or a smooth, dry plat of greensward; and it is occasionally done
there yet, especially the threshing of the buckwheat crop, by a
farmer who has not a good barn floor, or who cannot afford to hire
the machine. The flail makes a louder _thud_ in the fields than you
would imagine; and in the splendid October weather it is a pleasing
spectacle to behold the gathering of the ruddy crop, and three or
four lithe figures beating out the grain with their flails in some
sheltered nook, or some grassy lane lined with cedars. When there
are three flails beating together, it makes lively music; and when
there are four, they follow each other so fast that it is a
continuous roll of sound, and it requires a very steady stroke not
to hit or get hit by the others. There is just room and time to get
your blow in, and that is all. When one flail is upon the straw,
another has just left it, another is halfway down, and the fourth is
high and straight in the air. It is like a swiftly revolving wheel
that delivers four blows at each revolution. Threshing, like mowing,
goes much easier in company than when alone; yet many a farmer or
laborer spends nearly all the late fall and winter days shut in the
barn, pounding doggedly upon the endless sheaves of oats and rye.
When the farmers made "bees," as they did a generation or two ago
much more than they do now, a picturesque element was added. There
was the stone bee, the husking bee, the "raising," the "moving,"
etc. When the carpenters had got the timbers of the house or the
barn ready, and the foundation was prepared, then the neighbors for
miles about were invited to come to the "raisin'." The afternoon was
the time chosen. The forenoon was occupied by the carpenter and the
farm hands in putting the sills and "sleepers" in place ("sleepers,"
what a good name for those rude hewn timbers that lie under the
floor in the darkness and silence!). When the hands arrived, the
great beams and posts and joists and braces were carried to their
place on the platform, and the first "bent," as it was called, was
put together and pinned by oak pins that the boys brought. Then pike
poles were distributed, the men, fifteen or twenty of them, arranged
in a line abreast of the bent; the boss carpenter steadied and
guided the corner post and gave the word of command,--"Take holt,
boys!" "Now, set her up!" "Up with her!" "Up she goes!" When it gets
shoulder high, it becomes heavy, and there is a pause. The pikes are
brought into requisition; every man gets a good hold and braces
himself, and waits for the words. "All together now!" shouts the
captain; "Heave her up!" "He-o-he!" (heave-all,--heave), "he-o-he,"
at the top of his voice, every man doing his best. Slowly the great
timbers go up; louder grows the word of command, till the bent is
up. Then it is plumbed and stay-lathed, and another is put together
and raised in the same way, till they are all up. Then comes the
putting on the great plates,--timbers that run lengthwise of the
building and match the sills below. Then, if there is time, the
putting up of the rafters.
In every neighborhood there was always some man who was especially
useful at "raisin's." He was bold and strong and quick. He helped
guide and superintend the work. He was the first one up on the bent,
catching a pin or a brace and putting it in place. He walked the
lofty and perilous plate with the great beetle in hand, put the pins
in the holes, and, swinging the heavy instrument through the air,
drove the pins home. He was as much at home up there as a squirrel.
Now that balloon frames are mainly used for houses, and lighter
sawed timbers for barns, the old-fashioned raising is rarely
witnessed.
Then the moving was an event, too. A farmer had a barn to move, or
wanted to build a new house on the site of the old one, and the
latter must be drawn to one side. Now this work is done with pulleys
and rollers by a few men and a horse; then the building was drawn by
sheer bovine strength. Every man that had a yoke of cattle in the
country round about was invited to assist. The barn or house was
pried up and great runners, cut in the woods, placed under it, and
under the runners were placed skids. To these runners it was
securely chained and pinned; then the cattle--stags, steers, and
oxen, in two long lines, one at each runner--were hitched fast, and,
while men and boys aided with great levers, the word to go was
given. Slowly the two lines of bulky cattle straightened and settled
into their bows; the big chains that wrapped the runners tightened,
a dozen or more "gads" were flourished, a dozen or more lusty
throats urged their teams at the top of their voices, when there was
a creak or a groan as the building stirred. Then the drivers
redoubled their efforts; there was a perfect Babel of discordant
sounds; the oxen bent to the work, their eyes bulged, their nostrils
distended; the lookers-on cheered, and away went the old house or
barn as nimbly as a boy on a hand-sled. Not always, however;
sometimes the chains would break, or one runner strike a rock, or
bury itself in the earth. There were generally enough mishaps or
delays to make it interesting.
In the section of the State of which I write, flax used to be grown,
and cloth for shirts and trousers, and towels and sheets, woven from
it. It was no laughing matter for the farm-boy to break in his shirt
or trousers, those days. The hair shirts in which the old monks used
to mortify the flesh could not have been much before them in this
mortifying particular. But after the bits of shives and sticks were
subdued, and the knots humbled by use and the washboard, they were
good garments. If you lost your hold in a tree and your shirt caught
on a knot or limb, it would save you.
But when has any one seen a crackle, or a swingling-knife, or a
hetchel, or a distaff, and where can one get some tow for strings or
for gun-wadding, or some swingling-tow for a bonfire? The
quill-wheel, and the spinning-wheel, and the loom are heard no more
among us. The last I knew of a certain hetchel, it was nailed up
behind the old sheep that did the churning; and when he was disposed
to shirk or hang back and stop the machine, it was always ready to
spur him up in no uncertain manner. The old loom became a hen-roost
in an out-building; and the crackle upon which the flax was
broken,--where, oh, where is it?
When the produce of the farm was taken a long distance to
market,--that was an event, too; the carrying away of the butter in
the fall, for instance, to the river, a journey that occupied both
ways four days. Then the family marketing was done in a few
groceries. Some cloth, new caps and boots for the boys, and a dress,
or a shawl, or a cloak for the girls were brought back, besides news
and adventure, and strange tidings of the distant world. The farmer
was days in getting ready to start; food was prepared and put in a
box to stand him on the journey, so as to lessen the hotel expenses,
and oats were put up for the horses. The butter was loaded up
overnight, and in the cold November morning, long before it was
light, he was up and off. I seem to hear the wagon yet, its slow
rattle over the frozen ground diminishing in the distance. On the
fourth day toward night all grew expectant of his return, but it was
usually dark before his wagon was heard coming down the hill, or his
voice from before the door summoning a light. When the boys got big
enough, one after the other accompanied him each year, until all had
made the famous journey and seen the great river and the steamboats,
and the thousand and one marvels of the far-away town. When it came
my turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement for a week
beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or else that it
would be too cold, or else that the world would come to an end
before the time fixed for starting. The day previous I roamed the
woods in quest of game to supply my bill of fare on the way, and was
lucky enough to shoot a partridge and an owl, though the latter I
did not take. Perched high on a "spring-board" I made the journey,
and saw more sights and wonders than I have ever seen on a journey
since, or ever expect to again.
But now all this is changed. The railroad has found its way through
or near every settlement, and marvels and wonders are cheap. Still,
the essential charm of the farm remains and always will remain: the
care of crops, and of cattle, and of orchards, bees, and fowls; the
clearing and improving of the ground; the building of barns and
houses; the direct contact with the soil and with the elements; the
watching of the clouds and of the weather; the privacies with
nature, with bird, beast, and plant; and the close acquaintance with
the heart and virtue of the world. The farmer should be the true
naturalist; the book in which it is all written is open before him
night and day, and how sweet and wholesome all his knowledge is!
The predominant feature of farm life in New York, as in other
States, is always given by some local industry of one kind or
another. In many of the high, cold counties in the eastern centre
of the State, this ruling industry is hop-growing; in the western,
it is grain and fruit growing; in sections along the Hudson,
it is small-fruit growing, as berries, currants, grapes; in
other counties, it is milk and butter; in others, quarrying
flagging-stone. I recently visited a section of Ulster County,
where everybody seemed getting out hoop-poles and making hoops.
The only talk was of hoops, hoops! Every team that went by had a
load or was going for a load of hoops. The principal fuel was
hoop-shavings or discarded hoop-poles. No man had any money until
he sold his hoops. When a farmer went to town to get some grain,
or a pair of boots, or a dress for his wife, he took a load of
hoops. People stole hoops and poached for hoops, and bought, and
sold, and speculated in hoops. If there was a corner, it was in
hoops; big hoops, little hoops, hoops for kegs, and firkins, and
barrels, and hogsheads, and pipes; hickory hoops, birch hoops, ash
hoops, chestnut hoops, hoops enough to go around the world.
Another place it was shingle, shingle; everybody was shaving
hemlock shingle.
In most of the eastern counties of the State, the interest and
profit of the farm revolve about the cow. The dairy is the one great
matter,--for milk, when milk can be shipped to the New York market,
and for butter when it cannot. Great barns and stables and
milking-sheds, and immense meadows and cattle on a thousand hills,
are the prominent agricultural features of these sections of the
country. Good grass and good water are the two indispensables to
successful dairying. And the two generally go together. Where there
are plenty of copious cold springs, there is no dearth of grass.
When the cattle are compelled to browse upon weeds and various wild
growths, the milk and butter will betray it in the flavor. Tender,
juicy grass, the ruddy blossoming clover, or the fragrant,
well-cured hay, make the delicious milk and the sweet butter. Then
there is a charm about a natural pastoral country that belongs to no
other. Go through Orange County in May and see the vivid emerald of
the smooth fields and hills. It is a new experience of the beauty
and effectiveness of simple grass. And this grass has rare virtues,
too, and imparts a flavor to the milk and butter that has made them
famous.
Along all the sources of the Delaware the land flows with milk, if
not with honey. The grass is excellent, except in times of
protracted drought, and then the browsings in the beech and birch
woods are a good substitute. Butter is the staple product. Every
housewife is or wants to be a famous butter-maker, and Delaware
County butter rivals that of Orange in market. Delaware is a high,
cool grazing country. The farms lie tilted up against the sides of
the mountain or lapping over the hills, striped or checked with
stone walls, and presenting to the eye long stretches of pasture and
meadow land, alternating with plowed fields and patches of waving
grain. Few of their features are picturesque; they are bare, broad,
and simple. The farmhouse gets itself a coat of white paint, and
green blinds to the windows, and the barn and wagon-house a coat of
red paint with white trimmings, as soon as possible. A penstock
flows by the doorway, rows of tin pans sun themselves in the yard,
and the great wheel of the churning-machine flanks the milk-house,
or rattles behind it. The winters are severe, the snow deep. The
principal fuel is still wood,--beech, birch, and maple. It is hauled
off the mountain in great logs when the first November or December
snows come, and cut up and piled in the wood-houses and under a
shed. Here the axe still rules the winter, and it may be heard all
day and every day upon the wood-pile, or echoing through the
frost-bound wood, the coat of the chopper hanging to a limb, and his
white chips strewing the snow.
Many cattle need much hay; hence in dairy sections haying is the
period of "storm and stress" in the farmer's year. To get the hay
in, in good condition, and before the grass gets too ripe, is a
great matter. All the energies and resources of the farm are bent to
this purpose. It is a thirty or forty days' war, in which the farmer
and his "hands" are pitted against the heat and the rain and the
legions of timothy and clover. Everything about it has the urge, the
hurry, the excitement of a battle. Outside help is procured; men
flock in from adjoining counties, where the ruling industry is
something else and is less imperative; coopers, blacksmiths, and
laborers of various kinds drop their tools, and take down their
scythes and go in quest of a job in haying. Every man is expected to
pitch his endeavors in a little higher key than at any other kind of
work. The wages are extra, and the work must correspond. The men are
in the meadow by half-past four or five in the morning, and mow an
hour or two before breakfast. A good mower is proud of his skill. He
does not "lop in," and his "pointing out" is perfect, and you can
hardly see the ribs of his swath. He stands up to his grass and
strikes level and sure. He will turn a double down through the
stoutest grass, and when the hay is raked away you will not find a
spear left standing. The Americans are--or were--the best mowers. A
foreigner could never quite give the masterly touch. The hayfield
has its code. One man must not take another's swath unless he
expects to be crowded. Each expects to take his turn leading the
band. The scythe may be so whetted as to ring out a saucy challenge
to the rest. It is not good manners to mow up too close to your
neighbor, unless you are trying to keep out of the way of the man
behind you. Many a race has been brought on by some one being a
little indiscreet in this respect. Two men may mow all day together
under the impression that each is trying to put the other through.
The one that leads strikes out briskly, and the other, not to be
outdone, follows close. Thus the blood of each is soon up; a little
heat begets more heat, and it is fairly a race before long. It is a
great ignominy to be mowed out of your swath. Hay-gathering is
clean, manly work all through. Young fellows work in haying who do
not do another stroke on the farm the whole year. It is a gymnasium
in the meadows and under the summer sky. How full of pictures,
too!--the smooth slopes dotted with cocks with lengthening shadows;
the great, broad-backed, soft-cheeked loads, moving along the lanes
and brushing under the trees; the unfinished stacks with forkfuls of
hay being handed up its sides to the builder, and when finished the
shape of a great pear, with a pole in the top for the stem. Maybe in
the fall and winter the calves and yearlings will hover around it
and gnaw its base until it overhangs them and shelters them from
the storm. Or the farmer will "fodder" his cows there,--one of the
most picturesque scenes to be witnessed on the farm,--twenty or
thirty or forty milchers filing along toward the stack in the field,
or clustered about it, waiting the promised bite. In great, green
flakes the hay is rolled off, and distributed about in small heaps
upon the unspotted snow. After the cattle have eaten, the
birds--snow buntings and red-polls--come and pick up the crumbs, the
seeds of the grasses and weeds. At night the fox and the owl come
for mice.
What a beautiful path the cows make through the snow to the stack or
to the spring under the hill!--always more or less wayward, but
broad and firm, and carved and indented by a multitude of rounded
hoofs.
In fact, the cow is the true pathfinder and path-maker. She has the
leisurely, deliberate movement that insures an easy and a safe way.
Follow her trail through the woods, and you have the best, if not
the shortest, course. How she beats down the brush and briers and
wears away even the roots of the trees! A herd of cows left to
themselves fall naturally into single file, and a hundred or more
hoofs are not long in smoothing and compacting almost any surface.
Indeed, all the ways and doings of cattle are pleasant to look upon,
whether grazing in the pasture or browsing in the woods, or
ruminating under the trees, or feeding in the stall, or reposing
upon the knolls. There is virtue in the cow; she is full of
goodness; a wholesome odor exhales from her; the whole landscape
looks out of her soft eyes; the quality and the aroma of miles of
meadow and pasture lands are in her presence and products. I had
rather have the care of cattle than be the keeper of the great seal
of the nation. Where the cow is, there is Arcadia; so far as her
influence prevails, there is contentment, humility, and sweet,
homely life.
Blessed is he whose youth was passed upon the farm, and if it was a
dairy farm, his memories will be all the more fragrant. The driving
of the cows to and from the pasture, every day and every season for
years,--how much of summer and of nature he got into him on these
journeys! What rambles and excursions did this errand furnish the
excuse for! The birds and birds'-nests, the berries, the squirrels,
the woodchucks, the beech woods with their treasures into which the
cows loved so to wander and to browse, the fragrant wintergreens and
a hundred nameless adventures, all strung upon that brief journey of
half a mile to and from the remote pastures. Sometimes a cow or two
will be missing when the herd is brought home at night; then to hunt
them up is another adventure. My grandfather went out one night to
look up an absentee from the yard, when he heard something in the
brush, and out stepped a bear into the path before him.
Every Sunday morning the cows were salted. The farm-boy would take a
pail with three or four quarts of coarse salt, and, followed by the
eager herd, go to the field and deposit the salt in handfuls upon
smooth stones and rocks and upon clean places on the turf. If you
want to know how good salt is, see a cow eat it. She gives the true
saline smack. How she dwells upon it, and gnaws the sward and licks
the stones where it has been deposited! The cow is the most
delightful feeder among animals. It makes one's mouth water to see
her eat pumpkins, and to see her at a pile of apples is distracting.
How she sweeps off the delectable grass! The sound of her grazing is
appetizing; the grass betrays all its sweetness and succulency in
parting under her sickle.
The region of which I write abounds in sheep also. Sheep love high,
cool, breezy lands. Their range is generally much above that of
cattle. Their sharp noses will find picking where a cow would fare
poorly indeed. Hence most farmers utilize their high, wild, and
mountain lands by keeping a small flock of sheep. But they are the
outlaws of the farm and are seldom within bounds. They make many
lively expeditions for the farm-boy,--driving them out of mischief,
hunting them up in the mountains, or salting them on the breezy
hills. Then there is the annual sheep-washing, when on a warm day in
May or early June the whole herd is driven a mile or more to a
suitable pool in the creek, and one by one doused and washed and
rinsed in the water. We used to wash below an old grist-mill, and it
was a pleasing spectacle,--the mill, the dam, the overhanging rocks
and trees, the round, deep pool, and the huddled and frightened
sheep.
One of the features of farm life peculiar to this country, and one
of the most picturesque of them all, is sugar-making in the maple
woods in spring. This is the first work of the season, and to the
boys is more play than work. In the Old World, and in more simple
and imaginative times, how such an occupation as this would have got
into literature, and how many legends and associations would have
clustered around it! It is woodsy, and savors of the trees; it is an
encampment among the maples. Before the bud swells, before the grass
springs, before the plow is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is
the sequel of the bitter frost; a sap-run is the sweet good-by of
winter. It denotes a certain equipoise of the season; the heat of
the day fully balances the frost of the night. In New York and New
England, the time of the sap hovers about the vernal equinox,
beginning a week or ten days before, and continuing a week or ten
days after. As the days and nights get equal, the heat and cold get
equal, and the sap mounts. A day that brings the bees out of the
hive will bring the sap out of the maple-tree. It is the fruit of
the equal marriage of the sun and the frost. When the frost is all
out of the ground, and all the snow gone from its surface, the flow
stops. The thermometer must not rise above 38° or 40° by day, or
sink below 24° or 25° at night, with wind in the northwest; a
relaxing south wind, and the run is over for the present. Sugar
weather is crisp weather. How the tin buckets glisten in the gray
woods; how the robins laugh; how the nuthatches call; how lightly
the thin blue smoke rises among the trees! The squirrels are out of
their dens; the migrating water-fowls are streaming northward; the
sheep and cattle look wistfully toward the bare fields; the tide of
the season, in fact, is just beginning to rise.
Sap-letting does not seem to be an exhaustive process to the trees,
as the trees of a sugar-bush appear to be as thrifty and as
long-lived as other trees. They come to have a maternal,
large-waisted look, from the wounds of the axe or the auger, and
that is about all.
In my sugar-making days, the sap was carried to the boiling-place in
pails by the aid of a neck-yoke and stored in hogsheads, and boiled
or evaporated in immense kettles or caldrons set in huge stone
arches; now, the hogshead goes to the trees hauled upon a sled by a
team, and the sap is evaporated in broad, shallow, sheet-iron
pans,--a great saving of fuel and of labor.
Many a farmer sits up all night boiling his sap, when the run has
been an extra good one, and a lonely vigil he has of it amid the
silent trees and beside his wild hearth. If he has a sap-house, as
is now so common, he may make himself fairly comfortable; and if a
companion, he may have a good time or a glorious wake.
Maple sugar in its perfection is rarely seen, perhaps never seen, in
the market. When made in large quantities and indifferently, it is
dark and coarse; but when made in small quantities--that is, quickly
from the first run of sap and properly treated--it has a wild
delicacy of flavor that no other sweet can match. What you smell in
freshly cut maple-wood, or taste in the blossom of the tree, is in
it. It is then, indeed, the distilled essence of the tree. Made into
syrup, it is white and clear as clover-honey; and crystallized into
sugar, it is as pure as the wax. The way to attain this result is to
evaporate the sap under cover in an enameled kettle; when reduced
about twelve times, allow it to settle half a day or more; then
clarify with milk or the white of an egg. The product is virgin
syrup, or sugar worthy the table of the gods.
Perhaps the most heavy and laborious work of the farm in the section
of the State of which I write is fence-building. But it is not
unproductive labor, as in the South or West, for the fence is of
stone, and the capacity of the soil for grass or grain is, of
course, increased by its construction. It is killing two birds with
one stone: a fence is had, the best in the world, while the
available area of the field is enlarged. In fact, if there are ever
sermons in stones, it is when they are built into a stone
wall,--turning your hindrances into helps, shielding your crops
behind the obstacles to your husbandry, making the enemies of the
plow stand guard over its products. This is the kind of farming
worth imitating. A stone wall with a good rock bottom will stand as
long as a man lasts. Its only enemy is the frost, and it works so
gently that it is not till after many years that its effect is
perceptible. An old farmer will walk with you through his fields and
say, "This wall I built at such and such a time, or the first year I
came on the farm, or when I owned such and such a span of horses,"
indicating a period thirty, forty, or fifty years back. "This other,
we built the summer so and so worked for me," and he relates some
incident, or mishap, or comical adventures that the memory calls up.
Every line of fence has a history; the mark of his plow or his
crowbar is upon the stones; the sweat of his early manhood put them
in place; in fact, the long black line covered with lichens and in
places tottering to the fall revives long-gone scenes and events in
the life of the farm.