Sundays meant a good dinner

When I was growing up on the farm in the 1940s and 1950s, we tended to have certain days for certain things to do. For instance, Mondays were wash days for my mother. She would do the whole week’s washing on Monday, and typically didn’t run the washer again until the next Monday. That meant doing several loads of washing in our wringer-type washer. I note that many people today wash clothes after wearing an item once, even if it is only worn for part of a day.

Saturdays were going to town days. We like to say that “everybody” went to town on Saturday. Pea Ridge would be full of people. Rogers and Bentonville would be full of people. Farm people worked Mondays through Fridays, and went to town on Saturday. We would often make the rounds, to Bentonville for midmorning, then to Rogers for early afternoon, and finishing up in Pea Ridge in the late afternoon. We always tried to make it home by 4 in the afternoon to get a little supper and do the evening milking. Once in a while, we needed to make a special trip to town to have machinery repaired or to buy tractor fuel, but most of our buying was on those Saturday trips to town.

Sundays were going-to-church days, and special days in other ways as well. I have always heard that the custom of having church at 11 a.m. on Sunday was a practice that developed so that farmers like us could attend church, farmers who managed cattle and milked cow herds. Cattle farms thrive on regularity, and on a dairy farm like ours, the milking happens at a set time each morning and evening, every day. But we worked it so that nearly always the morning milking was finished in time for us to get to church. If 5 a.m. in the morning wasn’t early enough to get things finished and make it to Sunday School, then we changed the regular starting time for milking to 4 in the morning. The cows didn’t seem to mind coming in before daylight, so long as the milking happened at the same time each morning.

Sunday dinner was a special meal. By the way, Sunday dinner was eaten at noon. Farm dinners are at noontime, not evening. On the farm, evening meals are called supper. Sunday dinner was usually a fulltable affair. There would be more food on the table than usual, more variety, including desserts, and especially fried chicken. For most of the weekday meals, we ate pork of some kind. But on Sundays, it was fried chicken, and fried taters, and apple pie and maybe raisin pie and maybe a cream pie or a lemon pie. Most of the cooking for Sunday dinner was done on Saturday, or early Sunday morning, but the fried chicken would be fried after we got home from church. Cold or reheated fried chicken wasn’t fittin’ for Sunday dinner, even though it was fine and OK as left-overs for other days.

Sundays were also going-visiting days. Fairly often, our Sunday dinner would be at Grandma Nichols’ house. Grandpa Scott Nichols was there too of course, but we kids thought of the house as Grandma’s house. Grandma made fine pies. I especially remember her punkin pies (In Ozark you don’t spell punkin with a “p” in the middle). That would be like it was per-nounced “pump-kin,” which would be goofy. City people might have pumpkins, but we knew a punkin when we saw one, and you didn’t need to pump it. You might thump a punkin, but you wouldn’t pump it!

We kids used to identify a house by one or two members of the family, not necessarily the whole family. For example, our Mom’s family home north of Bentonville was our cousins Bill’s and Don’s house, even though our Grandpa Clement and Aunt Goldie lived there. Bill and Don were a little older than we were, and that was cool, because they would let us try to ride their bikes. They had the neatest spring near their house. That was where they got all their water for drinking and cooking. Grandpa Clement had made a basin that collected the water for dipping with a water bucket. They also kept a long-handled dipper at the spring so you could get a drink without going to the house. That water was so good!

Sometimes on Sunday afternoons we would go to see Frankie Louise and Nancy. That was a big trip, because they lived on a farm between Elm Springs and Springdale. Their parents were Millard and Eva Holcomb, and their grandparents, who also lived on the farm, were Frank and Bessie Holcomb. Aunt Bessie was my Grandpa Scott Nichols’s sister, and Frank was my Grandma Ellen Nichols’s brother. So Millard was my Dad’s cousin, and Frankie Louise and Nancy were our farther down the line cousins. The Holcomb’s were long-time Springdale people going back to the 1840s and the founding of the original village of Shiloh.

We never got to stay long enough. We always had to get home to milk the cows.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.