Down on the Farm: Part One

Back in 1949 my mother and father split up. My mother got sick and I went to live with foster parents. Moving from the inner city of Philadelphia to a hundred acre farm in Bucks County was a cultural shock to me. There were lots of chores to do on the farm, and time for quiet walks in the woods. In high school I became a future farmer. It was an isolated existence, but it on lasted for some four years.

When my father left to take a room in downtown Philadelphia things didn’t change too much. He came to visit us at least once a week, and we could visit him at his hotel or Arch Street whenever we felt like it. But, then my mother got sick, and my brothers and sisters and I were placed in separate foster homes.

I ended up on a hundred acre farm outside of Newtown, about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. My mother had told me that growing up on a farm in Georgia was the best part of her whole life. I had always dreamed about living in the country, so I was not too disappointed about the change. Of course, I missed my parents, but I hid the bad feeling of separation even from myself.

I remember my first day on the farm. After introductions I was allowed to go out by myself and check out the place. We were about two hundred yards off the main road. I couldn’t believe how quiet it was as I walked by the barn and checked out the corn shed and chicken houses. The empty space of open fields was unknown to me as I was use to being surrounded by block after block of three story apartment houses, and moving automobiles, trolley cars, and buses. I felt a sense of oneness with the silence right from the beginning.

There were lots of chores to do on the farm. I would get up an hour before it was time to leave for school. My foster father would be up already out in the barn doing the morning milking. He had a herd of some eight to ten milking cows that he milked by hand into a gallon bucket. He would pour the milk into a ten- gallon milk can. There was a milk shed outside the barn with a cooler in which to store the ten-gallon cans. My foster father would take the cans down to the end of our lane and put them on a wooden platform where the milk company would pick them up.

I had to feed the hundred or so chickens that were kept in two separate sheds. I also fed the dozen or so pigs that we kept in a pen near the barn. I gathered the eggs usually several dozen and brought them into the shed at the side of our thirteen-room farmhouse. In the wintertime I also brought in the firewood that we used in the wood burning stove.

After the chores we had a big breakfast of bacon, from the pigs, eggs from the chickens, and homemade biscuits. We would drink fresh milk from the family cows. All most all of the food that we ate came from the farm. We had ducks, and turkeys for holidays. We had grape vines and apple trees. And a big vegetable garden for all our veggie needs. My foster father would slaughter and butcher a calf or a pig at least once or twice a year. I help with the killing of chickens and still remember how we would stick a knife in the throat to bleed them. Also, I remember how the chicken would run around with his head cut off when we killed one with the axe.

After breakfast, I would take a half-mile hike to the bus stop. The bus was loaded with other farm kids who did chores similar to mine before they boarded the bus. When I was in seventh and eighth grade we went to the junior high in Richboro and the bus ride was about a half hour long. High school was in Newtown and the bus ride was cut in half.

At school, I found that there were only a couple African Americans. This was a big change from my Philadelphia school where there were only a couple Caucasians. I felt really embarrassed about living with foster parents and tried to keep the other kids from knowing. I use to shield my papers when we had to fill out information about our legal guardian.

After school by the time we walked home from the bus stop, it would be near five o’clock. I had to feed the chickens and pigs again, gather eggs, and bring in firewood. I would also throw down bales of hay from the upstairs loft, and break the bails apart to feed the cows. I would put a large chunk of hay into the manger in front of each cow. If the milking was not finished, I would grab an extra bucket and a milk stool and help.

All the cows were named and I began milking the gentlest cow, Betsy. I would plank my stool down beside her, and start squeezing gently. As the milk squirted into the bucket, I had to watch that Betsy didn’t raise her tail. If she did, I would turn my back to her and hover over the bucket to keep the milk clean.

A year or two after I arrived on the farm, the milk buyers went to bulk trucks for hauling the milk. In order to ship your milk in bulk trucks, you had to use milking machines and bulk storage tanks. You needed a herd of at least twenty cows to buy all the new equipment and still make a profit. Since we only had eight cows we had to stop selling our milk. The cows were like pets to my foster father. He kept them and we used the milk for ourselves and to supplement the food that we gave the pigs.

Weekends beside the regular chores there was lots of work to do. We had to shovel manure from the manure pile on to the manure spreader. We did this with long tong pitchforks. We would stand on the manure pile and pitch the manure into the spreader. When the spreader was full, my foster father would hook up the old steel wheeled John Deere tractor and we would take the manure out to spread on the fields. Our manure spreader was once pulled by horses and had a front seat. I would ride on the spreader as we covered the field to be available in case the spreader broke down.

We cleaned the chicken houses and put down ground corncobs for clean bedding. We also cleaned the pigpens once every couple weeks or so. We cut firewood on a big circular saw that ran off of a belt hook up to the flywheel of the tractor. It took two men to handle the long logs that we cut down from the woods.

Back then every farm site had a small patch of woods. The woods were joined together at the edge of other farm sites and usually four or more farms shared the same fifty or so acre patch of woods. We would go the woods once or twice a year to cut firewood and fence posts. Mostly we would cut fallen and dead trees. I really enjoyed the work time in the woods and imagined myself a lumberjack out West.

We had around twenty-five acres of meadows for the cows. All of this had to be fenced to keep the cows in. One of our weekend chores was to patch the fence. We would make our rounds with strands of barbed wire, wire cutters, hammers, and staples. We would patch up the fence wherever it needed patching and sometimes replace a bad fence post and splice the wire back to it.

Another of my weekend jobs was shelling corn. We had a little room aside the corn shed where we kept the corn sheller and the shelled corn. I would put two ears of corn into the slots, turn the handle and watch the ears turn in the sheller as the corn came off leaving an empty corncob. I bagged the shelled corn into burlap bags and shoveled the empty cobs into storage bins.