3

Henry Keeps the Tradition

1880

We buried Daddy a few weeks ago. He lived a long life—80 years. Afterwards we were going through his things and found the stories he had written about his boyhood and his life on the farm. I was so impressed that I decided, for the sake of the children, to add my story as well.

It’s now 1880. When Daddy was born here, the year after his parents came from Virginia, the Green River country was a wilderness. In his old age he could ride in comfort to Louisville on a passenger train. He was a good man who loved life, loved his farm, and loved his family. I’m just sad that the last 15 years of his life had to be without poor Momma.

She died in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. She was as much a victim of that war as any soldier who died on the battlefield. She died of grief, I believe, over the loss of my brother, Joseph, who died the year before in Virginia. They sent his body home, and he was buried up on the hill. Momma soon joined him. Now Daddy’s there, too.

All of our loved ones who have died are in the burying ground except Aunt Katie. She signed her rights to the farm over to Daddy in 1858 and moved to South Union, Kentucky. She joined a religious group there called the Shakers. I recall she was always very religious. She lived there until she died in 1878. She is buried in their cemetery at South Union, which is on the railroad from Bowling Green to Memphis.

I guess I should start out talking about the war. In 1861 at the start of the war I joined up with a Kentucky regiment on the Southern side. I got elected lieutenant, since I was a lot older than most of the boys. We were part of the Confederate Army in Tennessee. I believed that the South was right. I held no stock in slavery—never believed in it at all. I did believe that the U.S. government had no right to tell people in the states what they should or should not do. The states should be free to decide things for themselves.

My brother, Joseph, traveled up to Ohio and joined a Union regiment just a few weeks after I left. He really believed that the war was about slavery, which he hated. We both thought we were fighting for freedom—him for freedom for the slaves, me for freedom for the states. It just broke our parents’ hearts to have us fighting on opposite sides. Thank Heaven Joseph was sent to Virginia to fight rather than where I was fighting.

We “Johnny Rebs” fought in a few little battles. Then in early 1862 we found ourselves at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, on the Cumberland River, just south of the Kentucky line. The Yanks attacked us with a huge army. They were too strong for us, and we had to give up. I got shot in the right arm. The bullet broke the bone right above my elbow. The doctors had to cut my arm off below the shoulder.

I was in the hospital when we surrendered, but was too weak to be marched to a prison camp. They put me on a hospital boat with other wounded men and sent me to a hospital in Evansville, Indiana. It was a big place called The Marine Hospital, and it was full of the wounded. I got better in a few weeks. I gave my word that I would never fight again, and they let me go home. I took a steamboat home from Evansville and got dropped off at our own landing.

Daddy cried when he saw me coming slowly up the hill. I had never seen my Daddy cry before. That was worse than being wounded. I think my coming home made it harder for my parents in a way. Seeing me without my arm made them fear even more the dangers Joseph faced every time he went into battle. It is easier for people to accept war when they don’t see the reality of it every day.

Joseph fought for two years in Virginia and never got more than a scratch. Then in 1864 he caught some sort of fever and died, just like that. I was in the army for ten months and thought I was unlucky to lose an arm. Poor Joseph had to go through all that hell for two and a half years. Then he died of some sickness. Life just doesn’t make sense sometimes.

We were lucky here on the farm. The war mostly bypassed us. The Rebels wanted to blow up the locks on the Green River at Rochester. General Buckner, who was a Kentuckian, ordered the locks to be jammed with logs instead. The Yanks finally got all of the logs pulled out. They were able to use the river to supply their forces in southern Kentucky. We saw their boats pass by our landing, but they didn’t bother us. We guessed it was because Joseph was in their army.

The Rebel forces didn’t bother us either. Our farm was not easy to get to by road, and they didn’t have any boats. Maybe it was because of me, since everybody around here knew of my service in the Confederate Army.

At any rate we were able to keep the farm going during the war. Daddy had to work extra hard. As I got stronger, I did all I could, but farming is a pretty hard job for a one-armed man. My own boys really worked hard. They did the work of grown men, even though they were still only children.

I have not told about my family. I married my wife, Mary, in 1853, long before the war. We had three children: Little Jeff was born in 1855; John was born in 1857; and our daughter, Selena, came along in 1861. Poor Mary had a really hard time with Selena, and the baby girl died in a few days. Mary was sick for a long time, and she was never able to have more children.

Our family does not seem to have much luck raising girls, but we sure have been lucky with our two boys. I don’t know what Mary and Daddy and I would have done without them. They were able to do just about everything that we needed. When they were still small, they could harness and drive the horses, care for the animals, and help take goods to market. About the only job they could not do during the war years was plowing, so Daddy had to do all that, even though he was really too old. We cut down on the amount of ground we broke until the boys got old enough to plow. I’m sorry the boys had to work so hard when they were so young, but I’m thankful they were not old enough to go to war.

Momma sure was proud of her grandsons, and they were her only source of happiness in her last few months. She felt her life was over after the death of Joseph. But the world goes on. It seems hard to believe, but the 15 years since the end of the war have been very good for us. Tobacco has brought us good times, and we have been able to add a lot to the farm.

A breaking plow in an ad from 1890.

The soil in the Green River Valley is good for raising tobacco. We have to keep clearing new ground for a high grade-crop, and we also use manure. Daddy was a great believer in fertilizing with manure. I hated the job of spreading it, but it makes a much higher grade of tobacco. Since we get more money for higher grades, it is worth the effort.

The tobacco we grow is called Pryor. It’s a rich, smooth leaf used for making pipe tobacco mostly, and for twist. Some of it gets sent to Canada, where they make it into plug chewing tobacco. Pryor does best in the rich soil of new land where there is good drainage and a lot of loam from rotted leaves. Rich soil gives the leaf a light body and a good texture. The leaf cures into a bright brown color, which grades high.

Pryor is also a good stemming tobacco. We used to sell our tobacco ourselves, but since the war, a whole new way of marketing tobacco developed. Owensboro is the center of our tobacco market. There are 18 tobacco factories there, called stemmeries. We sell our tobacco to their agents, who come to our barn. They buy the tobacco and arrange to have it shipped to Owensboro.

In the stemmeries they strip the large center stem from each leaf, which makes two half-leaf strips. The strips age for several weeks in big wooden barrels, called hogsheads, which hold about 1,200 pounds each. Most of the strips are sold to England, but some go to the “Regie.” That is our name for the state tobacco companies in the other European countries. Smoking is very popular in Europe, and American tobacco is the best.

The buyers for these stemmeries travel around visiting our farms after we have cut and stripped our tobacco. After it is cured in the barn, and when the humidity is right for the leaf to come “in order” and get soft as good leather, we strip the leaves from the main stalk. We sort the leaves into three grades: trash, lugs, and leaf.

After the leaves are sorted, we tie them into bundles called hands. Five or six leaves are bundled together with the stems even. The head of the bundle is wrapped with a leaf folded into a strip about an inch wide. This tie-leaf is secured by tucking the stem end through the center of the bundle.

The price we get depends on the grade of the leaf. Last year, in 1879, we got from 50 cents to $1 per hundred pounds for trash; $2 to $4 per hundred for lugs; and $4 to $8 per hundred for leaf. You can see why we work hard to produce the highest grade we can. It really pays when we have a high-grade leaf.

We still make some twist tobacco for our own use and to sell to our old customers. Several big companies make twist tobacco now. They sell it at such a low price that we can’t compete with them and still make any money. Besides, we are getting too busy to fool with it, except for our own use. Now that we have quit making whiskey, we have to buy it by the jug for flavoring. I think we will quit making twist completely now that Daddy is gone. He was an expert roller and really seemed to get a lot of fun out of making twist. For me it was just another job. A one-armed man is no good as a tobacco roller. My boys don’t like it, either. They are pipe smokers.

We have been playing around with a new kind of tobacco called burley or white burley. It is a strong plant and produces a beautiful leaf. It started in Virginia as red burley, but some farmers in Ohio got a light-colored leaf from their seeds, so they call it white burley. It is getting to be popular as a blending leaf in pipe tobaccos, especially with people who roll the tobacco into cigarettes. Cigarette smoking is catching on in some places, but I don’t think it will ever be popular. Folks around here will stick with twist or plug or pipes.

We are doing well enough on The Home Place that we have been able to get some fancy new equipment for the farm. In 1870, we bought a sulky plow. It is like a walking plow, only it’s mounted on wheels so we can ride. Since we don’t have to guide it with handles, I can even plow with the riding plow. It took me quite a while to learn how, and my furrows were pretty ragged for a while, but I eventually got the hang of it. When we come to the end of a furrow, we just pull on a lever and the plow lifts out of the ground. It really speeds up the plowing, and we don’t have to drag the plow by hand to turn it around for the next furrow. I’m glad that I can now do my share of this job, although I sometimes have to guide the team with the reins between my teeth to free my one hand to work the lever.

We also bought a riding cultivator for corn. It saves us a lot of time in keeping the weeds out of the corn crop. It took me quite a while to learn to use it with just one arm, but now I handle it easily. We also bought a grain drill, which speeds the planting of all sorts of small grains such as wheat, oats, rye and barley.

We are growing a lot of wheat these days, and we have just bought a binder. This machine cuts the grain and ties it into sheaves. We stack the sheaves into shocks in the field so that the grain will dry completely. When the threshing machine arrives, we go out in wagons, load up the sheaves of grain, and bring them in to be threshed.

Threshing time is quite a circus. The threshing machine is a wonder! It is powered by a big steam traction engine. It has a big power take-off wheel that is connected to the threshing machine by a big leather belt. We feed the sheaves of grain into the thresher, and grain comes out. It is bagged up into gunny sacks or loaded into wagons. We sack up the grain that we are going to sell so we can ship it on board the steamboats to market. The grain we are going to feed our animals, such as oats, we load into wagons to take to the barn.

A sulky plow in an ad from 1890.

The straw gets blown out of another part of the machine. Every year our straw stack gets bigger as we grow more grain. They say the bigger the straw stack, the better the farm. If that’s so, our farm is pretty good. We use the straw for bedding for our animals and put it around our strawberries and other small fruit to protect them during the winter. We also pack vegetables in straw to keep in the root cellar.

Gangs of people get together to work at threshing time. Neighbors help each other. It’s a party as well as hard work. The women help out in the kitchen and get to talk with each other. There is always a world of food. We have fried chicken, fresh vegetables, lots of bread, and all sorts of fruit pies and cakes. Hard work sure makes people hungry! That old cook stove doesn’t get much chance to cool off during threshing time.

There is a good market for wheat these days. Most towns have a flour mill. We ship our wheat to a big mill in Evansville. We use the oats to feed the horses on the farm. Our rye gets sold to a distillery in Owensboro. Our barley goes to a brewery in Evansville. We send corn, when we have plenty, to the distilleries in Owensboro.

We still ship our hogs to market by boat. We no longer kill hogs at home, except for our own use. The packing plants in Evansville and Owensboro are always a good market for hogs. We have even shipped them as far as Louisville. It is quite a job to get a big old lard hog, which might weigh up to 1,000 pounds, to walk up the chute onto the deck of a steamboat! The passengers are not happy when they see us with a big lot of hogs to load. It means a smelly trip for them.

A lot of railroads have been built in Kentucky in the last few years, but the steamboats are still best for us. The first railroad in this area was the Louisville & Nashville, which passed through Bowling Green. The next was the Elizabethtown & Paducah, which crossed the Green River at Rockport in Ohio County. In the past few years a line called the Owensboro & Russellville crossed the Green at Livermore. We can send goods by boat to Livermore, and then by train to Owensboro, but it is expensive. It is still cheaper for us to use the boats to Evansville.

Besides, the boats are good customers of ours. We sell lots of butter, milk, eggs, and fresh garden produce to the boats for use in their kitchens. We used to cut fire wood for the boats as well. They wanted it cut four feet long in stacks four feet high and 84 feet long. It was a lot of work. While we had a lot of timber in the bottoms, we could make money doing it. Now most of our timber near the river is gone.

We still cut logs. We sell white oak to the barrel-makers in Owensboro for whiskey barrels. Bourbon whiskey has to be aged in virgin white oak barrels. We call white oaks “whiskey trees” because that is mostly what they are used for these days. We also cut a lot of walnut and cherry and sell them to the furniture plants in Tell City, Indiana.

We have new things for the house, too. We got some nice furniture at the plant that buys our walnut lumber. I got Mary a sewing machine. She is proud of it and is quite good on it. It took her a while to learn how to work the treadle just right to make it sew like she wanted.

We have new Mason jars for canning. Mary puts up fruits and vegetables in the summer, and we eat them all winter long. She keeps the cellar full of jams and jellies, and jars of corn, beans, English peas and other garden truck. When we butcher hogs, we make sausage that she cans as well. It is a hard, hot job, but the boys help her as best they can. It’s too bad baby Selena died. She would have been a big help to her Momma.

We buy canned goods at the store sometimes. The variety of food that city people have is amazing. The stores in towns have oranges and bananas all the time and fresh meat whenever we want it. They also have candy, cheeses, crackers, and all sorts of good things. But they are expensive. In Owensboro, country hams and lard sell for 10 cents a pound and bacon for 11 cents. Butter is 20 cents a pound and eggs 10 cents a dozen. I don’t see how city folks can afford to eat!

We have more social life here on the farm than my parents ever had. We now have a school down at the crossroads. The teacher boards around with the families of some of her pupils. The school offers eight grades, which is probably enough. There is a college in Bowling Green where students can go if they want more, but it costs a lot. Our church has a new building and many more members. We now have a preacher two Sundays a month and lessons every Sunday. There are socials, dinners on the grounds, and revivals in the summer.

We have a baseball team. Little Jeff and John both play, and they get up games with other teams up and down the river. It is quite an event, and everyone turns out to watch the baseball boys.

Roads are our biggest problem. The roads now are not much better than in my daddy’s day. I got so mad when my wagon got stuck a few years ago that I ran for the office of magistrate. Much to my surprise, I got elected! I have been working hard to get the landowners to bring the roads into better shape. They need to be ditched, crowned, and graded to keep them smooth. We also need better bridges. I got re-elected last year, so it seems that a lot of people agree with me. Some day we will have all-weather roads, maybe even with rock.

I started out this account talking about death. I’ll end it by talking about life and hope for the future. Little Jeff is getting married next week when the preacher comes through. He is marrying Jean Durham, the daughter of neighbors—fine folks who go to our church. Mary has been bustling around for weeks making him a fine suit and shirt and other clothes for his new life. There is just no telling what kind of confusion is going on over at the Durhams’.

Little Jeff and Jean are going to live here with us at The Home Place. We have plenty of room, and Mary will sure enjoy having another woman around. John will be moving out soon. He plans to marry a lovely girl from Simpson County whose parents have a little dairy farm. She is an only child, and John loves working with cows, so he will be all set. John and his bride-to-be met at a baseball game, of all things!

I only hope that Jeff will be content to stay on the farm and raise his family here. So many young people today are attracted to the cities and the big jobs in factories. It would just break my heart if my boys abandoned the land for the city, but I would never tell them. My dream is that one day my grandchildren will live here on the farm my grandfather hacked out of the wilderness. Only time will tell, I reckon.