Jake loved to tell stories and reflect on his life when he was younger. He touched on just about everything - from working on the farm, to life without electricity, how the land has changed throughout the years, and some of the pets he used to have. Below are five interesting stories that he shared with us that give us an insight as to what life was like working and living on a dairy farm in the mid 1900's. 

Farm Boy

Jake as a young boy on a tractor

       "I can remember right down here when I was just a small kid about 11, we had a farm tractor with iron lugs on it, not rubber wheels, we had dad put iron pipes, galvanized pipes over the brakes and he would get on the hay wagon...I was on the tractor and my dad was on the wagon loading the hay, and I’d go down these steep banks; he taught me how to feather the brakes and I was only 10 or 11....we had to put galvanized pipes on the brakes because I was too small."

 

Reap and Binder
       "My dad was real mechanical, he only went to 8th grade, but I remember as a little kid, he said, "we're going down to the Walloomsac Inn, Walt Barry has a reap and binder." Now a reap and binder is what you cut your oats with, it would cut it, put it in bundles and kick it out in the fields, and afterwards you'd cut them and you'd shock them up in tents to dry, and then you brought the thrashing machine over after they dried for a week, 10 days, out in the sun, you know, the other farmers would go around pitch them on the wagon and bring them to the thrasher machine, and the guy that set the bundles in they would cut the strings and throw them on the ground throw the loose oats in there and that’s how you got your oats from the thrashing machine. Well anyways, my dad said, "we need a reap and binder." 

Reap and Binder, similar to the one that Jake's father bought from Walt Barry

 

 

an oat field

      And I don’t know how he knew old Walt Barry had a reap and binder down there, but the Walloomsac Inn had one, but I must of been 6 or 7 years old, and I remember old Walt Barry in his white suit; he looked like Mark Twain. We'd go down, and what stuck in my mind was that the reap and binder was in this old building, and it had a swing door, and they hadn’t been in that building for years because there was a tree about 6 or 7 inches grown in front of the door and we had to cut the tree down before we could see the reap and binder, and he went in there and bought the whole machine for $15, something like that $5 or $15 he went home worked on it, and we cut the oats that year. I remember him saying that was a left handed cut, and I don’t know what that means and I remember it was a McCormick reap and binder, and that was the only time he used it. But what tickled me was that we had to cut the tree down, and it had been sitting there all those years and my father got it to working."

 

Electricity? I don't think so.

an old fashion stove, similar to the one that Jake used, with a water reservoir on the side

      "I remember growing up in the thirties we had no electricity. We had kerosene lamps and we had to carry our water and we had a system that’s in the cellar in the old farm house that had... troths and the water, when it rained ran into the system and then we had a hand pump it into the kitchen. We'd prime it and pump the water out, and that’s what mother and my grandmother did. We had the fill the big tubs and boil the water to do our washing in, because we had no running water. We had space heaters, like chunk stoves, we burned some coal and we had a stove in the kitchen - the hot water had a reservoir on it, there was a reservoir on the side of the stove; we kept that full because the stove was going all the time to heat water, not to heat water but to heat the house in the winter, and you’d come home, dip out hot water and wash up, and you had to pump it in the sink.
      You’d prime it, and it was an experience when you had to have a bath a couple times a week, you had to get enough water. And the old milk house, I can remember we'd go out there and my grandmother would say, “get me the strong arms to get the water out.” See, we didn’t drink it but we boiled it and used it to wash our clothes and our bodies. It was an experience, you're awake late at night to take a bath and then you run out to the back house and you'd run back. It was cold, you know, zero, and we didn’t have any stoves upstairs so it got kind of cool."

kerosene lamp
 

Additional Stories

 

The Infamous Game Cock Story

 Disappearing Cows

 

Home Hunting and Trapping