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| 1952 picture of the last farm the author lived on in Missouri during the 1930s. |
Since I grew from
eleven to fifteen years of age during the time we lived in that little
farmhouse a quarter mile south of Bona—the most formative years of any young
life—I shall always remember it as “home,” although the old house was long since
been moved back from the road to the woods and a new house built in its place.
It was a grey,
weathered little clapboard house shaded by several maple trees in the
yard. It had but three rooms—not
counting the outhouse that was out past the chickenyard—a living room and a
bedroom across the front and a kitchen/dining room in back that had a porch on
each side. There was only a small roofed
porch on the front facing the road so there was not much room out there to sit
in rocking chairs or swing in the evening and watch the world go by. That did not matter much. Nothing went down that old dirt road in the evening
anyway. You might as well be sitting on
the back porch to enjoy the cooler evening air.
There was no
electricity or running water in the house.
We used coal oil lamps and we carried water in a bucket from the deep
well in the yard. My father did build
Mother a kitchen counter that had a sink that drained out into the yard so you
could dump a wash pan or dishpan without taking it to the door.
Beside the back
porch there was a smokehouse to the north.
Out beyond there, past a large black walnut tree and the chicken house
was the two-hole outhouse. On the other
side of the backyard there was a path that led past the woodpile, some hutches
where we raised a few domestic rabbits, and down to the stock tank and the
small barn.
The barn had
originally been a two-story log cabin.
When it was converted into a barn, lean-to sheds were built on each
side; one with stalls for a team of horses or mules and the other with milking
stanchions for the cows. In the center
was a corn crib and there was a small hayloft.
The stock tank
outside the barn was a large round metal tank about three feet high and ten or
twelve feet in diameter. The water was
supplied by a pipe from the deep well in the house yard. The tank was large enough that we sometime
jumped in it for a swim on a hot summer day or had a bath down there if we had
not been swimming in the creek for a while.
In winter we had a bath in a wash tub by the black iron wood cookstove
every Saturday night. In summer when we
had been going barefoot (which was all the time except on Sundays or when we
went to Greenfield) we had to wash our feet as well as our hands and face every
night before we went to bed.
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| Single cylinder pump |
We had a pump
house with a gasoline engine for the reason that our well was unusually
deep—two or maybe three hundred feet, I think—which meant that it took a lot of
force to work the long-handled cast iron pump.
It was just possible to pump a bucket of water for the house by hand,
but for topping off the stock tank or pumping several buckets of water for
Mother to wash clothes, the pump was rigged to a primitive one-cylinder gasoline
engine with big cast iron flywheels on each side.
Now, that old
putt-putt engine was a bane of we boys’ lives.
Starting it was a hazardous process.
After connecting the coil and a dry-cell battery, it was necessary to
squat down, hold one of the valves open with your left hand to release the
compression, and crank the flywheels with the right hand. When you had the heavy wheels spinning pretty
good you had to let go the crank handle, release the valve, and if you were
lucky the engine would cough and start. It
very often did not start and the flywheel would kick back like an upset mule. It could break your arm if you did not let go
of the flywheel handle in time, something like a Model T would do. When it did that to me, I sometimes kicked
that old engine back if I happened to be wearing shoes at the time.
Out across a small
pasture from the barn there was a “woodlot” on that little farm—two or three acres
of woods left when the farm was cleared so there would be a handy supply of
firewood to cut. It was a great place
for us boys to practice camping out.
Richard and I would sometimes take an old quilt up in those woods and
make a tent. Then we would build a
campfire and kill a rabbit or a squirrel.
We rarely slept out there at night, however, since it was quite a way to
go to get to the house if something scared us—which it sometimes did after we
had been telling ghost stories.
Hearing about the conditions under which my father's family lived and my little grandmother cooked and cleaned and raised her children, I am overwhelmed with humility at her strength. Grandma had had a taste of "modern" life in Vancouver and Kansas City with electricity, running water, and flush (if not inside) toilets. Granted, most folks in the Ozarks lived that way and she was raised in what we would consider primitive conditions, but being a woman in those days, especially during the Great Depression, required grit and she had it in spades.
