'Our' Family
Sometimes I tell my grandchildren stories about my childhood. They can’t quite get their heads around how different things were back when I was their ages. It sounds so strange to them when I talk about farm kids driving around cars and trucks at the age of ten or twelve - and the (lack of) technology of those days. There were so many routine things we did back then that are no longer done at all today unless you live far, far off the grid. And, many things which were routine for farm kids to do in the ‘fifties would get modern kids in very serious trouble today.
To my grandchildren, my stories are fantastic and somewhat unbelievable. I get that. My lovely 14-year-old granddaughter even wrote a school paper saying how my tales seemed like science fiction to her. Since they do listen and ask reasonable and serious questions I know they really are interested. I always try to be as factual as possible and explain thing which aren’t clear to them, even when they give me those skeptical looks sometimes. On my part it’s hard to see things from their perspective too, but I’ve discovered a mental mechanism which helps me understand; I was my granddaughter’s age in 1955. My grandfather used to tell me stories about HIS childhood which I sometimes found hard to get my own head around too.
He would have been 14 or 15 around the turn of the century in 1900. At that time it was still literally horse & buggy days and many people had never even seen a car since there were only about 4000 in the entire country, and almost all of those were in cities too. Only the wealthy could afford to own a car. My grandfather told me once there was a report that a car was going to pass through a certain place and hundreds of people flocked to see it pass by, no doubt cheering as it did so. Imagine - the word of the car’s passing had gotten there ahead of the car itself!
Not long ago I read a ‘Looking Back’ story in our small local newspaper. In 1915 it was notable news here in this town that someone in North Carolina had decided to drive their new Model T Ford to the way-down-in-Georgia town where I now live to visit relatives. The trip took them three weeks with many flat tires and countless times getting stuck in mud and sand. Each time their Ford had usually needed to be pulled out by those dratted old-fashioned mules or hosses! Not only that, but the car had to be totally overhauled before it could be driven back home. The exact same trip today takes me between 8 and 10 hours over beautifully paved roads with nary a care in the world.
At the turn of the century there were no radios and although telephones had been invented, they weren’t in common practical use until years later, and then only in towns. The same thing with electricity and indoor plumbing, water and sewer systems, etc., etc. My grandparents were part of the 60% of Americans who lived on farms in 1900 when there were only a little over 76 million people in the United States. In 2010 there were over 310 million of us and counting.
My grandparents only occasionally got into ‘town’, perhaps once a month or even less often. There was no reason for them to go since they had almost everything they needed at home. Towns were only what we might consider small villages today. There was no hopping in the car for a quick trip to the supermarket or drugstore. Back then there was the 'general store' and the 'feed store' (for animal feed). In my grandfather’s time, his seventeen mile trip to town was an overnight affair with mule and wagon. The mules had to be rested, fed and watered from time to time too. If he was in a hurry he might ride a horse and return the same day, but it was very hard on the horse. There were no paved roads (as in NONE) until you got to the town streets paved with red clay bricks. Smaller towns didn’t even bother with that!
My siblings and I lived with our grandparents in our early years, and until after the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) finally installed electrical power lines in the mid ‘fifties. Before electricity arrived, my siblings and I still lived much as our grandparents had two and more generations earlier, so we all can testify to living conditions which are almost unbelievable to today's kids.
And, to this day, the REA still operates power grids throughout the rural south. My grandfather always claimed the REA ‘piped in’ the electricity! I suppose that’s true in a way.
Our heat in the winter was by fireplaces and stoves fed by wood which had to be chopped by hand. Toilets were outdoor privies and baths were taken in big tin tubs about once a week, less often in winter. In winter the tub would be placed in front of a roaring fire. The children all shared the same bathwater, heated in pots on the wood stove. Of course there was no air-conditioning. Keeping perishable food was possible only through the use of an ‘Icebox’, which was quite literally that - an insulated wooden box which the ‘iceman’ came around once a week to refill with a 100 pound block of ice in the bottom. In my time the ice was delivered in a truck, but 20 years earlier it had come by mule and insulated wagon. Almost every town of any size (over 5 or 6 thousand population) had its Ice Plant where the ice was produced and stored in buildings insulated with sawdust in the walls until the ice was sold and distributed. There are no ice plants at all like that left today that I know of.
Almost all our food was grown right on the farm. We grew corn, red potatoes, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, okra, cucumbers, onions, squash, several kinds of beans and peas, watermelons, cantaloupes, various fruits, peanuts, sugar cane, turnips, collards, mustard, and probably some other things I can’t think of at the moment. Some of the white corn when dry, was taken to a ‘mill’ to be ground into cornmeal and grits. The miller was paid by a percentage of what was ground, which he then sold. Sometimes we took yellow corn to the miller to be ground into animal feed. For that, the ground corn was mixed with hay and sorghum syrup by the miller after it was ground. The animals totally loved it too!
Cash crops on the farm were cotton, tobacco, yellow corn, syrup my grandfather made from sugar cane and sold for Fifty Cents per gallon, and animals sold at the livestock auction, principally hogs and cows, and occasionally goats. Going to the livestock auctions were always very entertaining trips for the boys in the family!
My grandmother processed the milk from our cows. We drank some of it. But, she skimmed the butter fat from the top of most of the milk after leaving it out overnight in large pans. We kids then churned the butter fat into butter - a very tedious job! My grandmother also turned some of the milk into clabber and whey curds. The skimmed milk and other lactose leftovers were fed to the hogs who could not get enough of it. After the age of nine or ten my job as the eldest boy was milking the cows. Anywhere from one to five milk cows were ‘fresh’ (producing milk) at any one time. My fingers are still tremendously strong to this day from all that milking! My hands would be cramped into claws when I got on the school bus on cold school mornings. And, that wasn't the end of it either, since the cows had to be milked every single day, weekend or not.
My grandmother got up at 4:30 AM every day including Sunday, and by 5:30 AM there would be steaming mounds of hot food on the table. She would holler out ‘Breakfast!’ at the top of her high-pitched voice and there was no sleeping through that. Of course everyone had gone to bed by eight o'clock the night before. Everyone would troop to the table where we’d find ham, sausage, and thick bacon all cooked just right. There would be a platter of eggs, some fried sunny-side-up, others, over-easy or hard, as well as scrambled, two or three dozen cooked up for five to seven hungry people. Everything fried was cooked in pure lard, no vegetable oil for my grandmother. There would be steaming hot coffee boiled in a big two quart enameled pot with fresh egg shells- Granny didn’t cotton to those percolators either! To this day I have never tasted better coffee, not even from the most up-scale cafe bistro I have ever visited. There would be biscuits, cornbread, pie, hoe cakes, grits ('Georgia Ice Cream' according to my grandfather), red-eye gravy, and heaven knows what all else. Pork was always a big item on any of those farm menus. It was very common to find pork chops on the breakfast menu.
To this day, my 95 pound grandmother was the most determined and toughest woman I've ever known by far, both mentally and physically. I'm convinced she could have taken down a thousand-pound mule if she had decided to and faced any situation head on with no hesitation at all. She lived until the age of 75.
The only things we purchased were things like salt, pepper, coffee, tea, spices and flour - and of course white kerosene for the ‘coal oil’ lamps for night time. There were no switches to turn the light on. Instead, you had to feel around for the box of large ‘kitchen’ matches always left next to the kerosene lamp, usually one lamp in each room of the house. All the fragile glass lamp mantels (chimneys) were removed, collected, and carefully washed each week to remove the soot, and the lamp wicks were trimmed then too if need be.
In the deep South, sugar cane syrup was used for sweetening and was made by my grandfather from sugar cane raised on the farm. Farm-grown vegetables were either consumed in season or ‘canned’ in mason jars. We kept 20 to 30 ‘laying hens’ and eggs were coated with ‘egg keep’ (a solution of slaked lime and water) and left out in the open air. Believe it or not, ‘free range’ farm eggs will keep (not spoil) for a year or more if coated that way, right through summer weather too. In the fall or winter hogs and cows were slaughtered for food to carry through until the next year. Meat was salted and smoked and hung in the rafters of the smokehouse until needed. White, red and sweet potatoes, were ‘banked’ in a mound of straw built above ground and then covered with earth. Potatoes would keep through an entire winter and on into the next growing season. If there were any left by the time the new crop came in, they were fed to the livestock which just loved them.
My grandparents kept chickens, goats, hogs, mules, horses, cows, donkeys, and guinea fowl, not to mention a hunting dog and two or three cats. No animals were allowed in the house. Most people today aren't familiar with guinea fowl and don’t even know what they are, so I’m providing a picture. They are the size of a small chicken, taste delicious, roost in trees, can fly like a quail, and have a most peculiar cry, sort of a ‘Pot-raaack’!
Guinea fowl were popular on rural farms back in those days because a flock of them would put out a loud racket if anything strange showed up in the vicinity. They were better than most watch dogs in fact. If you heard the guineas raising hell, it was time to get out the old shotgun and check things out!
Before the 1940s, typical farm wages were from Fifty cents to a Dollar or two per day, and a day went from ‘caint ’til ‘caint’, as in, from ‘from you can’t see until you can’t see’. Even in the mid ‘fifties, farm wages were still $4 to $5 per day. Work was so physically hard and strenuous most people had to consume 5000 to 6000 or more in calories per day in food. There were no fat farmers in those days. None. Nowadays, it seems like very few farmers aren't fat and well-fed.
Times were certainly different back then, and if someone from that time were suddenly transported to modern times, they surely would see our world as truly unbelievable science fiction! That notion got me to thinking; my grandfather’s stories were a bridge from his time to my own, and now my stories to my own grandchildren can be a bridge for them to pass along to their grandchildren in due course. That’s one reason I think it’s important to take the trouble to pass on the oral histories. Not all grandchildren will be interested, but there will be some - like me, and like my lovely young granddaughter to pass her version along to her grandchildren, who in their own turn will continue to pass along the oral histories of our, their family.
And, that's exactly how I think it should be!
* This story is entirely factual and true.
To my grandchildren, my stories are fantastic and somewhat unbelievable. I get that. My lovely 14-year-old granddaughter even wrote a school paper saying how my tales seemed like science fiction to her. Since they do listen and ask reasonable and serious questions I know they really are interested. I always try to be as factual as possible and explain thing which aren’t clear to them, even when they give me those skeptical looks sometimes. On my part it’s hard to see things from their perspective too, but I’ve discovered a mental mechanism which helps me understand; I was my granddaughter’s age in 1955. My grandfather used to tell me stories about HIS childhood which I sometimes found hard to get my own head around too.
He would have been 14 or 15 around the turn of the century in 1900. At that time it was still literally horse & buggy days and many people had never even seen a car since there were only about 4000 in the entire country, and almost all of those were in cities too. Only the wealthy could afford to own a car. My grandfather told me once there was a report that a car was going to pass through a certain place and hundreds of people flocked to see it pass by, no doubt cheering as it did so. Imagine - the word of the car’s passing had gotten there ahead of the car itself!
At the turn of the century there were no radios and although telephones had been invented, they weren’t in common practical use until years later, and then only in towns. The same thing with electricity and indoor plumbing, water and sewer systems, etc., etc. My grandparents were part of the 60% of Americans who lived on farms in 1900 when there were only a little over 76 million people in the United States. In 2010 there were over 310 million of us and counting.
My grandparents only occasionally got into ‘town’, perhaps once a month or even less often. There was no reason for them to go since they had almost everything they needed at home. Towns were only what we might consider small villages today. There was no hopping in the car for a quick trip to the supermarket or drugstore. Back then there was the 'general store' and the 'feed store' (for animal feed). In my grandfather’s time, his seventeen mile trip to town was an overnight affair with mule and wagon. The mules had to be rested, fed and watered from time to time too. If he was in a hurry he might ride a horse and return the same day, but it was very hard on the horse. There were no paved roads (as in NONE) until you got to the town streets paved with red clay bricks. Smaller towns didn’t even bother with that!
My siblings and I lived with our grandparents in our early years, and until after the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) finally installed electrical power lines in the mid ‘fifties. Before electricity arrived, my siblings and I still lived much as our grandparents had two and more generations earlier, so we all can testify to living conditions which are almost unbelievable to today's kids.
And, to this day, the REA still operates power grids throughout the rural south. My grandfather always claimed the REA ‘piped in’ the electricity! I suppose that’s true in a way.
Our heat in the winter was by fireplaces and stoves fed by wood which had to be chopped by hand. Toilets were outdoor privies and baths were taken in big tin tubs about once a week, less often in winter. In winter the tub would be placed in front of a roaring fire. The children all shared the same bathwater, heated in pots on the wood stove. Of course there was no air-conditioning. Keeping perishable food was possible only through the use of an ‘Icebox’, which was quite literally that - an insulated wooden box which the ‘iceman’ came around once a week to refill with a 100 pound block of ice in the bottom. In my time the ice was delivered in a truck, but 20 years earlier it had come by mule and insulated wagon. Almost every town of any size (over 5 or 6 thousand population) had its Ice Plant where the ice was produced and stored in buildings insulated with sawdust in the walls until the ice was sold and distributed. There are no ice plants at all like that left today that I know of.
Almost all our food was grown right on the farm. We grew corn, red potatoes, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, okra, cucumbers, onions, squash, several kinds of beans and peas, watermelons, cantaloupes, various fruits, peanuts, sugar cane, turnips, collards, mustard, and probably some other things I can’t think of at the moment. Some of the white corn when dry, was taken to a ‘mill’ to be ground into cornmeal and grits. The miller was paid by a percentage of what was ground, which he then sold. Sometimes we took yellow corn to the miller to be ground into animal feed. For that, the ground corn was mixed with hay and sorghum syrup by the miller after it was ground. The animals totally loved it too!
Cash crops on the farm were cotton, tobacco, yellow corn, syrup my grandfather made from sugar cane and sold for Fifty Cents per gallon, and animals sold at the livestock auction, principally hogs and cows, and occasionally goats. Going to the livestock auctions were always very entertaining trips for the boys in the family!
My grandmother processed the milk from our cows. We drank some of it. But, she skimmed the butter fat from the top of most of the milk after leaving it out overnight in large pans. We kids then churned the butter fat into butter - a very tedious job! My grandmother also turned some of the milk into clabber and whey curds. The skimmed milk and other lactose leftovers were fed to the hogs who could not get enough of it. After the age of nine or ten my job as the eldest boy was milking the cows. Anywhere from one to five milk cows were ‘fresh’ (producing milk) at any one time. My fingers are still tremendously strong to this day from all that milking! My hands would be cramped into claws when I got on the school bus on cold school mornings. And, that wasn't the end of it either, since the cows had to be milked every single day, weekend or not.
My grandmother got up at 4:30 AM every day including Sunday, and by 5:30 AM there would be steaming mounds of hot food on the table. She would holler out ‘Breakfast!’ at the top of her high-pitched voice and there was no sleeping through that. Of course everyone had gone to bed by eight o'clock the night before. Everyone would troop to the table where we’d find ham, sausage, and thick bacon all cooked just right. There would be a platter of eggs, some fried sunny-side-up, others, over-easy or hard, as well as scrambled, two or three dozen cooked up for five to seven hungry people. Everything fried was cooked in pure lard, no vegetable oil for my grandmother. There would be steaming hot coffee boiled in a big two quart enameled pot with fresh egg shells- Granny didn’t cotton to those percolators either! To this day I have never tasted better coffee, not even from the most up-scale cafe bistro I have ever visited. There would be biscuits, cornbread, pie, hoe cakes, grits ('Georgia Ice Cream' according to my grandfather), red-eye gravy, and heaven knows what all else. Pork was always a big item on any of those farm menus. It was very common to find pork chops on the breakfast menu.
To this day, my 95 pound grandmother was the most determined and toughest woman I've ever known by far, both mentally and physically. I'm convinced she could have taken down a thousand-pound mule if she had decided to and faced any situation head on with no hesitation at all. She lived until the age of 75.
The only things we purchased were things like salt, pepper, coffee, tea, spices and flour - and of course white kerosene for the ‘coal oil’ lamps for night time. There were no switches to turn the light on. Instead, you had to feel around for the box of large ‘kitchen’ matches always left next to the kerosene lamp, usually one lamp in each room of the house. All the fragile glass lamp mantels (chimneys) were removed, collected, and carefully washed each week to remove the soot, and the lamp wicks were trimmed then too if need be.
In the deep South, sugar cane syrup was used for sweetening and was made by my grandfather from sugar cane raised on the farm. Farm-grown vegetables were either consumed in season or ‘canned’ in mason jars. We kept 20 to 30 ‘laying hens’ and eggs were coated with ‘egg keep’ (a solution of slaked lime and water) and left out in the open air. Believe it or not, ‘free range’ farm eggs will keep (not spoil) for a year or more if coated that way, right through summer weather too. In the fall or winter hogs and cows were slaughtered for food to carry through until the next year. Meat was salted and smoked and hung in the rafters of the smokehouse until needed. White, red and sweet potatoes, were ‘banked’ in a mound of straw built above ground and then covered with earth. Potatoes would keep through an entire winter and on into the next growing season. If there were any left by the time the new crop came in, they were fed to the livestock which just loved them.
My grandparents kept chickens, goats, hogs, mules, horses, cows, donkeys, and guinea fowl, not to mention a hunting dog and two or three cats. No animals were allowed in the house. Most people today aren't familiar with guinea fowl and don’t even know what they are, so I’m providing a picture. They are the size of a small chicken, taste delicious, roost in trees, can fly like a quail, and have a most peculiar cry, sort of a ‘Pot-raaack’!
Before the 1940s, typical farm wages were from Fifty cents to a Dollar or two per day, and a day went from ‘caint ’til ‘caint’, as in, from ‘from you can’t see until you can’t see’. Even in the mid ‘fifties, farm wages were still $4 to $5 per day. Work was so physically hard and strenuous most people had to consume 5000 to 6000 or more in calories per day in food. There were no fat farmers in those days. None. Nowadays, it seems like very few farmers aren't fat and well-fed.
Times were certainly different back then, and if someone from that time were suddenly transported to modern times, they surely would see our world as truly unbelievable science fiction! That notion got me to thinking; my grandfather’s stories were a bridge from his time to my own, and now my stories to my own grandchildren can be a bridge for them to pass along to their grandchildren in due course. That’s one reason I think it’s important to take the trouble to pass on the oral histories. Not all grandchildren will be interested, but there will be some - like me, and like my lovely young granddaughter to pass her version along to her grandchildren, who in their own turn will continue to pass along the oral histories of our, their family.
And, that's exactly how I think it should be!
* This story is entirely factual and true.
I love that you have shared these memories with your granddaughter, and with me! I had forgotten a lot of what you wrote about but remembered by reading your words. I loved Papa and Granny although I was a little scared of him. No reason except his immense size and loud voice! He never lifted a finger or his voice toward me but I was still intimidated. I was always a little jealous that you and your siblings got to live with them sporadically but now realize the reasons why and I'm sorry. You are such a good writer and story teller, I wish you'd write a book about your experiences.
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