- Memories of Greenwood County, Submitted by Mike Pitko
Memories of Dorothy Braucher Gowen of rural Madison Fourth of July
The fourth of July was a big day for the family and it included a picnic at the big park in a town, 20 miles away. Peter Pan Park was located in the south part of Emporia. A day before they went to Emporia, they bought a case of bottled pop, (no cans in those days) and bags of potato chips. If there wasn’t time to bake a cake, they bought 2-3 sacks of cookies. These cookies were a real luxury to the children. The morning of the fourth, a couple of chickens were fried and potatoes were peeled for a salad. Everyone “washed up” and clean clothes were laid out. Lunch was put in cardboard boxes and off to Emporia they went. By the time they got there, all the tables were full, so they spread out a blanket on the ground. They would eat and watch the other people and kids. One year when her brother Charles was about 18 months old, he ran across the cloth and stepped in the potato salad. They had a good laugh. After lunch, the kids went to the swimming pool, which was just east of the park. The kids rented swim suits because they did not have any. They played in the shallow end of the pool until 5 p.m. After they went to the ice cream shop and got their favorite ice cream, they went home. There were chores to do and chickens to care for, cows to milk, hogs to feed and all the kids had to take a bath and get ready for bed.
Ice Cream Man
Dorothy’s grandparents lived in Emporia and she got to spend a week in the summer with them. The highlight of the week was the ice cream man coming by the house every day. He drove a horse hitched to a white wagon with a cover over the top of it and wore a white suit and cap. The ice cream man rang a little hand bell and came around 4 p.m. each day. Children, or sometimes house wives, would go out to the curb and get ice cream. Dorothy’s grandma would give her a nickel and she sat on the front steps waiting and could hear the bell eight blocks away. She remembers thinking he would never get to her house. She always asked for vanilla, but he also had strawberry and chocolate ice cream.
Butchering Time
Dorothy and her family always looked forward to butchering time as this meant fresh meat. In December, Dorothy’s dad had a fattened hog ready for butchering and got a neighbor to help him. Water was carried in buckets to the big black butcher kettle that was swinging over a wood fire. The hog was shot in the brain and the throat slit to allow it to bleed out. The dead hog was swinging by a rope and pulley over a barrel of hot water and lowered and scalded. The hair was then scraped off with sharp butcher knives. After this was done, the hog was let down in the water again to wash off the hair and dirt. Then the hog was gutted and left to hang until late in the night to cool down. Just before going to bed, the hog was let down and hauled to the smoke house and the door was locked so it could not be stolen. The meat was cut up and the lard saved. Lard rendering was left for a couple days later. To finish the whole job, it took the better part of a week. Dorothy’s mother and the bigger kids helped with the lard and sausage making. Enjoyable meals of fresh liver, tenderloin and fresh sausage were enjoyed by all. The excess sausage was stuffed in casing with a sausage stuffer. Later, big links were fried brown and put in big stone crocks, covered with hot lard, and was kept in the cellar. That sausage was used for Sunday dinners or sometimes when dinner was fixed for extra men working on the farm. They always hoped the sausage would hold out through spring or early summer, until the frying chickens were big enough to fry.
Prairie Haying
Dorothy’s dad would cut the hay with a horse drawn five-foot sickle mower. The hay had to dry for half a day or more. Then it was raked with horses and a dump rake. The barn loft had to be filled to the top first before stacking the rest of the hay. It was pitched on to a rack wagon and taken to the barn. Dorothy and her sister had to pitch the hay into the corners of the loft and tramp it down. The hay and weeds stuck their bare feet and arms. It was so hot and dirt covered their necks. Two or three loads of hay were pitched every afternoon. They were so glad when the barn was full. The rest of the hay was stacked using a swing type stacker. Brother Louie bucked up the hay onto the stacker buck, a horse pulled up the stacker buck with the hay on it and the hay was dumped on the top of the stack. Dorothy’s dad stood on the top of the stack which could reach over ten feet in height and pitched the hay around trying to make the top slope down to get the rain to run off. The girls drove the stacker teams of horses that lifted the hay. All they had to drink was warm water out of a stone jug. What a cold lemonade or pop would have tasted like on those hot days. Sometimes their mother sent a lunch of home-made bread and lunch meat and a few oatmeal cookies. Their parents worked very hard and had little to show for it, but Dorothy knows her parents treasured what they had. Some of Dorothy’s neighbors had much less.
The Day the Threshing Machine Came
Threshing time was a big deal to Dorothy and her siblings. Wheat and oats were cut by horse drawn binders in the 1920s and 1930s. The binder cut and bound the grain into bundles. It had to be hand shocked to dry out. A month later, the threshing machine made its rounds in the neighborhood. The big iron wheel tractor with iron lugs chugged along belching black smoke and pulled the big separator behind it. You could hear it coming from a mile away. The young man who did the threshing was always greasy and dirty, in Dorothy’s opinion. Dorothy’s dad had to go see the neighbors and round up a crew and her mother had to fix dinner for 12-15 extra hands.
Her dad drove to town early on the day the thresher was to be there to get ice and food for the threshing crew. Mom would order a big hunk of fresh beef and she boiled this with a couple heads of cabbage. They fixed mashed potatoes, slaw, other vegetables, sliced tomatoes all from their own garden. They always had pie, chocolate or vanilla cream. There was ice tea with a big chunk of ice swimming around in the tea container. The men made quick work of the dinner and were gone. There was always enough food and pies left for Dorothy’s mom and kids to eat.
A few years before, Dorothy remembers the threshing time, another man had a steam engine that required a bigger crew, maybe 18-20 men. More men were required to haul the water and fuel to the steam engine. Some of the men loaded the bundles of grain onto their hay wagons and hauled them to the mouth of the machine and pitched them in. The separated grain ran down a small pipe into a box wagon. The straw was blown through a large pipe out to the straw stack. When the grain wagon got full, an empty one replaced it and the full one was hauled to the west crib to be scooped by shovel into it.
Runaway
Dorothy became a runaway at age three as the story is told to her by her older sister and mother. It was summer time and mother let Dorothy go out of the house and told her sisters to watch her. The sisters got to playing and when they looked for Dorothy, they could not find her. Her mother called the neighbors and told them Dorothy was lost. After some time, they found Dorothy in an alfalfa field sound asleep.
When Dorothy was 6 or 7, she went to see a close neighbor named Sadie Taylor. She had no children of her own, but was very friendly. The lady asked Dorothy to come in her house and sit down. She went into another room and got a big doll. Dorothy had never seen a doll like that. The phone rang and it was Dorothy’s mother looking for Dorothy. Dorothy ran off a few more times and after one incident, her mother locked her in the smoke house. It has no windows and was black from the smoke. Dorothy was in there 4- or 5-minutes yelling. The next time Dorothy ran away, her mother sent her brother after her and all the way home he told her, “You are going to catch it.” Her mother put her in the cellar and shut the top door. It was very dark and Dorothy did not run away again to Sadie’s, but she never forgot holding “that doll.”
