After stopping by a cousin's house the other day to fix her furnace, I stopped by our old home place that has been turned into a city park for our home town. A grant from Uncle Sam back in the early '80's allowed the city to purchase the property in one piece. There's lots of history to this old barn as it is in this hayloft that I met my bride (of 38 years) to be. I was home on leave from the Marines and met her as a friend of a cousin (girl) that shared rides to college. Putting up hay she was helping my cousin slide the bales back to where I was stacking in the north end of the barn...
This is also the barn I spoke of earlier where a budding country singer named Eddie Arnold performed at barn dances and tried to get one of my aunts to elope back in the 30's or early 40's. Going through some papers my dad was burning years ago, I found the original plans that were used to build this back in the day. I have to defer to my much older brother or an uncle to check the actual year of construction though.
On the north end (right side of the picture) was the old stave silo whose use had been discontinued by the time I came up in the '50's. It has since been torn down, but I retained some of the cast iron components that held circular supporting rods together. The right end also was the cow lot where the dairy herd was let in to the milking stanchions twice daily. What you are looking at here is actually the back side of the barn and directly in front of the sliding door in the middle was the annual manure pile. Built over the course of every winter one wheelbarrow at a time it would then be hauled and spread in the spring. Bedding of the dairy cattle at night consisted of a mixture of straw and sawdust from the huge pile at the sawmill 80 yards to the south of the barn.
Mastering an oversized wheelbarrow at a very young age allowed me to push a heavily loaded load up the plank, dump it and in one sweeping motion drop the handles behind my back and scoot back down the plank towards the barn and the next load tugging it backwards behind me. More than once a loooooong leaping jump had to be made off the plank when the loaded wheelbarrow didn't cooperate with a 10 or 12 year old kid. Many times the leap was NOT fully successful and a right or left leg would be buried up to the knee right at the edge of the pile....
Now one thing that needs to be pointed out here is that the plank was probably only 10" to 12" slab of wood about 3" thick with the center worn down from the years of use and thousands of loads. Attached to the top of a cedar post it rested a good 6 feet up in elevation and the manure would soon be built up to that level. The good thing about freezing weather was that when my balance was lost on occasion a quick side step to the top of the frozen pile was all that was required and not the looooooong leap.
The fattening pen for the hogs was on the outside of the right half of the barn and enclosed with salvaged graveyard fencing. An opening in it allowed them to leave the confines of the smaller area and into a larger muddier area where they appeared to be much happier rolling in the muck. It was in the fattening pen that twice daily during milking, skim milk would be dumped into troughs to help in fattening them up for shipment to the slaughterhouse. The troughs were galvanized water tanks cut in half lengthwise with old plow shares welded to the bottom for stability.
It sure was a trick to get the pails of milk all poured in before the hogs would attack the troughs and more than once knocked the pail cleanly from my hands.... A latecomer would invariably run his snout under the hind legs of an unsuspecting lucky one in the front row. With a huge thrust the frontrunners hind end would be tossed high enough so the other could rapidly get his snout into the fresh milk having slipped from the rear to the front of the line.
The new concrete silo cannot be seen on the West side of the barn, but it is just North of another silding door in line with the one on this side. Nightly I would climb the silo and fork silage into the silage cart rounding it to overfull. Once full, climbing back down the cart would then be backed up slightly and pushed into the center of the barn and turned to go down the middleway to toss an ample supply of silage in front of each cows stanchion. Once emptied, the silage would then be topped off with a scoop of ground feed dead center of each pile. I can smell all the smells as well as though it was yesterday....
This is the South end of the barn where we always butchered beef on the concrete slab. I was about 13 and Dad, myself and Uncle Chippo had just killed a beef and about halfway through skinning we noticed that the Missouri Pacific train that passes literally at the Western boundary of the farm and less than 100 yards to our side had stopped. We thought it was quite strange because a train hadn't stopped for 30 years or more. Dad said something must have happened, but not hearing a crash or anything kept on skinning the beef. Finishing the beef, hanging it in the smoke house and going on about our daily business until lunch the incident was all but forgotton.
Back to the routine of the day, finishing the milking and the barnwork in the evening it wasn't until then we found out that our little old neighbor lady had been hit and killed by the train. I want to say she was 86 or 88 at the time and would daily cross the tracks to visit or take a home made snack or treat to a family that had several small children. It was cold as the dickens, the wind was blowing and covered with coat and scarf, she probably wasn't even aware of the northbound train. Her name was Bracie Scoble, rest her soul.... Its funny what memories an innocent picture will bring to the surface.
At the end of the slab of concrete was a few smaller building mounted on skids was the storage for my uncles DeLaval milking machine parts. One of the old buildings was called the "Herkimer Shack" named after an old "Knight of the Road", another name for a railroad Hobo that would travel the rails jumping a train and stop here and there for a free meal and sometimes to work for a spell then travel on.
Old Herkimer was apparently well thought of by my grandfather and he had the little shanty built for him to stay in on his itinerant visits. He stayed a number of times in an old limestone cave on the East side of the farm boundaried by the Frisco Railroad, and one time while going after the cows and at the same time rabbit or squirrel hunting as a young boy I found a beat up old hatchet inside the cave with a whittled handle. Bringing it home when I showed it to dad, he took one look at it and said: "That was old Herkimer's hatchet, you must have found that in his old cave" !!!! Guess what, Herkimer's hatchet is sitting on my fireplace hearth this very minute and has been there since the brickwork was done.
Annnnnnnd, you know what else is sitting here on the homestead don't you? Yes, Herkimer's Shack is sitting right by my shed stuffed with tractor and motorcycle parts...... It served as a pigeon coop when my two daughters were into homing pigeons for a 4-H project though....
How the heck does a story get so sidetracked anyway !!! ???
Talking about being sidetracked, may as well go one step farther....Dad always said the old hobo's had a marking system on the sides of the rails in line with homes or farms that would either give them a free meal or a little work. Marking on the side of the rails with chalk they let others know whether or not to venture off the tracks. I remember hearing of old Herkimer, Smokey Mountain Red and several others whose names escape me for the moment, but they were certainly a part of our culture and a piece of real American History !! Dad always said there were a lot of really good hard working men and smart men too that had become "Knights of the Road".
This is a pond on the East side of the barn. Many, many hours were spent ice skating here as a youngster. We had the silly old speed skates up in the barn that were decades old and so huge that I'd stick wads of newspapers in the toe and lash up as tight as tight could be to keep them from flopping left and right like crazy. It was nothing to rub a blister the size of a quarter on my heal in an hour or so, but that didn't stop the fun.
Then one year Dad splurged and bought me a pair of girls white figure skates at Goodwill for 25 cents !!! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Not caring that they were white at all because after the blistering pain my feet suffered as a result of the huge and looooooong bladed speed skates this was pure ecstacy !!! Suddenly I could skate backwards as well as spin around and go as fast as the devil !!
I crawled the length on my hands and knees with a 6' ruler to measure it one time. I added it up to be 510' long whether or not that is accurate I don't know, I was only 10 or 11, so who knows for sure....
One time I was out there skating away while dad and uncle Chippo was doing the barn work and low and behold the old boar hog wandered out on the ice about ten feet and there he lay. All spraddle legged and grunting. I had to get my shoes on, go get dad and we roped his hind leg and drug him back to the bank. You heard that saying: "As independent as a hog on ice" ?? Well, let me tell you that hog wasn't going anywhere on his own accord.
Soccer fields now adorn the little 4 1/2 acre corn patch that was just East of the hog pen. The Joachim creek passes just further to the East separating this side of the old home place with the Frisco Railroad and the single largest Silica sand mine in the United States. This was the littlest of the fields and I don't recall anything but corn for sure, but vaguely recall getting the old Massey Harris combine through the tight gate to combine wheat or barley. I'll have to defer to the much older brother on that account too....
The wash water and drain-off from the Silica Sand mine would dump into the Joachim right about here and the fish were deemed hazardous to eat, so I've never fished this section of the creek Northward. We'd sure gig the dickens out of catfish back the other way though. That's another story though.
The big hay field is the clearing just past the fence row in the center of the picture, the cows would travel in and out the lane between these two fields. To the right where the small thicket of cedar can be seen is just the southeastern boundary of the picnic grounds. There annually the local KC Hall would have their picnic there with booths, tents and all sorts of goodies. It was a beautiful rolling hillside bordered by the green water of the Joachim creek and almost totally shaded with towering Red Cedar. Cedar exceeding 20" diameter was the normal tree in here.
There were permanent outhouses built on the top of the hill at the end of the lane, just a bit northward. A vivid memory of mine is one of being the unfortunate first one in to disturb a swarm of bumblebees. I was maybe 6 years old and wearing shorts. They swarmed my ankles and stung my lower legs and one ankle severely. I'm talking major stings, major swelling, major itching (eventually) and wow, did that hurt !!! Like I said, it is a vivid memory.
A couple hundred yards South of the hog pen and a little East of the blacktop rests these picturesque and stately railroad abutments spanning the creek. I don't remember which of the two it was, Frisco or MoPac but one of them was re routed at one time or another and this reminder of the past remains as testimony to hard work and harder times. Plowing the fields to the West of here turns up a definite darker strip of dirt directly in line with these abutments marking the former route of the tracks.
This may have been a sidetrack over to an old lime kiln that was operated on this property in the 1800's. Again, I must defer to the ones in the family blessed with the factual knowledge and not leave this to my conjecture. If I get the needed input, I will edit and include it here for sure. As a matter of fact, if I do find some inaccuracy of fact I will edit those to correct them also.
The abutment on the far side of the creek is at the edge of a good sized pasture that sometimes the cows decided to graze. Many times when they didn't come in to dad's call from the back of the barn, I'd have to walk out the lane, down through the picnic ground and cross the sometimes chilly creek to bring the cows in.
The lead cow during my time was an aggravating old goat and that became here name: "Old Goat". Old Goat was the one with the bell on a leather strap and the others would slowly follow the old Holstein to whatever pasture she deemed to graze. Big cow, small curved horns and more white than black, she was a pretty fair milker and was there for a long time. It was on one of these trips going after the cows and packing the old Mossberg .22 and just East of this abutment about a 100 yards that I found old Herkimer's hatchet in the small cave.
One time in the '70's I was riding my motorcycle right by these abutments when a big old water moccasin was disturbed by the noise and shot across the path at just the wrong time. He shot perfectly through my front tire and instantly went flop, flop, flop through the forks of the motorcycle and my face and forearms became splattered with snake blood and snotty snake internal parts !!!! I didn't stop until I got to the creek to wash the nastiness off myself. Yeah, raw snake doesn't taste good at all. Bummer for me, but really really bad for the snake...
You just gotta wonder how long these monuments to times long gone will remain standing...
I could've taken a hundred pictures and written a hundred more pages but I guess it really doesn't matter one way or another anyway but I do sincerely hope the next generation starts asking questions earlier than I did.
So there you have some more Sunday morning ramblings of someone who should have paid more attention to the older generation to get even a better understanding of where he came from.... At least I have a pretty good idea of where I'm going.... yeah, it'll be warm.