Summer involved work for farm kids
Summer has traditionally meant vacation time from school for kids, and we who were kids in the 1940s and 1950s were just as prone to enjoy a time away from school as anyone. But summer usually didn’t mean vacation on the farm. Summer just meant that the seasonal work was a little different.
Farm kids have pretty much always “worked.”
We worked as part of making the home farm viable. We worked to put food on the table, to take care of the livestock that helped us make a living, to do necessary building and repairs to our house and farm buildings, and just to make the life of our family functional.
We had our times to play also, and the whole family would sometimes take time to go somewhere for the fun of it, to have a picnic, to go swimming on the Elk River or Big Sugar Creek, to visit friends and family and so on. But we all worked to help make our living: Dad worked, Mom worked, and we kids had our regular chores and aspects of the farm work to take care of, according to our age and abilities.
I had an astonishing experience in east Arkansas that made me realize that the way I had grown up was not necessarily the way that all farm families functioned. We had in one of our east Arkansas community families a senior who was graduating from high school; and I learned that although he had grown up as part of a farm family, he had never operated a tractor in the field. This was a big, strapping, healthy young man, a fine young man so far as I could tell, but he had never worked in the fields operating farm machinery. I was stunned. I hope I didn’t let it show too much. Maybe the family just didn’t trust him with the hugely expensive tractors and other machinery that some large farm operations use today, but I just had real trouble with the idea that here was a young man nearly grown and finishing school who had never really “farmed” on the farm on which he lived.
One of the main seasonal jobs for us on the farm was putting up hay for the cattle and horses. The hay season could be a make it or break it thing for farm life. Having a good supply of hay on hand for the upcoming winter season was real security. The hay supply gave us that feeling that we should be able to make it; we should be able to keep on keeping on. With a good supply of hay we could hope to prosper with our
livestock. They wouldn’t starve and we wouldn’t have to sell them off precipitously just to survive.
Putting up hay was really, really different in the earlier days as compared to today’s farming. Most of today’s haying is mechanized. The farmer does nearly everything from the tractor seat. When I was young, there was much more hand labor that went into putting up hay. Our own farm, with its big traditional barn for hay storage and feeding, was equipped after the fashion that was common from around 1910. We had some labor saving equipment, but there was still a great deal of hand labor involved. Our early hay equipment was horse-powered, that it, horse-drawn. We had a mower for cutting hay, but it was pulled by a team of two horses. The sickle bar was about 5 feet long, with a reciprocating bar with blades all along, working in a row of guards which each had a shearing plate which helped cut the hay stems as you went along. There was no motor involved anywhere in the process. After the hay dried enough to be gathered into the barn, we would go over the field with the dump rake, also horse drawn. The dump rake “raked up” the hay into bunches. If you learned to hit the dump pedal at just the right time you could form a windrow across the field. The dump rake was one of the first haying machines that I learned to operate. As soon as I was tall enough to reach the dump pedal I could drive the horses and rake hay.
After the hay was raked, we would go over the hay field using pitch forks to form the bunches into piles 8 or 10 feet apart, convenient for loading onto the hay wagon. Our hay wagon was not the kind of flat bed wagon that later came to be common for hauling baled hay. Our hay wagon had a rack especially built for handling hay loose, unbaled. We would take the hay wagon to the field behind our team of horses, Old Pat and Mike in our case, stop the wagon between a couple of hay piles, and pitch the hay onto the wagon with pitch forks. My Dad usually worked on the ground, pitching the hay up onto the wagon, and my job on the top of the load was to level the load and tromp it down. My work was not only to make it a good big load, but to stack it onto the wagon so that it wouldn’t fall off as we crossed the creek and pulled up the grade to the hay barn. I had one load fall off one time, with me on top of it. That wasn’t good. I tried to make sure that that didn’t happen again.
As the years moved by into the 1950s, hay balers came to be quite common our area farms. We ourselves continued to do things in the old-fashioned way to a great extent, but we would also often hire Mal Rogers, with his wiretie baler to come bale some of our hay. Mal Rogers had a farm just west of Pea Ridge, on what is now Hazelton Road. He had a Case wiretie baler, powered by a fourcylinder Wisconsin aircooled motor, and pulled by a small John Deere Model H tractor. I thought it was unique that his tractor had no starter. To start the engine you set the throttle and got off and whirled the external engine flywheel to kick it off. In those days, all John Deere tractors were powered by the traditional two-cylinder motors, and were distinctive for their “Put, ka-Put” sound.
The baling of hay on the farms gave many young boys an opportunity for summer work and a way to make some money. Many teen boys would form a crew of about four, obtain an old truck with a flat bed, and spend the summer hauling and storing baled hay for farmers all around the community. As I recall, the price for hauling baled hay was from 13 cents to 15 cents a bale, and the crew members who loaded and stacked the bales would get paid a cent and a half or two cents per bale. Today that wouldn’t seem like very good pay. At the time the beginning pay at many businesses was about $1 dollar an hour, which wasn’t great, but then, a dollar would buy a lot more back then than it does now.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by email at joe369@ centurytel.net , or call 621-1621.