The Family

James, Mary, and their 12 children: Katharine, Mary, Helen, Atlee, Dorothy, Edith , Amy, Holcomb, James, Eleanor, Edward, Anna, and grandchildren: Amy and Henry (Helen's)

My father and his sister owned the farm, having bought it from my grandfather. My aunt, Edith Rogers, was unmarried and she and my father, Holcomb Rogers, were two of twelve children. My grandparents, James and Mary Rogers, moved to the farm from Nelson County, Virginia in 1914. Edith was employed by the county as the Welfare Board Supervisor after working in the school system for some time. Holcomb managed the farm.

James, Mary, and their 12 children: top left: Edith, Atlee, James, Dorothy, Amy, Edward, Holcomb. Middle row: Helen, Eleanor, Katharine. Seated in front: Anna, Mary

My grandparents: James Rogers

Mary Rogers (in later life)

In 1942, when my father married my mother, Julia, my dad was fifty-something and my mother was barely twenty. My brother James was born in 1943, two years later my sister Katharine was born and two years after that, I was born. My dad was fifty-seven when I was born and my mother was twenty-four. Edith and Holcomb were joined there by their sister Dorothy ("Dot" also unmarried) when she retired from the New Brunswick, New Jersey school system where she had worked as a librarian for many years.

The House

The house was big and old, with high ceilings and big, wide hallways. My bedroom had a bay window in it, and used to be the master bedroom. It was the kind of house that had doors between all the rooms. Why is that? I have always wondered.

The house was oddly-shaped and had a mysterious set of back stairs which led to a room behind the upstairs bathroom that, as far as I know, was never used for anything. I came to discover that the house was actually two houses pushed together, but I never unraveled the mystery of how or why that had occured. The ceilings were about ten feet high, surrounded by crown molding. There were many rooms; in the downstairs: kitchen, back kitchen, pantry, dining room, “summer” dining room, library, downstairs bedroom, sewing room, and “office” (really just a bathroom). In the upstairs: a storeroom, bathroom, mysterious unused room, master bedroom, two large bedrooms, and four smaller bedrooms.

Blossom Hill in the Spring

In the “library” and dining room were were large family oil portraits hanging from the crown molding. One in the dining room was of a grey-haired lady wearing a frilly lace cap. That one used to scare me because the eyes would follow you all around the room. Late at night I made a point not to look at it. The table in the dining room had a bazillion leaves which, when inserted, could seat many people. I remember having around eighteen people for Thanksgiving dinner one year. There was a wonderful built-in china cabinet all along half of one wall. It was filled with china and glassware for just such occasions. A huge “side board” filled the other side of the room. It had three doors, three drawers, two shelves, and a cupola. All the silverware and extras, like sugar and cream pitchers were kept there. (I used to hide my breakfast oatmeal there too, and sometimes even got away with it.) There were French doors that led out onto the “dining room porch,” the main entranceway being the smaller hall door just to the left. The porch itself was almost as big as the dining room, and was great for rainy days in the summer, spring and fall. Adjacent to the dining room porch was the kitchen porch. It was made of bricks embedded in the dirt and two steps down. There was a tall locust tree next to the porch with a large brass bell anchored in it. It was rung for meals and could be heard all over the farm.

The “library” was really the living room, but it was called the library because it had bookcases full of books and several sofas, tables and chairs. There was a large Oriental rug which we used to drive our mini-cars around using the designs for roads and garages. A large fireplace and hearth with a big thick cement mantle stood on the south side of the room. The bench in front of it was a great place to warm up after sledding and snowballing in the winter. We had a wire basket for popcorn which was held near the flames to heat and pop. That popcorn and hot chocolate were some of our favorite wintertime snacks. At Christmastime our stockings were hung by the chimney with care. We usually got a tangerine in the toe, and hard candy and nuts. Christmas was the only time tangerines were available, and English walnuts and pecans were more of seasonal items then too.

There was a large porch outside of the library also, which wrapped around all the way past the sewing room. We used to sleep there in the summertime sometimes, when the heat was stifling. Although there were fans in every window, it was much cooler down on the porch. We had no air conditioning, not even a window unit.

There was a big wide hallway upstairs, with several dressers against one side. It was dark and the only light switch was in the middle hanging down from the ceiling. All the bedroom doors were usually closed, which is why it was so dark. My brother and sister used to tell me there were bears living in that hallway, and of course I believed them. My room was also at the end of the hall, so they used to hide behind the dressers and jump out at me, scaring the beegeebees out of me.

We had a fairly happy childhood, what with all that room to roam around in, barns to play in with haylofts, the pony to ride. The pony was named Dick, a Chincoteague brought home by my father from the actual yearly round-up on the island fifteen or twenty years before. He was getting kind of old by the time we came along and wouldn't let us saddle or bridle him, so we just rode him bareback, holding on to his mane. He didn't like that either. I gave up after he raked me off his back several times with a low-slung tree limb.

Chicken every Sunday (and how to pick one)

We had thousands of chickens and once a week, usually on Sunday afternoon, at least one would be chosen to be Sunday dinner. This was a whole ritual unto itself. First the wire chicken-catcher had to be employed. It was a long wooden-handled device with a hook on the end designed to snag the chicken’s leg and hold it fast. Then a trip into the henhouse was initiated. A suitable specimen was then selected. Next ensued a chase around the henhouse until at least one hen was caught by the ankle and carried upsidedown by the legs. (For some reason, chickens become placid when suspended upside down.) One can carry three or four chickens this way!

Next, one by one, the chickens were laid on the chopping block next to the henhouse. A hatchet was used to quickly chop their heads off. One had to be sure to hold the tips of the wings and the legs together very firmly, or the wings would flap and spew blood everywhere. You’ve heard the expression “like a chicken with its head cut off”? It’s true, if you were to lose your grip on the legs and let the chicken go, it would run around for several minutes without its head. I personally killed only one chicken. I didn’t like it, and so I never wanted to do it again. Fortunately, I never had to.

After the chickens were killed, and the blood was drained, i.e. they were hung upsidedown for a time, then they had to be plucked. They were brought into the kitchen, and immersed in a boiling pot of water for about three to five seconds. This was to make the feathers easy to pluck out. I recall sitting on the ground outside the kitchen, surrounded by scalded chickens on newspapers, with several cousins, and brother and sister, set to the task of helping prepare the chickens for that days’ dinner by plucking the feathers from the chickens. We called it “chicken-pickin’.”

After that the chickens had to be dressed. That is, cut open, entrails removed, and cut into cooking-sized pieces. (Actually the entrails were called “innards”!) This is also something I usually left to the more experienced, maybe the fact that very sharp knives were involved had something to do with that. I was always fascinated by the organs of the heart and gizzard though. The gizzard had to be split open, and an inner sac removed. In this sack was all the “grit” we had been feeding the chickens over their lifetime. Part of the chicken’s digestive track involves eating small gravel (“grit”) and storing it in their gizzards where the grain they eat is ground to be made use of in the rest of their systems. The heart was usually fried along with the rest of the chicken pieces and fought over as a delicacy. Only one per chicken you know!

We also dressed chickens to be sold fresh, and sometimes sold them “on the hoof” which meant still alive, but bound by the ankles. Once Aunt Dot took an order for one hundred dressed chickens. We were pickin’ chickens for three days!

Applesauce

Every fall when the apples were ripe, our father would take us for a drive in the pick-up truck to an apple orchard about an hour away. We would pick apples for a couple of hours, play around while some got pressed into cider, and then ride home sitting in the back with bushels of apples and a big barrel of cider. Later, a day would be set aside for cooking the apples and making apple sauce. My job was to turn the crank on the food mill to get all the seeds, core, and skins out of the stuff. Great for building up your biceps! Then I also had the job of turning the crank on the can sealer - I guess it was the "Little Ole Crank-Turner - Me!" Then we would take the cans to the cannery at the Herndon High School to be put under pressure and cooked in a process that preserved the contents. Afterwards, we had applesauce coming out of our ears for months. Served at every meal, almost like fried chicken!

Kitchen, Table, and Food

We had chicken for dinner every Sunday, along with applesauce, fresh vegetables from the garden: corn, tomatoes, green beans (these were called “snaps” because of the noise they made when were broken apart), peas, home-churned butter (more cranking!), homemade biscuits, and freshly mixed and frozen ice cream. In the winter the vegtables were the same, but from our own store of frozen and canned stock.

Forced to help with dinner preparation, I became an expert in biscuit rolling and cutting. The kitchen table was a huge slab of soapstone around four by eight feet, and had a “bread board” inserted through the middle that slid from one side to the other. When it was on the north side it was the bread board. On the other side it was the anchor for the can-sealing machine, the apple-ricing machine, and the butter churn. The board itself was about four feet by thirty inches and about two inches thick. Many batches of biscuits, cookies, cinnamon bread, and “Mrs. Wrights Rolls” were harvested on that board. It was also used as a dinner table for the hired hands on occasion when there were only one or two of them. It was big enough for them to sit facing each other!

On at least one occasion I remember seing a side of beef on that table, being cut and wrapped in freezer paper, to be stored in one of the freezers in the back room. Behind the dining room was a room called “the summer dining room” which was never used as such during my lifetime. It was filled with two or three long chest freezers, plus various pieces of old furntiure and other sundries. In the back kitchen was another chest freezer and an upright freezer.

The table also housed many boxes of eggs gathered from the hen house. I believe the boxes were actually orange crates about fifteen by fifteen inches. There must have been about nine of them at the east end of the table, and the west end was reserved for food preparation and dish washing. Dish washing never took place in the sink, it was done by placing pans of hot water on the end of the table, one for washing, one for rinsing, and a rack for drying. The glasses had to be washed first, then the silverware. Then came the plates and dishes, and finally the pots and pans. That way the water didn’t have to be replaced. The rinse water was so hot that tongs were used to lift the plates and glasses from the water. A person standing there to receive the hot silverware was required to immediately take it to the dining room and dry it as it was replaced into the drawers where it was stored. Very important!

The garage was a little too short, our `62 Buick stuck out of it by a couple feet, and the wheat bin inside next to the car was a wonderful place to get cool in the summertime, never mind the water bugs sharing the space. The smoke house was way past its prime, but there was still a smoked ham covered with dust hanging in the pantry by the kitchen. The bungalow was the house I grew up in till age eight when our parents’ marriage ended in divorce. The big house is where we all lived after that, each getting our own big rooms at the end of the long dark hallway with the bears.

The turkey coop is the scene of a terrifying memory of standing next to a bird taller than I was. (I ran.) The old hen house once had a purpose, but in later years only housed sacks of chicken feed and my 4H prize-winning flock of pullets in 1961. Also provided a wonderful place to hide during twilight games of hide-and-seek or cops-and-robbers. (Or just trying to get out of chicken-pickin.) The new hen house was filled with cages filled with hens, whose eggs when layed would roll down a little wire runway out of their reach and closer to mine. No wonder they were always cackling afterwards. There were also chickens in a more traditional set-up, whose warm bodies you sometimes had to reach under and get your hand pecked to gather the eggs. The small round steel henhouse was just another spot for yet another flock. Sometimes chicks. One morning the heat lamp got too close to the sawdust and caused a fire. It wasn’t til after I was at school that I realized that I too smelled like smoke!

The equipment shed housed my father’s Caterpillar tractor, Goliath. We used to ride with him while he plowed fields, what a thrill! Also in the shed were a binder and baler and several other smaller items like a rake (the kind with a hitch to be pulled by a tractor or truck) and several types of plows. And the maunure spreader.

Once my father was featured in a magazine article because he was the only farmer around who still plowed fields using a mule team. He had two mules named Ginny and Maude, and occasionally used them behind a plow, with himself walking behind and holding the plow and the reins, shouting directions to the mules, like “Gee” (G like “get,” ryhmes with “key”) and “Haw!” It was a sight to behold!

Susan, taken the day of the magazine article photos Picture of Daddy with Mules has been "misplaced"

In the tool shed/pump house there was every kind of tool you could name. And if it wasn’t there, Daddy would take a piece of metal and fire up the forge and make one. Well, perhaps he didn’t actually do that, but I spent many an hour in there with him cranking up the fire in the forge to help him while he pounded a piece of hot steel into whatever shape was required at the time. (more crank-turning!) Next to that tool shed was a windmill that held our water as it was pumped from the well. The actual operation of the pump had been transfered from the wind to electricity at that time, but the tank was still up on the structure. I think you get better water pressure if it is elevated. The tank, however, leaked and so in the wintertime huge ice columns would form and surround the structure. It was almost like our very own “fortress of solitude.”

The corn crib provided more sources of amusement. We would each take a position on one side or the other and hurl dried corn cobs (the corn still on them) at each other until someone got hit or hurt. I had to go to the doctor once to get a corn kernel taken out of my eye. In the corn crib there was a corn-shelling machine. Yep, you guessed it, more crank-turning! As the crank was turned, the corn was fed into one end and it went through the middle of two large wheels. The dried corn was rubbed off the cob and dropped through a hole in the bottom into a bucket underneath. The empty cob came out the other end and dropped into a basket. No, we did not take these to the outhouse. That’s where the old Sears catalogs went. Kidding! (No, I’m not, really.) The shelled corn was then fed to the chickens. The pigs were fed the corn still on the cob. The cattle got corn mixed in with other stuff called mash. The chickens got mash too, usually what you think is called chicken feed, but it was mixed with wheat, or it was actually ground-up wheat. Fascinating, isn’t it?

The lower barn and the upper barn were both designed for dairy cattle. The lower barn was built first and was near the windmill. The upper barn was new and improved, and had a state-of-the-art milking system in it, whereas the lower barn barely had electricity. After the upper barn was built, the lower barn housed the pigs and beef cattle and the pony. It had a hayloft full of hay which provided endless hours of entertainment for us. The upper barn was equiped not only with the new milking system, but also a wonderful manure removal system. No more wheelbarrows! There was a large drum-shaped receptical on a track suspended from the ceiling with chains and pulleys. All you had to do was run it to the end of the barn and out to the manure pit. What could be easier? The maunure pit was somewhat of a fascination all itself. In the winter time I remember my brother once boasting that it was so cold that all the manure was so frozen he could walk on it. Well, guess what, he couldn’t! He sank in to his knees, and we almost wet ourselves laughing. In the spring the manure was shoveled into the manure spredder with some straw and dragged behind the truck in the crop fields. It was recycling at its most basic.

In the hay loft of the upper barn there was another set of tracks with chains and pulleys. This one operated the hay fork. After the hay was baled it was lifted by a huge fork in blocks of maybe a dozen at a time. The system was designed to somehow swing the bundle into the hayloft thru the door automatically and release the bundle inside. (or was there someone inside operating the controls?) Another person inside had the job of arranging the bales neatly. This was not always properly executed because later our explorations would reveal hidden tunnels and caverns. Does this sound dangerous? You bet it was! But we survived, we flourished! We invented more games as we built fortresses and choose sides. The hay fork itself became our plaything. There was a platform way up top of the south end where the rail was anchored to the ceiling. From there or part way up the ladder we would swing out on the rope and let go to land in a pile of hay. By the way, do you know how hard a pile of hay can be? I bet you don’t.