Here is an old picture from 1959 on our farm at Schell City, Missouri taken when I was a child by me. Mom gave me free rein with our camera and now I'm glad she did. My father had taken my Uncle Bob Hammontree, Uncle Moe Bright and Cousin Marvin Hammontree squirrel hunting on a fall day. My mother and Aunt Short were in the kitchen fixing lunch for all of us which included me, brother John and cousins Don and Keith.
In the picture is the top of our large chicken house showing over the root cellar. My parents had leghorn layers and sold many of their eggs to a hatchery. Dad checked the eggs by witching with a wire. If the wire waved back and forth, the egg held what would someday be a rooster and if the wire made a circle the egg would become a hen. I don't know how accurate he was, but the hatchery bought the eggs anyway. The hens that stole out a nest of eggs and hatched chicks were taken care of and in a few weeks those chicks became our fried chicken dinner when we had company.
As usual when Dad took a break he filled his pipe. This is the picture I used in a story I wrote and sold to Good Old Days magazine about our root cellar (the mound of rocks behind Dad) which we called the cave because it was a dark, damp, cold cement cellar in the ground with snakes in it sometimes. It sit right behind the house. Mom stored her canning from our large garden and fruit trees, plus strawberries from our garden patch and blackberries from the pasture on the two shelves over the bins of potatoes. That was our food for all winter.
When a storm was brewing, we'd remove the wooden egg box on an old bench at the back of the cave and sit down, bundled up in a quilt. The egg box stored the eggs from our large flock of hens until it was full. What we didn't eat, Mom used to trade for groceries. That's why she always called shopping going to do her trading. Besides eggs, she traded blackberries, strawberries and potatoes.
Storms in the middle of the night in tornado alley always kept Dad jumpy. Fearing a tornado, he paced from window to window to watch the sky. Us kids would get woke up after the rain started to pour, the wind roared and lightning split the sky to make a run for the cellar until the storm stopped. Dad must have liked to watch the storms. He stood in the doorway. As soon as it was safe, we all went back to bed. Stories had it that once before we moved to that farm a tornado came alongside the house without doing much damage.
Our dog, Ginger, had a liking for all babies. She had carried a litter of kittens up and laid them on the back steps. The mother cat wasn't too happy with her. Another time, she fought with a mother hen to catch a new hatch of baby chicks to take care of. She gingerly carried each chick in her mouth down into the cave to keep safe for herself. We came home from town and found the hen angry with feathers fluffed up, attacking the dog from behind all the way to the cellar. On investigation, we found out why. About half of the hen's baby chicks were in the cave. We had to give them back to the hen and shut her up somewhere until Ginger forgot about adopting the chicks.
The cement steps to the cave were always cool in the summer. Mom was always sending one of us to the cave to get her a jar of something to cook. I always hated finding a large black snake laying on the steps. Usually, I'd put up a fuss until Mom or Dad came and moved the snake. One time I was getting a jar off the shelf and noticed a jar next to it had a baby snake curled up in it. I quickly backed out of the cave, leaving the jar Mom wanted sit. Dad went down to the cave and put a lid on the jar with the snake in it and carried the critter away so I could go back after the jar of food Mom wanted.
She canned meat as well as garden produce and fruit because we didn't have a freezer in those days to keep the hog or cow Dad butchered by hanging the carcass on the limb of the large mulberry tree behind the cave. It was a lot of work to can quart jars of food on hot summer days on a wood-burning cookstove. Our wooden refrigerator, called an icebox, was on the back porch where it was cooler. It had a space that held a large block of ice which kept it cool to hold leftovers and lemonade and ice tea until the block melted. Under the ice space the melting ice dripped into a pan Mom had to empty often. Each time we went to Schell City to get groceries and gas in the car, Dad stopped at the ice house next to the gas station and bought a block of ice.
This all took place for us in the forties and fifties in Vernon County, Missouri. My how times have changed now, but for me it is fun to look back on those carefree days when my parents worked so hard to make their family a home and I enjoyed the freedom of exploring over our farm.
