Frying Pan Farm

by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Spring plowing on the McNair farm near Floris. The serene aspect of the pre-mechanization farm is evident in this photograph taken in the first decade of the twentieth century. Photo courtesy of Louise McNair Ryder.

Naturally, the farmer's work only began with the sowing of the seed, for activity continued throughout the year. The work of calving, of pruning orchard trees, digging garden beds, and trimming cattle hooves occurred in the spring. In early summer the corn was thinned from four to two stalks per hill, by using a sharp stick to dig the stalks out. Then, toward the end of June the winter wheat was harvested. Cut with a binder and tied in bundles, it was shocked (put in stacks of ten to twelve bundles, wigwam fashion, with a bundle on top to shed water, or stacked on poles in a mound with the outside sloping a bit to let the rain run off) and left to dry in the field. If threshed by hand after about a month it had to be gathered and taken to the barn for further drying.

In the 1920s, however, only a few farmers still wielded the flail; most threshing was done by steam and later gas-powered threshing machines which travelled from farm to farm. Wilson McNair described these cumbersome and sometimes dangerous machines this way:

The thresher was run and pulled by a traction engine. They moved slowly only about 2 mi. an hour. The engine had a water tank mounted on each side in the rear to carry water while it was moving from one place to another.... The engines all had whistles and they would blow them every once in a while when they were on the road so we would know they were coming. We had to haul up some wood to fire the engine before we threshed....

In later years we had self-packing and weighing threshers with blowers that moved the straw further from the thresher. One time Mr. Hornbaker threshed for us. We had a small engine and thresher that was pulled by a team. While we were washing up for dinner some one looked up and saw smoke, [on] the other side of the barn where the thresher was. All hands ran up there and pulled the thresher out of the way and saved the wheat that was threshed, but the straw burned up. A spark from the engine had fallen into the straw.[31]

During the summer months of the cultivation process, insect control was also a major consideration. By the late 1930s a few large farms, such as the Harrisons, could hire an airplane to dust their crops, but modest farms of necessity relied on hand labor for this, as most other chores. "As ... new varieties of clover, alfalfa, and other plants came to be used, seems like the insects came along with them," lamented one farmer.[32] The Japanese beetle, introduced into America in the 1920s, wrecked particular havoc with the crucial corn crop. "The Japanese beetle was just awful," recalled Ray Harrison, "it would eat the tassel up which pollinated the corn ... then would get right into the ear of the corn and go right down into the shuckings."[33] Against these pests, and the inevitable destruction of wildlife, weather, and weeds, the farmer had to maintain an eternal vigilance. Much of the growing season was spent in monitoring these destructive forces.

The benefits of this watchfulness became apparent with the harvest. As mentioned above, wheat was the earliest crop reaped but the major harvesting was done early in September. Corn was cut and shocked at this time, and the large task of filling the silo was undertaken. To do this stalks and leaves of the corn were chopped by an ensilage cutter. Like the thresher, this machine was generally owned by an outside agent; it travelled from farm to farm to process each farmer's fodder. The early cutters were powered by steam, but like numerous other farm instruments, gasoline-driven equipment was developed during World War I. On a large farm up to twenty men were needed to keep a threshing machine or ensilage cutter going. Bundles of corn were chopped by the machine and then conveyed to a fan which blew the ensilage through a pipe into the silo. There one to four men tamped it down and guided the nozzle on the blower pipe to insure even distribution. It was dirty work, the corn stalks oozing juice and sticking as tenaciously as burrs to the clothes, hands and hair of those working in the silo. A small landowner might complete the silo filling process in a day, but for large farms it often took the better part of a week.[34]

Just as the spring brought forth a burgeoning activity, so did things happen with a rush in the fall. Haying was done just before the corn harvest, in the hot, late summer days which would cure the new-mown grass in the field. To cut the hay the county's farmers often used a one- or two-horse rake with a single attachment to raise or lower the rake's teeth when passing over a meadow. The dried hay, with its almost overpoweringly sweet smell, was lifted by forks into a wagon, tramped down, then transported to fill bursting barns. The least mechanized farms forked the hay into the lofts by hand but later barns were equipped with a mechanical fork for lifting the hay. Haying had to be done at precisely the right time or the grass would not cure properly and the hay would spoil. The combination of heat, hard, backbreaking work, and the necessity for hurry made haying a particularly fatiguing time.[35]