If you were fortunate enough to grow up in a farming community, you learned that harvest times arrived at various seasons throughout the year. “When I was ten, I started thinning corn in the summertime,” Rev. Carlton Andrew Luck Sr. (1932–2008) said to Mieka Brand of the Race and Place Project at UVA. “I worked up there [near White Hall] for the Clarks. Several brothers—Hugh Clark, Jack Clark, and Harry Clark—they all had adjoining farms.
“Thin corn, pull weeds out of it, and after that I started working in the hay fields. Oh, that was work; that was hard work. Ten-hour-day for a quarter. Good money. It was all I needed. I spent it every day. Believe it or not, I would walk two miles after I’d get paid and buy me a 12-ounce Pepsi, get a Mounds candy bar, and one package of chewing gum. The store, Albert Moses’ Service Station [near the corner of Pea Ridge Road and White Hall Road], was about two miles from my home. When I wasn’t thinning corn, I was getting up hay. And I did it until I started high school.
“In the fall of the year,” recalled Rev. Luck, “when they cut the corn—they had big corn fields—[the corn was put up in shocks and left in the field to dry.] My grandmother used to go there to work. Spend the fall and more or less the winter sitting out there in the cornfield shucking the corn. She’d shuck it, and then they would pick it up and put it away.”
“People in the older days were close,” said Virginia Wood Sandridge (1917–2013) who grew up on Walnut Level Farm near Mountfair, VA. “If one family said they were going to make apple butter, two or three families would come in together and help peel apples, make apple butter the next day. Then the other family would turn in and make apple butter, we’d all just work together. We borrowed the kettle from Henry Foster and we’d make two kettles of apple butter a year. You’d stand and stir that old apple butter and sometime you wouldn’t take it off ’til eight o’clock at night. It was getting dark.
“Oats and wheat were thrashed [by Phil and Totsy Wood from Boonesville.] They had an old thrashing machine and would go around and thrash for those who had a farm. Each job could take two or three days. Mother would have some of them to spend the night. He had three men with him, and Daddy hired quite a few people. They would spend the night in the barn, sleep on the hay. Get up in the morning, and go to the water tank up there in the barn yard to wash their face and hands. They said if they could have two meals a day, they could make out. Aunt Martha Jackson helped Mother to cook for the work crew and they would give them breakfast and then dinner. She had 17 men to feed.
“On the farm we had an icehouse, and it was deep. Dad’s shop was upstairs with the icehouse underneath. Every fall when it got real cold, they would go down on the river and cut ice and kept hauling ’til they filled it up. The blocks of ice were different sizes. Some of them you’d have to cut ’em in two before you could put ’em in the bucket to lift them up by a chain pulley in the ceiling up in the shop. I’ve gone down that old ladder and gotten ice and put it in a bucket and hooked it on to that chain. Another one of us would stand up there and pull it up. Let me tell you, in the summer time we had the best ice cream you ever ate. Oh, it was something else.
“We had six to eight hogs to butcher every fall. It was 13 of us; took a lot of meat. My grandmother always made lye soap with the chittlins out of the hog. Daddy, Grandma and Mother would take those chittlins down to the river. We would help too, but it nearly made us sick. Open up those chittlins and wash them and take ’em back in a tub. In the old kitchen, they made a fire in the fireplace and put the chittlins on there and made homemade soap; lye and chittlins together turned out to make lye soap. You’d cook it down and let it set overnight. Then block it off in little blocks. It was something to see. Those overalls and things they had to wash on the farm, they couldn’t use the powder that we use today.”
“My dad was a farmer,” said Clyde McAllister (1923–2019), “but when it was time to pick apples or peaches, they would hire themselves out. My sister’s husband would put together a working crew and go to the orchards. They had something they called a shanty, like barracks, and they would stay there while they were picking the fruit. I’m talking about back there in the early 1930s. Lumber, saw mills had them, too.”
“A [sorghum] cane mill came to our home every year,” said Emory Wyant (1911–2001), “and I remember making molasses. That was a yearly thing. We had cane every year. We made a lot of cider, too, and made our own vinegar. Yeah, you take apple butter and sorghum molasses, that’s what people lived on almost. And buckwheat cakes.”
Sentimental illustrations of Thanksgivings-past do warm hearts, but they overlook many of the hands which labored to bring in the sustaining harvests. A familiar 1897 hymn by prolific songwriter Johnson Oatman Jr. encouraged one and all in this way: “Count your many blessings, name them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done.” And be thankful.
Follow Secrets of the Blue Ridge on Facebook! Phil James invites contact from those who would share recollections and old photographs of life along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Albemarle County. You may respond to him at phil@crozetgazette.com. Secrets of the Blue Ridge © 2003–2024 Phil James
The post Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Harvest Time: Reaping the Good Fruits of Hard Labor first appeared on Crozet Gazette.