farmers at time to elevate, corn, grain and hay to wherever they want it.  Also it required two men to cut the twine that held the bundles together as the grain was pitched from the rick.  The steam engine was a big awkward piece of machinery and was very heavy.  It was hard on the wooden bridges or culverts, and even though they put heavy boards down for a track, they still crushed through.  Later larger separtors became common and they had big knives to cut the bundle ties, chop up the straw and had powerful blowers to place the straw where the men, usually 4, could stack it.  They always thrashed the oats first and then the wheat.  The farmer wanted the oats straw on the bottom because the cattle, which spent a big part of the winter in the straw lot, would eat the oat straw more readily than the wheat.  Of course it took quite a crew to operate a thrashing ring usually around 24 men.  The old men would hold sacks to catch the grain, younger men would load and haul the grain to the graineries.  It took good strong men to pitch the bundles into the separator.  As time progressed and more thrashing rigs were around the farmers discarded making ricks and the grain was hauled by wagons from the shocks in the field direct to the separators.  The water wagon was a very important part to thrashing.  The steam engine required good pure water.  If the water was dirty or roiled up it would foam in the boiler.  There wasn’t very many wells that could supply the needed water and at times the water wagon would have to go a mile or so to a big pond.  A hand powered pump was used to fill the tank.  The waterman always had plenty of company with a group of boys going along for the ride.  I might say that when the new method of hauling grain direct from the field to the separators that an art slowly went out of existence  The art of stacking grain in ricks.  Thrashing days were always looked forward to, not only to get the grain thrashed and hauled to market but the Big Dinners that was part of the rings.  The women folks worked as hard as the men to prepare the dinners and how well one remembers how a corn fed, buxom gal would stand at each end of the table with a peach limb or fan of some sort to shoo the flies away.  As time went on I saw the transition from the steam rigs to the smaller but more numerous tractor rigs and finally to the combines used today. 

About this time of the year the hay had to be put up.  I never experienced the hand cutting operation for most every farmer had a mowing machine or hired one.  Usually as a boy I ran the sulky rake gathering the dried mower hay into wirrows, there to be hauled or dragged to the stack.  Pitchers would leave the hay to the man on the stack to be stacked so that the rain would not penetrate.  Again the middle or center of the stack had to be kept higher than the outside and the hay had to be distributed evenly.  A platform of rails (rail fence) was made to keep the hay off the ground and cause it to draw dampness and rot.  These platforms were usually 3 rails high and afforded places for rabbits to get under. 

Then there was the job of mowing fence rows, mostly rail fence.  It is sickening to see the condition of fence rows today and how clean and neat they were kept when I was a boy.  Of course plowing ground for wheat took place shortly after thrashing and haying and about wheat planting time came one of the hardest jobs on the farm in those days – cutting and shocking corn.  This was done as a rule just befor the first frost if possible.  It normally was hot for this task started about mid September – The only implement was a corn knife (a blade about 18 to 10 inches long.)  The job was started when the husks on the ears were dry and the leaves started to dry on the stalks.  We would have to protect the arm that gathered the stalks with an extra slave, usually an old overall pant leg and tied down around the wrist and pinned to the shoulder.  The reason for this was to protect oneself from the razor sharp edges of the corn blades.  The stalks were chopped off about 12 to 16 inches from the ground and after cutting an armful it was carried to a “galos” and set up.  The “galos” was made by bending 4 stalks and tying them together.  This was made in the 6^th and 7^th rows, bending a stalk from the 6^th to the 7^th making an “X.”  This had to be made rigid enough to hold he stalks of corn upright.  We always made our shocks from 12 rows wide.  After the shock was completed we would pull the top part together tightly with a rope and then tied together with a string or binder twine.  The job of husking usually started in November and the shocks had to be torn down, laid on the ground and the back breaking job of bending over and picking the corn from the husks took place.  We always seemed to do it the hard way.  We would throw the corn in a pile and befor night, got to the barn and get a team and wagon, load the corn on the wagon, haul it to the crib and of course scoop it off.  Most of the farmers took the team and wagons to the field and threw the corn directly in the wagon, saving the pick-up job.  After a shock was picked, it was carefully sat up again and retied and latter need to feed the cows."

I don't have much to add to this post.  Long hours, hard and never ending work seems to be the life of a farmer and boys growing up on a farm..