Cass County, Missouri - Chapter 41: Reminiscences, Continued, 1917

There were no organs or pianos in farm houses and they would expel one from the church if he played the violin. We called them fiddles, but nearly every one drank whiskey. There was some one in nearly every neighborhood that kept it for sale. The price was fifty cents per gallon. One couldn't get a house raised, logs rolled or harvesting done without they furnished whiskey. When I was a boy I have carried a jug of whiskey on one side and water on the other side, and the men took their choice. Drunkenness was very common. I saw over one hundred drunk men at one time on election day. It was common for the clergy to drink whiskey. The saloons were called groceries and hotels, taverns. We had a great deal of game - deer, turkey, pigeons, geese, and ducks, in great abundance. I have seen fifty wild turkeys in a drove and flocks of pigeons that nearly hid the sun and it would take them an hour to pass over. They would break the limbs off the trees where they roosted. I have seen thousands of geese in our corn field at one time.

The people visited a great deal. The whole family would all get in the wagon, using chairs for seats. We had no spring seats then, and we often used oxen instead of horses to pull the wagon. Most all heavy loads were hauled by oxen. A great many of the horses were balky.

Our clothing was homemade. They took their wool to the carding machine and had it made into rolls, and the women and girls spun it, and the flax and wove the cloth in hand looms. There were no sewing machines. All the sewing was done by hand and the women didn't com¬ plain any more about being overworked than they do now. There were very few milliners then. Women didn't wear hats and nearly always her first millinery-made bonnet was her wedding bonnet. Hoops came into use about fifty-six years ago. They pleated a skirt and anyone that could raise twenty cents bought rattan and ran it into the pleats, but some of them hadn't the twenty cents and used grapevines, but these caused a great deal of trouble, for the vines were so stiff they couldn't squeeze them together to get through a narrow door. They would have to raise up one side, so they could pass through, and when they sat down, if they were not careful to pull them back, but sat down on the hoops, they would fly up in their faces. People took their cowhides to the tanner awhile before this time and had them tanned. The tanner gave them half, and kept the other half. The shoemaker would come and work them up into shoes. The shoemaker made his own shoe pegs. Most of the people bought their boots and shoes at the store. My father bought me the first pair of boy's boots I ever saw. They had red tops. The women made our summer hats by platting oats straw and sewing the plats together. Men's boots were very clumsy affairs. They were very hard to put on and they had to use a "bootjack" to pull them off. There was a "bootjack" in every house. A few years before this pewter plates were in general use and the tinkers would come around once a year and mend the plates.

All the relatives, and often the neighbors, were invited to weddings and no one was expected to make a present. The boys took the girls in a lumber wagon, or on horseback, to church, but more often on foot. I have often walked home with a girl three miles, and we thought we had a good time. We had preaching every three weeks, on Thursday afternoon. Our public school was in the church. When the preacher came the teacher would tell us to lay our books aside, and when the ser¬ vices were over we would resume our studies. Our preacher had thirteen different places to preach at every three weeks, and we didn't think they had a very hard time. They were called circuit riders. Single men got one hundred and fifty dollars per year and a preacher with a wife got two hundred dollars and twenty-five dollars for each child, and they hardly ever got all of their salary.

Sunday School would generally start in April and would generally die in August. We used the American Sunday School Question Book, so you see we had the same lessons every year. There was no public school money. They raised the money by subscription, and the teacher boarded with the patrons. One of my teachers was a Quaker and he didn't allow us to sing or whistle in the school house, or on the play ground, but the boys could wear their hats in school and we studied out loud.

William Orr's father taught our school one winter. We had school six days in the week. The school houses were nearly all log houses with a large fireplace. 1 saw one - a double log house - with a chimney in the center and a fireplace on each side. The teacher in this school gave a premium to the scholar that was first at the school house the most times during the term, and a good many had to come three and four miles. I saw them going to school with lanterns. The seats were made of slabs from the saw mill. They bored two holes in each end and put pieces in them for legs. They bored holes in the wall and put in pins and laid a plank on them for a desk. They had very small windows. I saw one school house that had one row of glass in a large crack in the side of the house.

There were no screens on the houses. Flies had the run of the whole house. When they were bad, some one generally broke a bough off a tree and minded the flies from the tables while we ate.

People didn't can any fruit or vegetables and there was none for sale at the stores. We hadn't any lamps. We used candles or put lard in a saucer and twisted some rags together, laid it in the saucer and lit it, and we thought it made a very good light.

We had no washing machines. The women generally carried their washing down to the spring, built a fire there, and heated the water in a large iron kettle.

I remember well when my father brought the first cook stove into our neighborhood. It was called a step stove because the back part of the stove was about ten inches higher than the front part. It had printed directions how to use it. They said to build the fire, turn the damper down, let it burn 15 minutes, then turn damper up, burn 15 minutes, then put the biscuits in. It wasn't long until several of our neighbors bought stoves, and they would have mother come over and stay a day and teach them how to cook. Before this some of them had bake-ovens, made of brick, which they would heat with coals from the fireplace, then draw out the coals and put your bread, pies or meats to bake, but most of them used an iron bake-oven which they would set on coals on the hearth and put coals on the lid of the oven. There were no heating stoves at my earliest recollection. The first ones were called the Frank¬ lin stove and built like a fireplace, but set out from the wall in the house. They put in a "back-log," had "dog-irons" to hold up the fore stick and balance of the wood and had a crane to hang the pots and kettles on, but they cost forty dollars, and that was a great deal of money in those days. That would buy twenty acres of good land. They generally roasted a turkey by suspending it by a wire in front of the fire with a pan under it, and the cook would keep the turkey turning around before the fire and dipping the gravy from the pan with a spoon and pouring it over the bird. When it was done it was fit for a king. It makes my mouth water to think about it.

The postage on letters was five cents, except to California and Ore¬ gon, which was twenty-five cents, and the receiver of a letter paid the postage when he took the letter out of the office. There were no enve¬ lopes. They wrote the letter on one side of foolscap paper, folded it and sealed it with a wafer, or melted wax.

Most every farm house had a conk shell, or a long tin horn, some¬ times a cow horn, to blow to call the men to the house for dinner. No one had a watch, and when it was cloudy they didn't know when it was noon. We set our clocks by a noon mark, which was generally made by the county surveyor. When the shadow reached the mark it was twelve o'clock.

Every house had a rifle, which was a flint-lock. There were very few pistols; there wasn't any revolvers, or double-barreled shotguns. A few years later they put tubes in their guns and used percussion caps. At my earliest recollection there were very few matches. I only knew one family that used them. When they wanted to start a fire they would put some flax tow with gun powder in the pan of a flint-rock rifle and snap the gun and set fire to the tow and blow it into a blaze, or they would strike a flint with a pocket knife and throw a spark onto a piece of punk to set it on fire, but oftener we would go to a neighbor and borrow fire.

They had no scrapers or graders to work the roads, and very few bridges or culverts. There were very few carriages, and no single buggies with tops. There were very few books, but most of them were covered with calfskin. There were very few newspapers. There wasn't one family in ten that took a paper of any kind. There was very little stationery, and what there was, was always foolscap.

The threshing machine, to separate the chair from the grain, came into use about this time, but they were still using the beater which threshed out the grain and they would run it through the fanning mill to separate the chair from the grain.

The two horse cultivator came into use about 1855. It was a large clumsy affair. The wheels were as large as the front wheels of a com¬ mon wagon and the driver sat on a seat about four and one-half feet from the ground and a boy followed and uncovered the corn. There were no corn planters until about 1858. They had low Hat wheels about eighteen inches high and the runners were about the size of sled runners. When they struck ground that was a little hard, or a large corn stub, it would throw them out and leave the corn on top of the ground. A man would follow with a hoe and cover it.

Reapers came into use about 1853. They cut eight feet and took six large horses to haul them. One man drove and it generally took two men to rake the grain off ; one man would rake one round and the other man the next, but there were a few men that could rake all day. Before this they cut grain with cradles and laid the corn ground off with one-horse plows.

We made very little hay. There were no blue grass pastures. There were no mangers or stalls in the stables. We had about ten head of horses and the trough ran through one side of the stable. We threw a basket of corn in and let the horses fight for the corn, which was their principal feed. Part of the time we gave them corn fodder in winter, and we turned them out on the range at night in the summer time. There were a great many horses foundered and had poll evil, big jaw, fistula, sweeney, and stiff joints. We generally fed corn thirty or forty days.

We killed our hogs at home and hauled the carcasses to market. The packers pressed the lard with a hand press and used the cracklings in the furnace for fuel. They sold spare-ribs at one cent per pound and threw the heads and feet away.

Merchants went to St. Louis twice a year to lay in a stock of goods and gave very few orders for goods between times. They bought their goods largely on time and sold on a year's time. Everyone had to settle with cash or note and it was often by note the first of January, and a family of eight that ran a bill of one hundred dollars during the year was considered extravagant.

I often hear old people talking about the good old times, but I don't want any of them. I have often thought I would like to have the town and country to send such people to and let them live there.

The people are a great deal better morally, physically and intellect¬ ually. I would rather ride in an automobile than in an ox wagon, plow with a gang-plow instead of the homemade twelve-inch plow, harvest grain with a binder instead of the cradle, plant corn with the check rower instead of by hand, and cover with a hoe, live in a modern house instead of the log cabin, start fires with a match instead of the flint and steel, and a thousand other things that I haven't space to mention here. And I predict there will be more improvements in the next thirty years than there has been in the past sixty.