THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Someone recently asked me, “What
did you do
between ‘laying-by’ of crops and time for harvest on the farm? Did you have some time off for vacations?”
Vacation was not a part of our
vocabulary on the mountain farm where I grew up—not for us who lived on
the
farm, anyway. Yes. Our
“city cousins” had a vacation, and
oftentimes spent it with us and other farm relatives in the mountains. For these once-a-year visitors, their week or
two weeks on the farm were to be a time of industry for them—when they
would be
taught how to milk the cows, feed and care for the animals, gather the
vegetables from the garden and the fruit from the trees which defined
our daily
work in the “interim season” to provide food for the table.
Maybe we would find a little
time to go to
the Nottely River that flowed through our farm bottomlands and there
play in
the water and learn to swim.
But there were dangers, too. We
were warned to avoid deep holes and
swift-flowing areas that could easily upset one’s balance and prove a
hazard. And in late afternoon, we would
take our
fishing poles, an adventure the city cousins loved, and go back to the
river to
try our luck at hooking some fish. If it
was a good “biting” day for the fish, we might catch enough for a fish
fry for
supper, always a treat. But I need to
explain that the city cousins were appalled that we had to dig
earthworms—and
handle them, no less—to provide our bait for the fish hooks we used on
a
lead-weighted line attached to a pole cut from the canebreak along the
river. They, no matter how much I taught
them about
baiting their hooks, would never thread the earthworm onto the hook. When cousins were present, I seldom ever got
to fish myself, a past time I thoroughly enjoyed doing (earthworms and
all!). My job was to keep their
fishhooks baited and, if they caught a fish, to remove it from their
line and
place it on the forked stick we used to stash our catch until we went
to the
house to clean our fish and prepare them for the fresh fish fry supper.
But there were other interim
tasks in our
summers apart from entertaining our city cousins who were getting a
little
taste of what farm life was like, even in the more slowly-paced days of
summer. In last week’s column, I told
about the summer session of school and how we had classes at Choestoe
School
(and this was typical of the other country schools throughout Union
County and
the mountain region). We had to go to
school, so the visiting cousins who were out of school because it was
summer
could choose either to go with us to school (visitors were welcomed
then, but
were subject to the same rigid discipline as were we regular students),
or else
they could stay home and follow my father on his many tasks of interim
work
between the time of ceasing cultivation (‘laying-by’) and harvest.
A very necessary task on our
farm was to
get ready for fall sorghum-syrup making, a period of at least six-weeks
stretch
of time. Six hard days a week, my father manned our syrup mill and saw
to
making about 3,000 gallons of sorghum annually, from his own cane
patches and
that of other farmers within our region.
And to get ready for that fall task, there were necessary jobs
to do.
First, a large pile of slabs and
long
firewood had to be hauled and stacked near the furnace of the syrup
mill to
provide fuel for cooking the syrup.
Occasionally, we had a “traveling sawmill,” that is, a sawmill
owned by
someone else that set down for a while to saw timber from our own
forest. The by-products of this operation
were the
“slabs,” or long pieces of bark and outer portions of trees that were
first
sawn off from a log and stacked to the side for just the express
purpose of
using later for fuel at the syrup mill or in our own household winter
fires. These slabs were loaded on the
farm wagon and taken to the syrup mill and stacked neatly for use in
the
furnace. These were especially useful,
since they were cured, for starting the fire.
But because they were cured, they would burn very quickly and
had to be
supplemented by “green” wood.
And this “green” wood, or
uncured wood, had
to be cut from standing trees, usually stunted or less-promising for
timber. The workers used cross-cut saws,
trimmed off limbs with axes, and cut the trees into either furnace
lengths, or
if the wood would be used for fireplaces or the wood cook stove, cut
into
proper lengths for these. Again, this
newly-cut “green” wood would be loaded into wagon and moved to its
destination
near the syrup mill or the woodpile near the house.
With the wood cut, or in the
case of
“slabs,” retrieved from the sawmill, and hauled and stacked neatly
awaiting use
later in the fall and winter, one major “interim” job on the farm was
finished.
Then my father (and other
farmers in our
area) directed their energies and attention to such interim but
necessary tasks
as fence-mending, barn and farm building repairs, and general upkeep,
whether
“cutting the branch or river banks,” (trimming the growth of weeds and
sprouts
that had to be kept under control beside streams), or helping a
neighbor (or
having oneself) a “roof-raising.” And
this did not mean, as is commonly known now, a disagreement or argument
of
unfriendly nature. It was
neighbor-helping-neighbor to put a new shingle roof on a barn or even a
dwelling house, or perhaps to assist in building another corn crib or
peripheral building on the farm. And
another task I’ve left unlisted: cutting
oak timber of good quality, and sawing logs into shingle-length, then
riving
(as this process was called) shingles from the logs, stacking so that
air could
flow through them to dry them, to provide wooden roof shingles for
houses and
farm buildings.
And always there was the
“putting-up,” the
preserving of vegetables, fruits, grains and dried peas and beans for
winter
use. This entailed gathering, canning,
pickling and drying. Sometimes the
processes turned into sociable gatherings as neighbor helped neighbor
with
these food preservation tasks.
Poet Byron Herbert Reece
expressed well in
his poem, “The Stay-at-Home” (from The
Season of Flesh, Dutton, 1955, p. 34) this interim period
between
end-of-cultivation and fall harvest.
There was no time to wander from the farm and take a vacation. Work was demanding and year-round:
“The fields of Hughly held him,
The land where he was born.
With fence to men and cows to
tend
And care of wheat and corn.
He had no leif to wander
Beyond his place of birth,
But often he would ponder
The luring lands of earth.”
And so interim times on the farm
passed,
with necessary tasks accomplished, marked off one-by-one in the long
list of
things to do. Those thus bound to the
soil “Who often thought of going/But had the will to stay”* did just
that: they stayed and they worked. And there was a deep love for the soil, for
the toil, for the ties that bound to the land, the people, independence
and the
way of life.
(*Reece: “The Stay-at-Home”,
lines 13, 14).
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
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