Goerwitz

By Sam Goodwin

MONTHLY OUTLINE: FARMING THROUGH THE SEASONS

• DECEMBER -- Cutting and Hauling Wood
• JANUARY -- Daily Chores (still Cutting and Hauling)
• FEBRUARY -- Cutting, Hauling and Storing Ice
• MARCH -- Finish Up Cutting Wood and Make Maple Syrup
• APRIL -- Cope With Mud - Saw and Split Wood
• MAY -- Spread Manure, Plow, Harrow and Plant
• JUNE -- Weed, Cultivate - Cows Out To Pasture - Pick Wild Strawberries
• JULY -- Cut, Dry, Store Hay - Pick Raspberries, Peas, etc., From Garden
• AUGUST -- Harvest Oats, Pick Blackberries, Blueberries and Early Apples
• SEPTEMBER -- Dig Potatoes
• OCTOBER -- Gather, Sort and Store Apples - Dry and Thrash Beans
• NOVEMBER -- Butcher Surplus Animals, Preserve Meat - Swamp Roads in Woods

GENERAL COMMENTS

I guess it is common knowledge that many New England farms were abandoned starting with the Civil War in 1861. The reasons for it also are no secret. A farm, almost by definition, included livestock, and livestock had to be fed, watered, etc., at least twice a day, even on Sunday when "our farmer" didn't work. No doubt, many a farm boy was lured away from the farm to a factory job in town, just by the fact that he could sleep as late as he wanted to Sunday morning.

Men and women to whom farming was the only natural way of life were lured to the prairies, where the land didn't have to be cleared of trees, rocks, etc., but merely ploughed. (There is really nothing wrong with New England soil; you just have to mine it out from between the rocks.) Still many stayed on for generations. Some ever prospered. They worked hard. They developed a sense of how to do things right and passed that sense on to their sons and daughters.

A big part of doing things, was doing things in season. Obviously, if you didn't plant and harvest on time, you didn't get as good or as big a harvest. But there was a lot more to it than that, and that is what? I shall attempt to describe in this article.

I believe that what finally put most small, diversified farms out of business in the nineteen thirties was laws passed in various states in the name of sanitation, making mandatory such things as electric refrigeration of milk. If the state legislature didn't act, the processing industry did, simply refusing to buy anything not handled in the approved, standardized way. If a farmer was not on a power line and couldn't afford to pay the extra cost of getting the line extended, he became a subsistence farmer, losing money every year, or he moved away.

Frequently the land and buildings were left in the hands of the bank for unpaid mortgage or for unpaid taxes. When someone's house burned down the homeless family could obtain the abandoned farm, sometimes without a down payment. In spite of lightning, careless smokers in barns, crumbling chimneys, and other destructive forces, there were always more houses than there were families to occupy them. Until this time even though the farm buildings were abandoned, the land was frequently bought or rented and worked by a hard working farmer in the neighborhood. In the nineteen thirties a lot of fields and pastures were left to revert to forest.

Roads were abandoned and the few remaining farms became inaccessible and practically worthless. But, trees grew fast and soon the land was worth something again for: paper pulp, spools, toothpicks or firewood. After all nobody expects a wood lot to be accessible. Building your own road was part of the deal.

Of course the seasons didn't always do what they were supposed to do. A very dry, very wet, or cold summer meant trouble for obvious reasons. But, a very warm winter could mean trouble in a way that I will describe. Still I believe that for the farmers who did it right, there were enough good years to carry them through the occasional bad year.

CHORES

Every farm had animals before automobiles became widely used. Even the preacher, merchant, teacher, doctor and lawyer kept a carriage and horse in the quaint little barn in town, with its little hay door upstairs over the main door. The ones still standing are usually garages today. Some, however, have been converted into apartments. The reason for mentioning this is that every animal had to be attended to a least twice a day (horses three times a day), even on Sunday when our straight-laced Yankees "didn't work."

What do I mean by "attended to"? Well, our farmer had to feed his cows, horses, sheep, hens and pigs. He had to make water available to them. This might be a fairly easy matter of letting them out into the barnyard, where he pumped or raised water by bucket and boom from a well into a watering trough. At other times, for one reason or another, it might mean bringing water in buckets to each animal. A horse or cow might drink as much as five gallons at one time.

Then every animal had to be fed: Hay, grain or meal to every horse and cow, plus lesser amounts to feed the sheep and hens. Swill and grain for the pigs.

Then there was the charming task of cleaning the stalls and heaving the manure out the window onto the "dung heap" and putting down fresh bedding for each animal. (Bedding might be straw, sawdust, or as my father used, shavings from a spool mill.)

While doing all these chores, a good farmer would be constantly checking each animal for signs of sickness. Plus, checking the hen house for holes or cracks through which a weazel or other small, bloodthirsty neighbors, might get in and make a meal on chicken blood.

Then our farmer took his daily "harvest." The cows had to be milked, by hand (each cow taking ten minutes or more) and the hen house combed for eggs. Let us assume that our farmer had a small operation: two horses, four cows, a calf or two, about six sheep, two pigs and maybe a dozen hens. If, you dear reader, are fascinated by such problems, you may attempt to figure out how many hours our Yankee Farmer devoted to "chores" every morning before he brought the milk and eggs into the kitchen and sat down to breakfast. Some farmers got up as early as four A.M. In the winter this meant eating breakfast by lamplight and doing chores by lantern light, meanwhile being very careful not to set hay or bedding on fire. In December and January he usually harnessed up his horses and got into the woods, just as it was getting light enough so he could see the trees he was to cut. Since it might start getting dark around four P.M., forcing him to come home from the woods, getting up at four, or five o'clock at the latest, helped him to keep his chores, and therefore his "livestock," on a consistent every-twelve-hour schedule. More contented cows meant more milk.

Are you exhausted yet? Remember this is merely what he had to do twice a day, even on Sunday when he "didn't work."

In case you were wondering, the farmer's wife, daughter, hired girl, old-maid aunt or sister—whoops! I meant to say unattached female relative—worked at least as may hours as the men. In earlier days there was always spinning, weaving and sewing to do. But even after textile mills and ready made clothing industry took over most of that kind of work, women still had an endless amount of cooking, cleaning, washing, bed-making and mending always in front of them. They said, "The Farmer works from sun to sun, but, Women's work is never done."

Women's work was less dirty than men's and women were less likely to be injured by an encounter with an out-of-control animal (or machine). Still theirs was more boring and confining which, included at least one hazard, serious but usually not recognized.

Preparing three big, hearty meals a day for men doing heavy physical work, was almost sure to give a woman a "stout" figure.

It sounds paradoxical, but the woman who was able to "lighten" her work did so by doing more or better work than she had to. She honed her skills by making simple, sometimes very frugal, meals more attractive. Deserts were especially susceptible to being treated as works of art. In-season fruits, berries, tomatoes and other foods might be skillfully preserved as jams, jellies or simply as canned berries in water and sugar or plain old apply sauce.

A woman could leave a more enduring monument to her taste, resourcefulness, and self-discipline by designing and making a patchwork quilt. Usually several women were involved in each quilt.

CUTTING AND HAULING WOOD

I can assure you that growing up on a farm in central Maine in the late twenties and thirties is not an experience I would ever choose to go back to. Still, I do regret the loss of certain aspects of that life. In particular, I regret the fact urban and suburban America has forgotten seasons. I don't mean the four seasons of the calendar, but rather the seasons for doing certain things, for example, a season to pick wild strawberries, followed by haying which is followed by picking wild raspberries.

If someone should ask you why the "Old Time Yankee Farmers" in days of horses and oxen, rather than truck and tractors, did their wood cutting and lumber cutting in the winter, I suspect your answer would be, "Because, in winter they couldn't do anything else," or something close to that.

Now it is certainly true that with two feet of snow or frozen ground they could't plow, harrow, plant, cultivate, weed or harvest—the activities most widely associated in our minds with farming. Still, I am sure that our "old time farmers" were never at a loss for something to "keep them out of mischief."

If he had no woodlot and bought his firewood from a neighbor who had one, I'm sure he could have found plenty to keep him busy thoughout the hours between morning chores and evening chores. (Just as the Gloucester fisherman who only fished in the summer certainly didn't hibernate in winter, but mended nets, sails, riggings, boats, etc.). So, like the fisherman, our farmers repaired their wagons, plows, manure spreaders, rakes, harnesses, horse blankets and everything else in need of repair or preventive maintenance.

So, to get back to our original question: Why was wood-cutting for the fire and lumber cutting, maybe to sell or maybe for the addition to the house, nearly always done in the winter?

I cannot speak for all of New England (or "Yankeeland"), but having grown up in the interior of Maine, near the edge of the Great Woods that combine all the way to the Canadian border, I can tell you quite a lot about why and how those operators of small, rocky, and largely unspecialized farms interacted with and used each season as it came and went.

Some time between mid-May and mid-October take a "drive" into the country that I am talking about. There are still farms but only a fraction of as many as a hundred years ago. There are sizable tracts of woods, some that have always been woods, and many that were once fields or pastures. Park your car on the edge of the tract of wooded land and take a walk. If the ground is level, it is probably also wet and spongy. It may even be a real swamp with clusters of four or five trees growing on a little island surrounded by water a few inches deep. You don't really want to walk very far in this wet stuff, so you start up a slope for higher and dryer land. The chances are you will be picking your way between obstacles. There are stumps from the latest cutting, some two feet in diameter. There are probably a few rotting trunks of trees that couldn't wait for the next visit of the chainsaw and blew down. Very likely there are lots of rocks, some standing up as high as your knee or higher. (Remember the Glacier reached to Long Island and Cape Cod.) Finally where there are no other barriers the ground itself often resembles an ocean on which two foot waves froze. These little humps or waves are called "cradle-knolls." Now if you are a farmer with horses and want to cut trees and haul them out, what are you going to do?

Don't assume help's on the way. In late October and November the puddles, the swamp, and the ground itself all freeze almost as hard as the granite boulders with which they are strewn. Then without getting your feet very wet, you can walk in with an ax and shovel and clear or "swamp" a road. You ignore most of the cradle-knolls, rocks less than about eighteen inches high and small bushes. You cut a few saplings, knock off the tops of the steepest cradle-knolls and pick your way between the larger obstacles.

If you don't have more pressing concerns, you will probably cut a few trees, have the horses shake, or, (in Mainese "twitch") the logs into a pile from which they can be rolled onto the sleds. This pile is called a "long-yard."

(This seems an appropriate time to explain that a "log" is always round, not split, and at least five feet long. A round piece of a tree trunk four feet long is a "bolt." Any piece of wood smaller than that is a "stick" or a "chunk" or "junk." You don't burn "logs" in your stove or fire place. You burn "sticks," diameter up to about six inches, or "junks" whose diameter may approach and occasionally equal the length.)

Around the first of December the next wave of help arrives, permanent snow. When I was growing up in Maine, we usually didn't talk about "inches" of snow. Snow came and was evaluated in "feet." As soon as you got a foot or a little more, your horses could pull a pair of bobsleds over the road that you cleared. Nature has given you the material to level off the humps and fill the hollows. The horses and bobsleds now make their own road.

Now I suppose I have introduced a new mystery. What the heck is a "pair of bobsleds"?

A pair of bobsleds is basically a winter wagon with a front sled and a rear sled taking the place of front wheels and rear wheels. The front sled has a wagon-tongue; the rear sled is pulled along by a pair of crossed chains. A load of logs is rolled into the pair of bobsleds and bound at each of its four corners with special chains, believe it or not called "corner-bind-chains," and held together by a long chain around its middle. For hauling smaller pieces such as "limbwood" a flat bed rack is secured on top of the two bobsleds making the whole arrangement more like a wagon. Each bobsled is about four feet wide and six feet long. Loaded, a pair made a respectable load for two horses, as long as there were no hills too steep. Naturally there were larger sizes for hauling bigger loads of logs and smaller ones for such loads as maple sap. The logs were hauled to a site near the farmhouse and unloaded into a big pile to be "worked up" into fire wood later. After a week or two of this, the flatbed rack was placed on top of the two bobsleds and a smaller "lumb-wood" was hauled out.

There was another method of cutting and hauling. That was to cut everything into four-foot lengths. This was called "cord-wood." The man who cut it stacked it into neat piles four feet high. (Four feet by four feet by eight feet make a cord.) This method was less efficient but it made it possible for the owner of the wood to pay the cutter and hauler by the cord. The use of cord-wood determined the three standard lengths of fire-wood. A four foot stack of cord-wood could be cut into twenty-four-inch pieces, three sixteen-inch pieces, or four twelve-inch pieces.

Remember, the chain saw had not been invented. Every cut had to be done with human muscle power. The larger logs had to be cut with a two man crosscut saw and the smaller pieces with a wooden framed bucksaw. By the nineteen thirties a bow saw with a tubular steel frame was getting more and more popular and being used for bigger and bigger cuts. Now one man could do a lot of work that had required a two-man team.

CUTTING, HAULING AND STORING ICE

After cutting and hauling wood for all or most of December and January, our farmer would usually drop that work around February. Then he would turn to cutting and hauling ice from the nearest pond. He had no electricity, so the best way to keep the milk and other things cool in hot weather, was to put them in an ice tank. If he ran out of ice before the hot weather was over, he could lower cans of milk into the well or he could get a minimal degree of cooling in the cellar.

Every cellar had a tier of "slat shelves" hung from the floor joints above. Eash "slat shelf" was made up of two one-inch-by-three-inch boards with a space between for maximum ventilation. The farmer's wife would put the milk into shallow pans and place the pans on the slat shelves. She would cover the pans with a cloth to keep out dust, etc.

Since the cellar was only a little cooler than the outdoors, the milk might sour in the hot or humid weather. It was widely believed that thunder and/or lightning caused the milk to sour or "curdle." If there was a piano player in the family, it would sometimes be claimed that a spirited rendition of "The Storm" would have the same effect. Sour milk was not wasted. A variety of cheeses could be made from it, the simplest being cottage chesse. Anyway, whatever people couldn't eat, pigs usually could.

To prevent reverting to this primitive technology as much as possible every farm had an ice house. It was supposed to be located in a shady place. It was probably about two stories high, had a few windows and, instead of a door, a narrow opening running from the ground to the roof. It had a side-room inside where sawdust was stored, and every winter "cakes" of ice were stacked and packed in sawdust, hopefully to last until about Labor Day.

Depending on what kind of winter it was, the ice on the millpond or beaver pond might be anywhere from twelve to thirty-two inches thick by the first of February. Sixteen to eighteen inches was about normal for an average winter.

BOBSLEDS

Imagine a plank of hardwood (probably maple or oak) three inches thick, by ten inches wide, by six or seven feet long. You stand the plank on its edge, then mark off and saw a curve into one end, making the front end of a sled runner. Then you do exactly the same to the second plank. Thus you have a pair of runners. Space them four or five feet apart, secure another plank across the top, half way back, using nuts and bolts plus corner brackets for strength. Now put another crosspiece, across the front end, but in such a way that it can turn up and down, and you affix a wagon tongue. Now you put another plank on top of the one in the middle and secure it with a single pin in the middle so that it can swivel to right or left. This is called a "bunk." You have more wood, therefore, more weight than you need in the runners. Carefully cut away most of the wood that doesn't add to the strength. That is your leading bobsled. The trailing bobsled is exactly like the leading one except, it has no wagon tongue.

You have one more job to do. You take the bobsled to the blacksmith. In his own secret way he fits strips of wrought iron to the bottoms of the runners, using the same method that he does to stretch iron tires onto wooden wagon wheels. He also cut curved iron stakes on the ends of each bunk. These will serve as sockets into which you put stakes to keep your load from rolling off. Now iron rings are attached to the ends of the runners, so that two chains, each crossing diagonally from the rear corner of the leading sled to the opposite head corner of the trailing sled will serve to keep the second sled following closely behind. One more iron ring is attached in front. This will hold the "evener" or "whiffle tree" by which the horses pull. One more refinement is useful though not necessary: On each side a rigidly fixed two-by-four runner from the leading bunk to the trailing bunk. These serve two functions. First, when going down hill empty, they keep the trailing sled a respectful distance behind the, leading sled. Second, when going around a curve, they keep the two bunks parallel, turning together.