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June 25, 2007

Privations of past were even worse, it seems, for those living on farms

“YOU must have grown up in a wealthy neighborhood,” was the way one of my readers greeted me when I chanced to meet him.

“You had gas lights and all the other luxuries, like inside-the-house water pumps,” he asserted. “We had to do our homework and reading under an oil lamp or by candlelight. When we wanted water to drink, or to wash, or to bathe, we had to haul it by bucketfuls from a spring house several hundred feet from the house.”

The revelation made me aware that despite of all the hardships and inconveniences we were enduring while growing up, someone else had it worse.

I never experienced life on the farm. I was oblivious to the many bountiful farmlands that surrounded our towns in those days. My only association with farm-bred youngsters was with acquaintances I had made in Sunday school and church.

They didn’t attend our schools, but had to walk miles in all kinds of weather to their one-room school houses where one teacher would teach eight grades at the same time.

I was always envious when I saw my farm friends arrive for Sunday school by horse and buggy. I was proud when I could hitch a ride with a congenial milkman was he made his rounds through the town, or on a cabbage or produce wagon that was making its way to the curb market.

The only visits I ever made to farms were fun visits. We would romp in the hay, gather seeds to feed the chickens, torment the bulls and chase the cows. I was fascinated by the way horses would shoo off flies and insects by quivering the skin on their legs.

We never realized the extra hardships the farm folk endured and the chores the young folks had to attend to while we were complaining about such things as stacking wood, washing and drying dishes.

The gas lights now seem like a luxury. A woman reader who was raised on a farm recalled to me recently that when she was young they had only one kerosene lamp in the house for light.

“When my older sister was primping for a date,” she said, “she would take the lamp upstairs to dress by while we all waited in he darkness downstairs for her to finish.

The farmer plowed from dawn to dusk with crude machinery and teams of tired horses, leaving the lesser chores for his wife and children to perform. The lesser chores included getting up at sunrise to milk the cows, feed the chickens and gather eggs from the henhouse before toddling off to school. After the long hike home from school there was hay to pitch, manure to spread, pigs and sheep to feed, cows to round up in their stalls and horses to unhitch.

In the summertime there were wagons to load with fresh vegetables and milk to haul over the dirt roads into town. There were corn and tomatoes and other crops to help fathers pick and harvest. Farm mothers would do the canning and preserving.

The hours were long. but the eating was good.

Fun time usually was on the weekends. For the teen-age children there were pie socials on Saturday nights at grange halls or country churches. The young girls would prepare goodies and the young men would bid on the baskets. Whichever basket a boy bought, he would have the treat of the preparer’s company the rest of the evening.

The number of farms has dwindled greatly in the passing years. In those that are left, mechanized equipment has taken over most of the heavy chores. Modern tractors have replaced horses. Growing towns and cities have taken over the once farmlands.

The Amish in the area appear to have the only semblance of the old-time farms.

The memory of the old-time farmers coming into our towns with their milk, eggs and vegetables is something which will always linger with us.



Wally Wachter is a retired managing editor for The Herald.

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