Watch the Interview

Short Version (20 minutes)

(20 minute interview)

"JH" - Junior Harwood

"TH" - Tiffany Hall

JH- “I am Junior Harwood.”

TH- “And you were born when?”

JH- “I was born July the 3^rd, 1923.”

TH-“And you’ve lived here your entire life?”

JH- “I was born on Cleveland Avenue, I was born there, so it stayed in the family for all these years.  Hopefully it will stay there for many more.  It is hard to believe that I had the only house here and now this is a full street right all the way up to Church Street.  I didn’t figure that anyone would want to live here. It was all pasture, you know. You know where the White Rocks over there in Bennington? Well, it was kind of irony when you stop to think about it. That mountain was a fire when I was born. I never even gave it a thought as to what I would turn out doing and it wound up that this was my district for forest fighting. Yeah, for the state. I’ve worked for them for 24 years. It was just like, like it was born to be there. That’s the way we always looked at it and the way I always looked at it. I had a big district. But it was hard. It was dirt roads, dirt everything. No sidewalks or nothing like that.

They had a horse, a team of horses that would come out and they had a hook up where they would get some of the stuff where they could get off of the road. They would try to plough it over to get rid of it, just a little bit anyway. There used to be a lot more snow than what we had this winter. They had a plough that they could hook up to plough off the sidewalks, why should they bother with anything else because most people didn’t have a car, they had a horse. And the horse, they could hook it on to wherever they wanted to go and that’s all there was too it. The worst I had ever seen it we couldn’t go to school. We went over and started shoveling right over by the school house and we shoveled all the way up the hill and all the way back over to where the road comes out and still comes out in the same place over on the main road, Route 7, 7A now, it used to be Route 7. That’s where we’d come out right there, and we shoveled all the way there. Now, there was a gang of us but that was still a lot of shoveling.

Chores; Helping on wash days. It was done by a, uh, (hand) machine that you put your water in and run the machine up and down, you know what I’m talking about.”

TH- “A washboard?”

JH- “Yeah, you sat right there and pumped them until they were clean. Of course, we had to do that too, everybody worked back in those days. I enjoyed it.

Food; you lived on, if you could, like fish. There’s a really good trout stream right out back. We caught a lot of trout back there. Then, come hunting time, we had rabbits and deer that big rascal came from there and this one too, they were shot…and I got a whole box full of horns back there. I didn’t have them all mounted but you can see that the moose horns right there. Look at the size of those. You had to, you still have to try to get drawn to hunt. Well, I was lucky enough to get drawn to hunt and I could take one guy with me. So the two of us, we hunted together for years. We both went, of course we split that thing in half, it was really good eatin’ too. It was very tasty. A lot of people would say ‘Well I could not possibly eat one of those animals.’ I don’t know why they couldn’t eat a moose. I don’t know why, they eat beef. Look at the size of the moose. It was hunting and it was hunting for your food, but by the same token it was just getting out there and being able to do it. I know that lots of times I’ve come home from school and have said to Ma, God rest her soul, so I said to her, ‘What’s for supper?’ she says ‘ Potatoes and with-it.’ That was what you were going to have for supper. And she said ‘liver’ and I didn’t like liver at all. I do now, but in fishing and hunting somebody had been, some of the younger boys had been so we had meat and it was good. You can see how young that other fellow was right there in that picture.

Fun and food. It was fun and it was food because we were shooting pidgins off the roof of the house and wherever you could get it you know. And they’re excellent eating. We would catch them off a barn and they guys that would own the farm very often would be a farmer of a big farm back in those days, they don’t have them anymore, we’d go over and say, ‘ Can we shoot a few birds off your roof?’ and he’d say, ‘As long as you don’t puncture the roof’. I can hear him now and of course we wouldn’t, and they knew it. But we would never over do it. If you wanted to have a half-a-dozen for supper that’s what you would get, you wouldn’t because you’d burn that stuff all up and you wouldn’t have anything left after a while. You could also hunt with a ferret back in those days. You probably don’t know what a ferret is.”

TH- “I know what a ferret is, some people have them as pets.”

JH- “Yes, they do. But you take one of those rascals and you take it and put it in a rabbit hole and you’d run him in the hole and you’d put that little rascal in there and pretty quickly you’d, I swear you could hear the earth rumble. When they run out of there, of course it was frozen now, they would pop right out through. That way you didn’t have to shoot them and you didn’t have a lot of money to buy shells anyway. When you get one of them out you just catch him and twist his neck and that’s all there was to it. That’s all she was right there.

You raised your own chickens, hogs. You raised anything else that you could for me ya know. There was nothing the matter with it, it was all good. After that when you were butchering them, if anybody was ill in the winter time, of course they would butcher in the fall, take the fat and boil it down, and then we’d take caster oil and it works. And then there was another one that worked real well, and I used to trap for them and that was skunk oil, and it worked. And it doesn’t sound like it would be anything that you would want to do with but you could rub it right on if your muscles were sore and it would take that right out of them. It was good stuff. Quite often you still had a little odor to them.

I used to have a paper route. I would do the paper route and you would do that on ice and you got to wear you could really skate ya know. Lugging your paper around to the whole village of Shaftsbury.

Jobs. This was the best job I ever had. Trapping.”

TH- “Trapping, what’s that?”

JH- “Well, I set traps and you had to be legal for this. And I was legal. You would get muskrats, mink, or beaver in the traps because that’s where the money was. Bring them home and skin them, get ‘em all skinned, and then hang them until they are ready for the guy to buy them. There used to be a place in Bennington and I used to sell all my stuff, he would come up from New York State. He just loved to buy from the guys up here who trapped because they were very careful skinning them and the whole business. They would say ‘You got any mink today, you got any beavers today?’ and this is what they were looking for (money). There were several of us who trapped because otherwise you wouldn’t have a penny ya know. We got pretty good money. The last beaver that I caught, the last fisher that I caught I caught it because they had gotten some fishes back in the state and I wanted to see just if I could still do it. And I was getting old then, I went out and I set a trap and one of the guys says, ‘What were you doing out on that road?’ and I said, ‘I just went out there and put a trap out there.’ I just wanted to see if I lost my skills. I got the fisher, so I went over the next morning and thumped it over the head with a stick. I brought it right home and skinned it right out quick because it was the night that the guy was gunna be in Bennington. So I went over there and he walked and he says he recognized me because he bought a lot of furs from me. He says, ‘You got something good?’ and I said, ‘Well, I think so, I don’t know how good it is, but I got something I had never caught before.’ And that’s the whole reason I went to catch one of them. He says, ‘What did you catch?’ and I said, ‘A fisher’. He says, ‘Good Lord Almighty, they just went down but I can still give you $100 for it.’ And I said, ‘I’ll take it’, naturally. And he said that two weeks before that they were paying for that fur $300. But hey, $100 that was still a lot of jingle ya know, yes it was.

Another thing that a lot of people didn’t think was very exciting but I used to trap bears too and of course you have to have a license and you can’t trap them anymore. I used to trap them.

TH- “It sounds pretty exciting to me.”

JH- “Oh, it was. It was exciting alright. There were three different ones that I had a real close call to with traps. When I made the clogs, now a clog doesn’t mean much to you, but it’s a stick about this long and this big around. And then I’d notch it off the side and that’s where my trap went. It was soaked right up to that. When they would go they would smash everything out to pieces. You had to have wire around it and everything else back when it was legal so that the human wouldn’t get into it. If a human got into it, it was nobody’s fault but his own because everything was there but a sign.

So I says to him, ‘Do you wanna shoot a bear?’ and he said ‘I’ll take your rifle and shoot with it.’ I don’t know whether you hunt or not. He had a 32 Special and I had a big, heavy, old blunder buster. It was good for bears. So he took my gun and shot the bear. He says, ‘Well that was pretty dog’gon good.’ And I said ‘Yeah it was.’ So he said ‘I think I’ll do that too.’ He got a bear trap and went down to Pownal and set one down there. And he got a trap and it scared him so that he never trapped again. He was just scared to death.

So we were out there, we was cutting corn and pretty quick he was taking tow rows and I was taking two rows. Pretty quick he stopped and I says ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘There’s one thing I want you to understand.’ I says, ‘What’s that?’ he says, ‘I own that corn right to the ground.’ In other words, I was cutting it too high. He always had told me and he was right. If he was haying, it was hot, it was really, really hot. He would look around until he found one, and he would find a snake and he’d take that snake and he always had a piece of rope with him and he’d tie it around the head and put it around his neck. And he says ‘It would stay just as cool as it could be’.”

TH- “So what did your parents do for jobs?”

JH- “Mother was a mother. She was at home and she baked and this and that and the other thing. That was it but Dad was, he worked down at Eagle Square down there. For many years he was a machinist, he did alright down there but you go out to work for a farm and a dollar a day and your board. That was it.

They had one right over there and it was a sheep farm. If Mother and Dad could make a living for their family just working on a farm you’d know because they were good and they made money and of course they got more money than us young fellows got. It was good money for us. A dollar a day and your board and I’m a pretty good feeder.

They all had big families back then and it was good that they did because otherwise things would have been pretty quiet.