My Ozark Mountain Valley Home - September 1950
by Stan Hitchcock
I remember the taste of an ice cold Grapette, lifted out of
the old soda box full of big hunks of ice broken up, at the old country store
up the road and on top of the hill a mile from our farm. The old soda box sit
on the creek gravel concrete slab front porch of the old store and the store owner would chip up
a 50 pound block of ice every morning to keep the pop cold for when we boys
came out of the hay fields at the end of another hot September day. We spent August and September shocking oats,
baling and hauling in alfalfa hay or cutting corn for silage and putting it
into the upright silos. Lots of folks
don’t know what it is to shock oats, since farm machinery has moved on like
every thing else in life and the old ways pretty well forgotten. Oats, to make oat hay or grain, was cut in
the field by machines called binders.
The binder was simply a machine that cut the oats, gathered it in a
sheath and tied a binder twine around the middle of it. You then went through the field with us boys
as field hands and picked up the individual oat binded sheaves and stacked them
in groups of about six or eight bundles, stood on end with the grain at the
top, topped with a single bundle on top to shed water. It was a beautiful picture of a field
properly shocked and lined up in neat rows for the neighbors to admire when
they drove by. We took a lot of pride in
doing it right and the neighbors would judge the worth of a man by the care and
condition of his fields. The shocks of
oats would stand in the field for several weeks to dry and cure before you
brought the wagons out and hauled them into the barn hay loft. If you decided to harvest the grain from the
shocks, instead of just feeding it as forage,
you hauled the cured sheaves to the community Thrashing machine, which
my dad and a neighbor owned and used to thrash all the surrounding farmers
grain. The old thrashing machines were
an absolute marvel and I loved thrashing time.
We boys would be on the wagons, pitching the sheaves of oats into the
mouth of the Thrashing machine, which would then separate the grain from the
stems and put it into burlap sacks to load up and take home to the farms. The resulting straw stack would grow into a
small mountain before you were through.
We ran the Thrashing machines with an huge old two cylinder John Deere
tractor from the 20’s or 30’s, I never did know the exact vintage but I’ll
never forget the sound pop pop pop’n along, and the whole community of farmers
would be there to help get the crop in.
Best part of it was the Lunch Break!
Boy, what a lunch break it would be as the different farm ladies would
cook and bring food out to board tables on saw horses sit up under the trees to
feed their boys and men. Big jugs of iced
tea, friend chicken, new taters and green beans out of the garden along with
corn, fried okra, cucumbers and sliced tomatoes, and desserts that you can only
imagine. Pies and Cakes and Cookies that
were so good that right now, as I write this, my mouth is waterin’. Eatin’ will never be that good again, but it
once was, and I was there to enjoy it.
All of this farm work was labor intensive and very, very
dirt and dust heavy. At the end of the
work day, in August and September heat, after we had gone to the store at the
top of the hill for our cold drink, we headed for the creek with a bar of soap
and a towel to wash up and cool off.
Nothing ever felt quit so good as that first naked plunge into the
spring fed creek water when you were covered with hay dust.
On our Ozark farm we raised a variety of animals and
therefore a variety of crops. We had
Hereford cows, laying hens, Five gaited and three gaited horses that we showed
at the horse shows and the fairs, a few pigs to butcher, a couple of goats and
assorted wild animals that my brothers and I would find out in the woods and
along the creek and bring home to make pets out of. At any given time you might find a collection
of baby red or grey squirrels, flying squirrels, baby coons, baby rabbits, owls,
hawks and so forth that we would feed and love and turn loose when they grew up
to go back to live in the woods. A real
life Disney adventure! Because of
growing up like that I never was able to shoot Bambi, I just enjoy watching
them as they eat all my dang horse hay.
Sadly, the modern Combine has replaced the old binders and
thrashing machines, one man with modern equipment can do the work of twelve,
the thrashing crews are long gone, farmers seldom get together to reap the
crops of the whole community, the owners of the modern markets don’t chip up
the big blocks of ice to keep the Grapette cold anymore, you would probably get
arrested if you jumped in the creek, naked with a bar of soap, and …..THE
THRESHING LUNCH, UNDER THE TREES IS GONE FOREVER!
Simple solutions for more simple times, but the pleasure of
sharing a day’s work, together with your friends, neighbors and family members
created memories that are still so strong in me today. The family farm is special and it created
special people, people that work and are proud of it, a sense of
neighborliness, a faith born of working the land and seeing the bounty of it, a
toughness to keep going even when the weather, market, government and your own
physical body seems to work against you.
Yessir, we don’t give up, we get up and get going, still climbing the
mountains after all these years. God
Bless Us All and Keep Us Strong.
Stan Hitchcock