Chickens

The "Double Crib Barn" consisted of two cribs separated by a breezeway and covered by the same roof. The breezeway, which essentially acted as a driveway which entered the barn was often used for the grain or hay trucks, to protect them from the rain.

This barn was just south of the house as you drove up the long drive. Our Prairie house was situated on the top of the hill and the view to the west was awesome! Prairie as far as you could see! With no fence around it as it was just a hay meadow.

As I remember, the cribs were separated  by a drive thru and had a slanted roof going down from the east and west end of the barn. The wall, and door boards were spaced apart to allow air to flow through the crib to help dry the corn still on the cob. Now, farmers have expensive metal silos with equipment to circulate and dry corn that is already shelled before it goes into the silo. So many things have changed since those days and these memories just bring back the smell of corn,  hay, and wood in the barn that will always be a part of my lifetime experiences.

Morris’s aunt and uncle, Carl and Elda Buchanan lived just east of Pittsburg, KS, which was about 10 miles from us. Carl had worked for Dickey Clay in Pittsburg where they made clay pipes. They closed down and that left Carl without a job. Fortunately he found a job in Kansas City, with Fairbanks and Morris Co, a foundry, but that would mean they would have to move up there.

They had about two dozen hens and a couple of roosters that they brought over and let us keep for them while they lived in Kansas City temporarily. It looked like the west side of this old crib barn had been used as a hen house, as there were nests built along the side (wooden boxes with a filling of hay)  and  some roosts in thereas well, and we released the chickens there and shut the door until they become accustom to their new home. Later we let them roam in the large yard that was just a part of the prairie that had been fenced off. This had not been mowed until haying season when the guys had the mower on the tractor. So it was usually only mowed one a year!

Along about sunset the chickens would all come back to their hen house and fly to the roost for the night. We would then go out and close the door so the coyotes and foxes could not get them.

Their natural instinct is to scratch around in the dead leaves and twigs in the grass looking for bugs. They also are partial to quite a lot of greenery. They also would find themselves somewhere where they could have a dust bath. They would find a patch of dry earth, and wriggle around until it was all through their feathers. They seem to know that it would clog the pores of the mites in their feathers, and get rid of them.

The next spring some of the hens began to roam out in the field and make a nest for brooding. It was always amazing to me that they managed to brood those eggs without a fox or coyote making a meal out of them!

Wild chickens are forest animals. They live in small groups called flocks. They scratch in the dirt and forage for things to eat. While one hen sits on the nest to lay, the group may wander away through the undergrowth searching for food. The hen's cackle serves to renew the contact with the group as if to yell "where are you?". The cock (with the other hens) answers "here we are!".  This was like music to me... for a while!

A mother hen enjoys lovingly teaching and nurturing her baby chicks. The chicks find sweet comfort under the shelter of mom’s wings and mother hen takes great pleasure in her wise and protective role. A mother hen will do everything in her power to protect her biddies. It’s her instinct. Call it chicken love if you will, but the hen is hardwired to protect them.

It was a delight to see one of the hens bring her brood of little fluffy chicks up to the hen house. Her wings stretched to her side and those little heads peaking out as they walked along protected by Mothers wings.

One of the roosters loved to crow at the break of dawn! Morris usually was up and down at the barn to milk the cows early, then he would come up to the house and I was to have his breakfast cooked so he could go of to the field or whatever he and Uncle John had planned for the day.

 I loved to sleep in! And if the babies would stay asleep I would too! But that darn Rooster seemed to have it in for me! He would come up right under our bedroom window and crow  his loudest!

This made me so angry that I would go out on the back porch in my gown and throw whatever I could get my hands on at him! Of course I never could hit him. He would strut away like he was king of the Prairie and join his Harem of Hens as if he had accomplished his days work!!!

We named him Dormeyer, after the name of a fine heavy duty electric mixer…you know …an egg beater???

It was Dormeyer’s delight to catch me in the outhouse and try to attack me with the long sharp spurs he had growing on his legs just above his feet, as I was leaving! He because so aggressive that I feared he would attack one of boys. Morris’s Mom laughed and said, “Oh! He couldn’t be all that bad!” One old Rooster?” So we decided to give him to her.

It was not long before she became a believer and Dormeyer went to live with the hens down at the Johnston house!

He soon disappeared from there! We never knew if he was caught by a coyote or fox or ahum… met his demise in some other way!

The day that rooster left our Home on the Prairie was a day of celebration for me!

The Milk Cows

The old barn had a shed on the east side of it with stanchions for milking cows,so Morris agreed to milk some cows for extra income for the Ranch/farm.

He and Uncle John went to the stockyards in Joplin where they had an auction every Fridays, and bought several cows. Then later, Morris saw an ad in the paper for 6 cows that a man down around Webb City had for sale, so they went down to look at them.

The man had a small acreage at the edge of town and sold milk right from the farm there. He was getting older and had decided to quit milking. John and Morris decided to buy them all, and as they were loading them into the truck, the old man said, “Maybe I should tell you their names as they come into the barn better if you call them by their names.” He said, “This it Mable, and this is Whitie, this is Gladys, this is  Lightening, and so on. The name Lightening ,just slid right by him.

With this addition, Morris had 18 cows and was milking them all by hand. Morning and night. That was after working on the ranch, and farming the fields on the Old Johnston Home place the rest of the day! Later he did get two milking machines.

 That evening he starts calling them in to milking, there were only 3 stanchions, so he could only get that many in at a time. Feed was placed in the trough, which the cows loved, and they were eager to come in and eat it and they usually knew just which stanchion was their place in the line also. As they put their head in the stall, he would close the bar to hold them in place if they decided they were NOT going to have anyone milk them!

He had milked all but “Lightening”, who was a little Jersey cow. Jersey’s are all small built but they are noted for giving lots of creamy rich milk! They are always gentle and easy to handle. She was already in the stanchion and enjoying her sweet sorghum coated feed. He put his stool down and placed the bucket under her udder, then grabbed a tit in each hand, when she swiftly kicked him off his stool!

Wow! He lifted the kickers from the wall where they were hanging and placed one on each back leg and place the bucket and stool back in place and started again, when Wham! She did a little dance and had those kickers off and kicked him against the wall!

This time he decided he would just tie that back leg to a rope and the rope to the wall behind her! That time she just flat out laid on him! That was when he had the bright idea to turn the little calves on her and let her feed them rather that feed them on a pail! She was so small that with four of them on her they would literally lift her off the floor and walk her around. Oh she hated that and was not so eager to come into the barn and place her head in the stanchion even though she loved the feed! But that took care of that problem.

Later Morris said…”Always listen carefully to what people say to you!”

No Rain Again!

1953: Driest year on record. State average precipitation: 25.35”

The Prairie south of the house had been plowed up and John and Morris planted corn there in early spring. With no rain to speak of and the hot weather it didn’t even reach the tasseling stage, so it was decided to cut it and shock it for feed for the cattle in the coming winter.

John still had a team of horses, although they had  used tractors for what farming they did now. He also still had a horse drawn sled with sickles they had used to cut and shock corn, back before the tractor came into use.

|I couldn’t even find a photo of a horse drawn sled anywhere so have inserted this drawing of one.|

As the horse drew the sled down between the rows, John sat on one side of the seat and Morris sat on the other side and they held out their arm to catch the corn as it was cut, stopping to stack it when their arms were full. This was a long and slow process as they shocked the whole 40 acres.

They came in for lunch and in order to make room for Uncle John at the table I would pull that round table out from the corner.  I would fix a full meal not a light lunch. Perhaps a roast with potatoes and onion, or even a meat loaf with mashed potatoes and a vegetable. Lettuce for a salad was not available easily at the grocery stores then as it is now in 2011, so I doubt if I would have had a salad, although I liked to bake cakes, so perhaps I had managed to do that, if I had not had too much interference from the two little “helpers”.

Ken and Mike would both have been seated in their high chairs and Uncle John would always say "Hi Buttons,” as that was always his pet names for any of the small children. That way he didn’t have to remember their names!

They had salvaged some of the corn crop for fodder for the Cattle for the coming winter and somehow, working out in that heat, and even with no air conditioning we managed to survive the 110 degree heat.

That Saturday night bath!

That Saturday night bath in the summer time was easier than in the wintertime. AND it was not just on Saturday nights, but an every night thing them. Our bathtub was the big galvanized tub used on weekdays to rinse the laundry.

Usually I filled the tub with water from the well outside on the back porch and left it to warm through the daytime, then we took turns bathing after dark. First the boys, then me, then Daddy was last. After a day in the fields he was very dirty!

One day it was hot and I had taken the boys for a walk down in the pasture where a little branch ran. It was alkaline water that drained off the coal pits that were south of our land. It was shallow enough so I could sit down in it and it was only up to my waist. Ken, who was only 2 yr old and Mike was about 6 months and still in diapers. I stripped to my undies and let the boys go nude. We were enjoying the cool water when Morris drove in the drive up at the house. He heard us laughing and playing and came on down… stripping off his clothes as he crossed the fence and laughing as he stepped into the water with us. Yes, the family that bathes together stays together. This year is the 59th year we have been enjoying our life together…or as he says, with a grin on his face…’a couple of those years were good years!’

The principal source of heat in the wintertime was the wood or coal stove positioned in the corner of the living room, as the chimney was in the middle of the house, with access from both the kitchen and the west bedroom, although we only had the one coal stove for heat.  It was not so enjoyable to take a bath in a galvanized tub set out on the floor and filled with water heated on the nearby stove.

After supper the tub was placed on the worn living room floor in front of the stove. 

The living room became the bathroom for the whole evening while we took turns taking our bath. I draped a sheet over the backs of several kitchen chairs pulled close to the tub.  This not only gave a little privacy, but also kept the drafts off as we bathed.

 The tub was half filled with water heated in a big pail on the stove.  I always bathed the boys first. When they were dried, in their jammies, and in their beds it was my turn. I was small enough then to be able to sit in the tub and soak away some of the aches and pains of lifting two babies and fixing meals for Morris and usually Uncle John when they were working up here at the ranch.  Then it was Morris’s turn to soak away the field dirt that was impossible to avoid. After putting on his nightclothes he gathered up his dirty overalls and put them to soak in the used, but still soapy, water for the night. The tub was pulled over near the back door and those clothes were put into the washing machine On Monday. 

Hot Summer Time

I loved waking to a soft breeze blowing in the south window over our bed, but soon that breeze was HOT! Temperatures were above 100 that July and August.

Looking west out over the prairie I could see the many blooming wild flowers swaying in that hot breeze and smell their fragrance. Morris usually picket me a bouquet of flowers as he walked through the fields.

There was a porch across the west side of the house and one across the east side of the house. I would sometimes place a wet towel or sheet over the screen door so the breeze would come through it and cool us off.

We had a small electric window fan, about a foot across that Morris put in the west window and this ingenious man, put 2 bales of hay on the porch just in front of that window and sat a bucket with a few holes in the bottom of it. Filled the bucket with water and sat it on top of the hay and it slowly seeped through the hay and the fan brought in moist air that cooled us some.

Usually the boys only wore their diaper as it was so hot.

Ken with his ragged Andy and his bobba

Church

We had long hours of hard work, dusty and sweaty overalls, complexions that were deeply tanned from working in the sun and we seldom took time to sit down and relax except at meal time and on Sunday at Church time.

Morris and I both belonged to the Christian Church in Nashville, Missouri but Morris’s Mom attended the Baptist Church in Minden mines, which was only 5 miles away, so we started to church there.

One Sunday Morris’s Mom, Dorothy, and his brothers Bill and Richard came home from church with us for dinner. Bill had also brought his good friend and classmate, Charlie Clegg. They were both about 15 years old then.

As Dorothy and I were busy in the kitchen  preparing dinner for all of us,  baby Michael began to cry for attention and Dorothy handed him over to Bill and said…’Take care of him”.

Charlie had picked up my Doctor Spock book on  The Common Book of Baby and Child Care, and as Michael continued to cry , Bill said….”Read faster Charlie – Read Faster!”

THE STORM CELLAR

With so many tornadoes reported through the Midwest this past month I though I would tell you about the storm cellar we had by our Prairie Home.

A storm cellar is a type of underground bunker designed to protect the occupants from violent severe weather, particularly tornadoes. They are most commonly seen in the US Midwest ("Tornado Alley") where tornadoes are particularly frequent and the low water table permits underground structures.
Our Storm Cellar was just to the north of the back porch. Close enough to the home to allow quick access in an emergency, but not so close that the house could collapse on the door during a storm, trapping us. This is also why the main door on most storm cellars is mounted at an angle rather than flush with the ground; an angled door allows for debris to blow up and over the door without blocking it and also decreases the force necessary to open the door if rubble has settled on top.
This cellar would have been eight by twelve feet, if I remember correctly, and had an arched roof —but it was entirely underground. This one was built of rock. It had no windows in it and it was very dark inside. The only light came in from the open door and you had to have a flashlight or lantern with you to see well in there. There was no air ventilation as some cellars had that I had been in before.
Shelves lined the walls of the cellar for storing canned produce, however I didn’t know how to can when we first moved into the Prairie Home but my mother-in-law soon taught me how to do this.
I hated going down into that cellar. I just knew there were snakes in it, and I was so afraid of snakes that I would rather take my chances with the storm as to go in where I just knew the snakes were! Therefore I kept the door to it closed all the time. Plus as the boys grew old enough to wander around I didn’t want them to go in there by themselves.
Here is a picture that Morris took of me sitting by the cellar door while we lived here.

When a storm was headed our way we could see it coming for miles as those dark clouds blew in from the northwest across the prairie.
The next year after we moved in, we were glad we had that cellar as we watched two tornado’s crossing the prairie to the west of the house and one later spotted east of the barn! We were lucky indeed that we never did have one come over the farm!
Fully enclosed underground storm shelters offer superior tornado protection to a traditional basement or cellar because they provide overhead cover without the risk of being trapped or killed by collapsing rubble from above. For this reason they also provide the only reliable form of shelter against "violent" (EF4 and EF5) tornadoes which tend to blow the house off the foundation, removing the overhead cover protecting the occupant.