FOOD DOESN’T COME FROM THE STORE

Most people today think if you want a gallon of milk, or a pound of butter or a dozen eggs, you drive down to the corner store and buy them. But that is a fairly recent phenomenon, and a fairly fragile situation. If anything happens to break down our system at any point, we only have about three days of food in the stores, then what? In the old days, food didn’t come from the store.

In the not too distant past, most people lived in rural areas on acreages, not bunched up in cities unable to fend for themselves. Even people who couldn’t afford to own land themselves, would be able to rent a farm from someone else who did. When the Cook family moved here over 100 years ago, that is what they did, they were tenant farmers until they had enough money to buy their own land. They kept cows, pigs, geese and chickens for food, as well as growing a large garden and orchard for fruits and vegetables to can. Horses and mules were kept not for pleasure or as pets, but as transportation and work animals around the farm to power farm implements.

James Jackson Cook at his farm on Cook’s Corner Rd in the 40s

Cows and pigs are a lot of work. Cows can always find their way OUT of the fence to find greener pastures, but they can never seem to find their way back IN on their own. They always seem to want to have their calves in the dead of a cold, miserable night, and you are going to have to spend all night out there helping them do it. Then all the animals are ready at the crack of dawn to be fed and milked again, just like yesterday and just like tomorrow. Clean out that chicken coop, gather and wash those eggs, feed those chickens and pigs, change that water, brush those horses, come back tomorrow and do it all again ……. Below: Unknown Clountz family photo.

What’s wrong with this picture of the boys riding cows? Why nothing. Mama said kids used to ride cows all the time in the old days, she rode some herself, not in a rodeo either, but in the pasture. (Natalie Bauman)

Fresh milk and butter on the farm is the best! Milking usually has to be done twice a day, early in the morning and at evening. If you do it by hand like people around here did, it takes a while, it can messy and smelly and the cow can kick you. Sometimes, just when you are about to finish, the cow kicks the whole bucket of milk over. It’s fun though when the cats and dogs come up and beg so that you can practice shooting milk directly into their mouth from the cow.

Below: Florence Cook Clountz milking, about 1970.

Whole milk from the cow tastes great! When the milk chills, the cream separates and you can skim the cream off and make butter. The skimmed milk that is left is what Mama called “Blue John” because it had a bluish color without the cream in it. I didn’t look forward to butter churning, whichever method we used. We had a big tall crock with a stick plunger, a glass jar type with a crank handle and sometimes we just put the cream in a Mason jar and shook it about a MILLION times until the cream changed miraculously into butter, you can really see the magical process in that small jar. It was really fresh and sweet, but not yellow, it was, of course, CREAM colored!

Where do you keep the milk and butter? They kept in crocks and usually used it up quickly anyway, people all had large families. If it soured, you could give it to the pigs. Everyone had a slop bucket for the pigs somewhere in the kitchen. If food couldn’t be used by the family, it was not wasted, it was given to the animals to eat. We had one of those, it wasn’t a pleasant thing to have, but necessary. In the old days, they had an ice box, literally, like an ice chest. We had one. It was an insulated square metal box with legs with a second compartment on top which held a large square block of ice, if you could get it.

In the old days, people didn’t depend on the store for food because for one, they many times had no way to regularly get to a store or they couldn’t afford to buy food there. Next time you see a Superstore, appreciate it!

Yes, the answer to the question - which comes first, the chicken or the egg - the chicken has to come first, then you get the best tasting fresh eggs in the world. They are MUCH better than the cage eggs you buy in the store, trust me, I know. BUT, you haven’t lived until you have kept chickens. You earn those eggs. If you want nice tasting eggs, you will let the chickens roam free and eat a lot of the things they are supposed to naturally eat, (plus you have to spend tons of money usually, supplementing their diet with chicken food, oyster shells, etc.). Below: Ellie Hash feeding her chickens on Cooks Corner Rd 1920?

Because of this, you better watch where you walk, because you can’t potty train a chicken. I used to run bare foot in the summer as a kid, and I can’t tell you how many times I was doing the one legged trot to the water hose to get rid of that HORRIBLE smell in between my toes. Out in the country, you aren’t the only ones interested in having chicken dinner. There are owls, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, bobcats and many other predators that would love to unburden you of these pesky chickens, so you have to make sure and lure them (with food since they aren’t smart enough to train) into a covered, completely enclosed pen every night. That’s right, the pen soon becomes disgusting and the chickens are called fowls because of their terrible housekeeping abilities. So YOU have clean it out. The good news is, it makes you feel less sorry for them when you eat them and you can use what you clean out of their pen and all the other animal pens to fertilize your vegetable garden, and it works great. But compost it a little while first. If you put it on fresh, it will burn up whatever plant it comes near (after it has already burned out the inside of your nose, so after a while you may forget how potent it is).

You usually start preparing the garden in Texas in January by tilling it and applying fertilizer and planting such things as onions and potatoes. The process continues with different crops as it warms. One thing that never stops in the garden is hoeing. The number one crop in any farm is the one that no one ever plants – weeds and grass. They are the parasites living off the hard work you have put into the soil to make it productive. To make sure your vegetables are able to have room to survive, you have to eliminate the determined intruders, and it’s an almost daily job. Below: Florence Clountz

Florence, working her garden and (right) harvesting her sweet-potatoes in the 1980's.

The other parasites in the garden are also ever-present problems that only constant vigilance seems to help- bugs, bunnies and deer. Those cute Disney characters aren’t so cute when they are chomping down all your food!

Once a vegetable is ready to be harvested, it seems they are all ripe at once. You can’t eat all of those. Your neighbors don’t need them, they are seeing them in their sleep! But the unwritten rule of farmers is: Never Waste Anything. So you can it and preserve it for winter which means more hard hot work, but it pays off later in the cold months when there are no fresh veggies to be had. You can also can meat and fruit. People also had smokehouses they used in the fall when they killed hogs to smoke and preserve the meat for later. Meat can also be cut in thin strips, smoked and dried like jerky to preserve it.

If the stores closed down, or Hard Times come again, would we, like our ancestors be able to say “Food doesn’t come from the store”?

GOTTA LOVE OUR COUNTY ROADS TOO!

Due to all the recent flooding rains, travel on the roads has become a bit difficult at times. Just imagine for a moment how much worse it would have been, had all your roads NOT been paved? What if you consistently couldn’t get to work or get your children to school because of muddy roads?

Today, we take these things for granted, but in times past it was not the case. As recently as 1939, farmers of Locust and the Overton school community, through a delegation, with spokesman Tom Montgomery, expressed their need for an all-weather road from Locust to highway 91. The statement of Mr. Montgomery was that “the area affected was a trade territory for Denison, and their large number of farmers along the road did most of their trading in Denison, when the road was passable. Farmers wishing to come to Denison last Saturday found they had to walk some distance to a good road and have their neighbors on the good road bring them to Denison. A good road has been promised to the community for the past several years, but so far nothing has been done about the matter.”

The bad weather in 1939 brought forcibly to the attention of the people of Locust community the great need of an all-weather road from Locust to highway 91. The people felt they had been sharing their part of the burden to help build better highways over the county, but they remained in the mud and their children were forced to stay away from Overton School or forced to endanger their health by exposure to open weather and muddy roads. This was the only school building in the county which still remained undeserved by all-weather roads. The community was located in one of the richest growing belts of the county which practice general diversification and contribute largely to the milk, butter, egg and other farm products which were marketed in Denison. It was believed that the road leading from Locust to highway 91, if made an all-weather road, would give to an important group of Graysonites their just dues.

I remember Mama telling me that prior to, and during that time period, the roads were indeed terrible in this area. In some cases, they were just dirt, not gravel. She said when it rained and long after, the muddy ruts would be so deep that the wheels of the cars would sink down to the axles and running boards and become stuck. Other times they would slip off the roads. When the roads were dry, they were so rough, the term “washboard” didn’t just refer to laundry implements. The ruts would dry and stay deep and if you drove in them, your car might get caught on “high center” as she called it and you might be “left hanging”.

Most of our rural roads have been paved now and many of us remember what it was like before, and we don’t want to go back! So the next time you ride down that smooth, paved, rural, county road, appreciate that it took many years of muddy cars, lobbying and work to make them that way.