Today I am sharing my grandfather Lynne O. Ramer's articles about barns and sheds of his childhood in Milroy, PA in the early 1900s. Gramps sent his articles to Ben Meyer who shared them in his We Notice That column in the Lewistown Sentinel in the 1960s.
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Joseph Sylvester Ramer and his second wife Barbara Rachel Reed Ramer were Lynne O. Ramer's grandparents.
The photo shows the Milroy, PA farm he lived on as a child.
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Lots of Work and Fun-Making When Barns Flourished
Up in the Haymow
Being a Blue Hollow lad back in the days, when every famer had its great big and roomy barn, filling it was a lot of hard work. But there was something to compensate for it. There was lots of fun-making, too.
Up in the haymow there were also sheaves of wheat, oats, and corn stalks. The mow's floor consisted of scant, open-face planks where the food for the livestock had to be handled with tender care or it would be ruined.
To prevent spontaneous combustion and heatings and excess molds, causing fire to break out and perhaps burn the building to the ground, there had to be proper ventilation.
So the kids had to keep the hays and straws and sheaves in the most intricate manner. After these things began to settle down, the puzzle of getting out of it would have challenged the skill of an escape artist like Houdini. The kids had a job trying to untangle the mess.
It was hard on the kids, too, on a smotheringly hot day. In the haymows the harried youths dragged and tramped the hays until they actually dropped from sheer fatigue.
Remember, it was 108 degrees up there beneath the tin roof. Then the kids sweated, but in the winter time they almost froze up there, chutting the feeds down through the mow hole, down to the ever hungry horses and cows.
Yet, despite all this, it was like a paradise up there next to the cool tin roof on a rainy day. It was pleasant and relaxing, listening to the pitter-patter of the rain. Or the clank-clank of hail stones in sweet music as they descended on the corrugated galvanized roof.
'Twas no place to linger on sub-zero days, dragging the food supply to the mow holes. It was fully a 50-foot drop from the top of the mows to the barn floor below.
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| Early 1900s, John O'Dell on his farm near Capac, MI |
Knocked Out Cold
So the muscle-power of the cows and horses had to be called on to help. A one-inch hemp rope around the neck of Old Daisy, Old Bessy, or Old Dobbin, or Old Mary would pull the pitchfork holding sheaves up to the top.
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| Farm horses early 1900s. John O'Dell farm in Brown City, MI |
This arrangement worked real well. But then one day Mary's colt whinnied at an unguarded moment. The rope was tightened as Mary tired to go to her baby and it caught the farm boy, who was tossed through the air "with the greatest of ease."
When he hit bottom he bounced off a heap of limestone. Result: The lad was knocked out cold. It was a long sleep for him before he woke up with the help of old Doctor Boyer*. Unconscious he was from 2 pm to 8 am the next day. The youngster had the "ride of his life," nearly the last ride.
When the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed and the rain and hail pummeled the galvanized roof, nobody had to worry about being up in the haymow. They felt perfectly sage. There were four lightning rods. Ben Franklin proved a point with his kite.
If a lad got careless when the mows were being filled he ight disappear in the heap, falling through an unfloored section of the floor, reappearing again in the stable below--scaring a horse or cow half out of its wits.
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| Threshing in 1920. John O'Dell farm near Capac, MI |
Thresher Comes Around
The time came when Homer Cressman** bought his throwing rig to separate the chaff from the grain. The thresher was set up. And soon the barn floors were littered with dust and chaff and the wheat and oats sheaves did fly.
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| Hay stack in early 1900s. Photo of the John Kuhn farm in Tonawanda NY |
The cone-capped stack grew bigger and even bigger in height and width. There the livestock could munch later, but meanwhile the chickens followed the sifting chaff and grains away out into the meadows and fields.
Yes, the kids had lots of useful things to fill their lives. Unlike the youths today, they didn't need thrills such as some do nowadays--pulling over mail boxes, prowling rural lanes, scaring the people by the noise of their motorcycles.
Gone are the days and gone also are many of the old-fashioned barns which furnished so much work and play, not only for kids, but for all the family.
*****
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| Barn raising and barn. John O'Dell farm near Capac, MI early 1900s. |
Here’s What Goes Into the Barn and What Comes Out
Chicken Thief Surprised
Come, if you will, with us and we’ll take a look at the most important of all the farm buildings next to the farmer’s house. Namely, the barn. Let’s think of what goes on in them, what goes into them, and what comes out of them.
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"tilling the soil" around 1920 involved a team of horses.
John O'Dell fam, Capac, MI
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Lined up side by side are the various stables, three of them. First on the left come the horse (and colt) stables; next, in the center, come the bulls’ and calves’ stables, and on the right are the milk cow’s stables.
There are entries or runways between the rows, whence the brans, chops, grains, corns, hays fodders are dispensed into the mangers, troughs, racks, etc., from bins and haymows.
Stalls for the animals may be solid walled planks to prevent Old Dobbin from kicking Old Daisy. If there is nothing as substantial as the walls between the livestock, then merely a long chained to the ceiling, is poked though the hay and racks. The log, swinging freely, gently touches the flanks or rumps of the horses, poking them and reminding them to stay in the middle of their domain.
The story is told of two young scamps who had stealthily come into the horse stables one night, seeking to get some roasting chickens for a dough bake at Potlicker Flat. {Note: Potlicker Flat was a real place!] The horses, let out to munch and sleep in the nearby meadows, had made room for the fowls to come in to roost for the night.
The kids had to work in the dark. One of them accidentally knocked against the log hanging from the ceiling. Like a pendulum, the big heavy log began to swing back and forth, finally sticking against the rump of one kid.
The one who was hit started to run away as fast as he could, yelling, “Charlie! Run! He got me!” He thought it was the framer, Andy Swartzell***, who hit him with a club. Both of the lads, indeed all actors in the little episode, are now long gone.
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| Bringing in the hay early 1900s. Photo of John Kuhn on his farm in Tonawanda, NY |
A Fall From Mow
Across the entire rear end of these runways we mentioned is a narrower runway for dragging feed to the animals. Across holes to the mows above are made, each one having a ladder to crawl up and down as one wishes.
A fall or jump from the haymow above or the straw mow or fodder mow to the heaped up pile below was a breath-taking thrill or a breath-taking thump, depending on whether it was intended or accidental. Many a farmer’s boy or even the farmer himself or a hired hand has been seriously hurt in one of these falls.
These horse stables and cow stables are cleansed daily (huh, well, maybe every day) but the colts and calves’ stables offal are allowed to accumulate on the floor. That makes it easier for their shorter legs to reach the mangers and hay-fodder ricks.
Some accumulations remain all winter. Hence the spring cleaning is a task detested by the teen and pre-teen farm lads. When the oldsters aren’t watching some kids curl up in a wheelbarrow and read such smuggled literature as the Alger Books, the American Boy, Youth’s Home Companion, Jesse James, Liberty Boys of ’76. This is done between barrowsful.
Outside in the barnyard, too, are the straw stacks. There the munching, lunching cows and horses chomp away, but only as high as they can reach, say six to eight feet. As a result the stack assumes a mushroom shape.
Roosters Lose Dignity
On occasions, tunnels are eaten straight through the stack and on rare occasions the pile tumbles over onto the cattle, sending them scampering and snorting.
Under the barn’s overshoot a clay-gravel path, an all-season access from the outside can be made to all stables. Two or three rock-salt boxes are handy. Also the water trough is under the overshot, so the feeders and drinkers can be out of the weather altogether.
In the troughs are horny chubs that tickle the noses of the cattle and tease the Rhode Island Red roosters which mostly fall in when pecking at a surfacing chub. Lose all their fowlish dignity as they get a through dunking.
This is just a compressed resume of what goes on, into and out of stables in barns. To which you can add your own imagination. How about it?
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| John O'Dell barn near Capac, MI around 1920 |
*****
Some Farmers Still Have A Shanty House Left
City folks are familiar with the vacation homes, which we recently described. But there are still left county people having many different houses. They include at each farm the following: the shanty, the barn, the milk shed, the wood shed, the implement shed, the smoke house, the outhouse, and not forgetting the corn crib and granary, also the silo.
Now the shanty is most used of all. Most of these are attached to the main dwelling, but some stand off by themselves.
So what is it used for? Well, the shanty is merely a lean-to at rear of the farm house, used as a supplementary kitchen. Or laundry.
In a sense the shanty is an air-conditioned annex, to keep the boiling clothing on wash day from steaming up the kitchen, as well as eliminate the heat of canning, preserving, baking, etc. out of the summer kitchen. By air-conditioning we mean it’s cooler there than in the kitchen due to the opened and unscreened windows, during the summer time.
The shanty provides a means of preparing butchering dinners or holiday dinners or when the “city relatives” pile in on the farmer’s family unexpectedly.
In the winter it is not quite as warm as the kitchen, so that grandma, in her woolen shawl, can scrape the hog’s small intestines clean for the sausage-making. And all this without freezing her nimble fingers.
If you ever tried to preserve jams, vegetables, and pickles all on the same stove, you can readily see how useful is that “extra stove” in the shanty.
We must not overlook the privacy of a shanty for a bath, either in a 12-inch basin or in a full-sized galvanized laundry tub. For both of these versions the bath must be taken in a stand-up position.
And when the soft (lye) soap skids across the floor, have no fear. he soap can’t hurt the bare, splintery floor. So just gingerly trace the soap and retrieve it.
If you are fortunate enough to have like-minded cousins who want to take a scrubbing, you can exchange the scrub brush. Then both get a good going-over. While standing yet!
There really ain’t time, nor temperature, to play with sail boats or plastic toys else the water may begin to freeze before your toys float to the other side of the make-shift tub. You see, we can spare only one tea kettle full of hot water per person per week. Rinsing is verboten.
Other functions of the shanty were for milk-seperatin’, butter churnin’, sausage grindin’, mush boilin’.
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| John O'Dell farm near Capac, MI around 1920 |
Snowbound in Barn
Now that all of these things are done for us, in national establishments, put up cartooned, canned, wrapped and shipped everywhere for immediate consumption, there is really no honest-to-goodness uses for a shanty. (About as useless as a bath in a 21-day trip to the moon).
It was the custom to make all the different buildings inter-communicating in U or L formation so a person could walk from one end to the other without being exposed to the weather.
Why was this so? Because during a heavy snow the drifts might pile up 20 feet deep. Hence it was not a good idea to get snow-bound until the next spring in the barn. One might be marooned there and unable to separate the milk for a long time.
If the farmer and his family weren’t too finicky they could fetch the cows into the kitchen to milk, or the pigs to slop or the Rhode Island Reds to nest.
The fashion today is to have two homes or two places to live when the family is so minded where to have them located. But that kind of life will never be as exciting as in the day when the shanty flourished!
*****
Sheds: Attached to Every Barn
Our story about the farm
shanties naturally leads to another kind of building that always
could be found nearby—the sheds. Let’s talk about a typical Blue
Hollow shed located in one of the ravines in the east end of Kish
Valley [Kishacoquillas Valley, known locally as both Kish Valley and Big Valle]. Here’s how it looked, say about the year 1915:
Like every barn, Blue Hollow’s
has attached to it a shed, located at right angles to the higher barn
roof. The shed generally becomes “all purpose,” for dozens of
functions. In the back end of the shed are stored the harrows, the
discer, the hay rakes, the tedder.
And in the forefront of the shed
is the milk wagon, a light spring wagon, with no top to shield one
from the weather. Then at the outer edge of the shed is a corn crib.
Here are stored a few hundreds of bushels of corn.
The bottom and sides of the crib
are lined with quarter-inch wire mesh to keep out the rats. But the
mice find entrance and enough corn silk to make a dozen cozy nests,
lined with chicken feathers and the fleece of sheep. But the mice
consumption of corn kernels is not heavy due to the barn cat that
keeps their number down.
Outside the crib door is a
knotty old chopping block on which you cut corn-on-cobs into a dozen
pieces with your trusty hatchet. There the barn fowls of all kinds
can peck the kernels off the cob more easily and so the cobs will
decompose in the nearby manure heap. Not only chickens, ducks,
geese, turkeys gather for the feast, as do also the semi-wild guineas
and semi-tame pigeons.
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| John O'Dell farm near Capac, MI around 1920 |
Implements Aplenty
To the other side of the shed is
an assortment of things including a huge anvil mounted on a block, a
few wooden horses to hold up any platform, a hand-operated forge and
a boxful of coal.
Ranked against the stable side
wall are these implements: Picks, hoes, rakes, grubbing pick, a
16-pound sledge hammer, a two-bitted axe, a crowbar or two, pieces of
water pipe, iron stakes, etc.
Hanging of the wall are
cross-cut saws, a crossback saw, regular woodsaws; a hacksaw, small
hand axes, pip wrenches, monkey open- and closed-end wrenches,
collars, hamess, fly netting, harnesses, whiffletrees, etc.---all of
which need mending and re-riveting.
Oh, we forgot! There stands a
300-400 pound grindstone. And nearby is a stock of scythes, sickles,
a cradle, cutter bars from mowers and reaper-binders, corn cutters,
bush hooks---all needing tedious hours of turning and grinding and
whetting.
Fastened to the wall are a
20-foot long, two-inch thick plank work benches side-by-side, with a
few shelves, and drawers underneath for a grand assortment of boxes,
cans, jars. The boxes once contained cut plug chewing tobacco. The
cans were once full of paint.
As for the Mason glass jars,
they were “stolen” from the missus’ cellar. In the receptacles
were nails, screws, washers, cotter keys, nuts, bolts, glazier’s
points, all sorts of rivets, hasps, hinges for small doors.
Busiest Spot on Farm
And in the large bins were
hoops, hinges, clevises, snaps, open rings, closed rings, horseshoe
nails, horseshoes, rasps, chisels, awls, punches.
There were barber-wire
cutters, fence wire stretchers, also staples of all sizes. Ranked
beyond the work bench were unused rolls of three different heights of
fence and chicken fence and barbed wire, rolls of tar paper, and a
parcel bundle of cedar shingles. There were shoe lasts for humans.
Over all was the layer of dust,
mixed with chaff and chicken, pigeon and swallow offal.
On rainy days this was the
busiest spot on the farm. Grinding edges of axes, scythes, cutter
bars. This entailed the labor of chiseling off the rivets and
installing new rivets, either by the anvil or on a handy length of
rail from the Reichley**** Brother’s logging railroad, or from the
Naginew***** or Shaeffer’s quarries. Yet, perhaps also from the Pennsy [Pennsylvania] Railroad.
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NOTES
* Old Doc Boyer appears on the 1910 census for Old Armgah Township as Dr. S. J. Boyer, age 53, with wife Emma E., age 42. On the 1920 Census Samuel J. Boyer is age 63 and lives with his wife Emma and their children Walter, age 13, and Roy, age 11. Samuel J. Boyer died in 1943 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Milroy, PA. His son Walter Wendell died of Typhoid fever at age 31; he was born Feb 3, 1857 and died in 1918. Walter worked as a telegraph operator for the Pennsylvania Rail Road.
**S. Homer Cressman appears on the Armagh Township census. He was born about 1859 and worked as a store clerk in 1880. He was widowed and a traveling salesman in 1920, living with his son Gilbert, daughter-in-law Minnie, and grandchildren George and Samuel, on Gilbert's farm. In 1930 he owned a saw mill.
*** According to his death certificate, Charles Andrew Swartzell was born Sept. 9, 1863 and died January 11, 1929. His parents were Andrew Szartzell and Mary Ann Aitkins. He married Ann C. Linthrust. His occupation was farmer. His death certificate was signed by Dr. S. J. Boyer.
****According to Lost Railroads, found at
http://lostrailroads.com/about/: This railroad was built by Reichley Brothers to connect their operations with [the] tramroad Gotshall had constructed southwest from Poe Paddy, through Panther Hollow and past Dinkey Springs. It must have been built shortly after 1900, after they acquired the Monroe Kulp mill at Milroy and associated railroads and chose to abandon the original Reichley tramroad from Poe Paddy along Poe Creek.
According to a Armagh Township History from http://www.pagenweb.org/~mifflin/twp-history.html: *****Naginey [city] was named for Charles Naginey and is the site of a vast limestone quarry. It was also a station on the Milroy Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
