Posted by cdmn on February 15, 2021 at 17:54:52 from (96.33.227.18):
In Reply to: farming 100 years ago posted by swindave on February 15, 2021 at 15:35:18:
In 1921 the handwriting may have been on the wall. Grandpa and his neighbors had done well during the WWI years. Wheat being worth $40 per bushel in today's money. He remodeled and added to the house, built a new barn for horses and milk cows. He bought a second-hand 1918 Ford car and traded two cows for a 1914 Fairbanks Morse Model H engine for grinding feed and powering the firewood saw. He became the father of my mother, who was the 6th child. He hired a contractor to do his plowing with an IHC Titan. The rest of his farming was done with horses and pitchforks. They butchered the beef and hog and canned some of it in glass jars. Chickens provided eggs, and sometimes meat for Sunday dinners. Big garden. Wild berry picking parties. They had a summer kitchen used for cooking and laundry, and became a granery when fall came. The kids went to country school about 5 miles away. They had their own horse and buggy. Church and Ladies Aid were the social thing. The country store and post office gave them the bare necessities. The blacksmith shop was perhaps 10 miles away. If a trip to town was necessary, supplies were bought, such as flour, salt, sugar, puffed wheat, oatmeal. Eatons and Sears catalogs, Fuller Brush Man, and Watkins Man. There was a guy who picked up the cream cans from various farms and hauled them to the Creamery 10 miles away. Except in winter, they were hauled to the train station. The wife and kids probably went to town about twice a year. There was a terrific fear of socializing with strangers, brought about by the flu pandemic, and partly by religious fundamentalism.
Ice was hauled in and placed in a pit in the log cabin that served as a pantry. Water had to be pumped for household and farm. Saturday night baths would be in the creek, unless it was frozen. There was a neighbor bachelor, a cousin of sorts, who made himself useful to the whole neighborhood, including bringing the mail home from the Post Office, expecting supper and a visit for his service. And fresh gossip. This guy was always there when pigs or bull calves needed castrating. He was the bell ringer and usher at church. He prepared bodies and built coffins and dug graves for those who preferred the old customs. Maybe he got $10. He was a Sunday School teacher and the head chef at Bible Camp. Threshing time brought the rig and the engine and the neighbors horses and hayracks. Some boys slept in portable bunkhouses or in the hayloft. They got to sample the cooking skills of all the eligible daughters along the way.
The postwar recession was hard on farmers long before the 1930's. But things carried on with little change until I was a kid. Their first tractor was a 1939 John Deere A.
As for books, I'd recommend the series of Foxfire Books.
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