PART SEVEN Oral Histories and Family Memoirs - Mountain Light ...

I was married February 4, 1908 when I was nineteen years old to John in our Trinity Lutheran
Church in here Endicott. We settled on a small farm near town, later moving to another place. First we
had to build a house, then a barn, and drill a well on top of a hill. It never went dry and is still there and
we also put up a windmill. At first I pumped the water and carried it in the house. Later we put up a
reservoir and piped the water into the house. I carried many a five gallon can of water to our hogs. When
fieldwork began I did chores before my little boys were old enough to do them.
We also built a nice big stone cellar with two partitions, one for milk and fruit, and one for
potatoes, apples, and garden foods. I can still see those big pans of milk on a long table with thick cream
on them. Once a week the milk was skimmed and I made butter with the cream. Sometimes ten pounds of
butter was formed in pound forms and brought to the store to exchange for groceries. Charlie Wakefield
was our store man, he also handled clothing and shoes. I also did a lot of canning. My fruit cellar looked
like a grocery store. I did all the canning at night when it was cool and my children were asleep. I was
very tired at night and when I put my babies to bed, I usually would lie down with them for a few
moments and fell asleep before they did. But after they were all asleep, I got up and did another day‟s
work canning fruit, vegetables, or sewing. I make all my children‟s clothing except overalls which we
bought from Charlie Wakefield.
Butchering time in the winter was another big event. Some neighbors came at dawn, as soon as
daylight came. Water was heated outside in a scalding trough. We butchered as many as ten hogs at a
time. By noon they were all hanging outside to get cooled off or cut up into hams, bacon and backbone,
spare ribs and tubs of tenderloins to be ground up for sausage. The hearts and head with eyes removed
were cooked up for headcheese and liversausage. By night, 10:00 o‟clock or 11, all was done by that time.
The children could skate on the floors.
The next day the fat from the hogs was rendered and make into lard. As much as 25 gallons of
lard, nice fresh lard, was put into the cellar. This went on for three or four days of work. I made a brine of
boiling water, brown sugar, and salt, and saltpeter, strong enough to hold up an egg, to cure the hams and
bacon. It took two or three boilers full of this solution to fill up a fifty gallon barrel of meat. After six
weeks of curing the hams, they were smoked in our little smoke house, as we called it. Then the meat was
put in sacks and put in the cellar for use all summer. There were tubs of sausage smoked and hung in the
smokehouse till it was all use up. Some of it was canned.
On one of those occasions my little boy Elmer, who was seven or eight years old, wasn‟t feeling
good so he stayed home from school. Since butchering was planned, everyone being so busy my little boy
was up and down looking pale, but not complaining of much pain. The next day he became worse and I
called our good Dr. Dan Henry. He came and took a look at my boy and said he was sure it was his
appendix and that he had to go to the hospital. This was in January—bad weather and bad roads. When he
was on the operating table it was discovered that his appendix had burst two days before. He was very
sick for ten days, but the Lords spared his life.
One other time in the summer towards evening, my little boy Harold who was about two years
old then was missing. We had a big dog, Rover, who was his companion. His Dad, Carl, and I started out
looking for him. I was cutting meat for supper when told Harold was missing. We went in different
directions over the hills and found him. He had followed the dog over the hill into a hollow place and was
lying there fast asleep, the dog beside him. I was still holding the butcher knife.
I raised big gardens. An early garden was close to the house and late garden with potatoes,
watermelon, and cucumbers out in the field away from the house. Sometimes I got up early while my
children were still asleep to hoe my potatoes. It was quiet and peaceful with the fresh dew on the
wheatfields and garden smell. Nothing I liked better with only the sun coming up over the hills and blue
sky. Chickens laying eggs and back by milking time. When fieldwork began the chores were added to my
household duties.
As the years went by, I must say those were the happiest days of my life. I had my little family
around me playing in the big yard under two big trees, birds singing, no outsiders bother as we lived back
over the hill, off the road. Once in a while the Watkins man came through. I bought a good supply of
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