1983OH02.1
1983OH02.1
Family Farm Oral History Project
Interview with Nora Gilbert
June 23, 1983
Conducted by Ginny Scott
© 1983 Kentucky Oral History Commission
Kentucky Historical Society
�
Kentucky Oral History Commission
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502-564-1792 ( (fax) 502-564-0475 ( history.ky.gov
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should be corroborated with the original audio recording if possible.The following is an unrehearsed taped interview with Nora Gilbert, a farmer’s
wife in Laurel County, Kentucky. The interview was conducted by Ginny Scott, for the Family Farm Project of the Oral History Commission. The interview was conducted at Mrs. Gilbert’s farm on June 23, 1983, at 1:00 A.M.An Interview with Nora Gilbert
Scott: ( ) better tell me when…and I don’t think you care…
Gilbert: [Laughing]…not a bit. Born in Jackson County, June 13th, 1913.
Scott: Are you that old?
Gilbert: I was 70 years old the other day.
Scott: Oh, my goodness!
Gilbert: ( )
Scott: [Laughing] Where were you born in Jackson County, what community?
Gilbert: At that time…Horse Lick.
Scott: Were your parents farmers? Did they farm any?
Gilbert: Yes.
Scott: Did you have brothers and sisters?
Gilbert: Three brothers and two sisters.
Scott: You worked on the farm there then.
Gilbert: Yes.
Scott: How big was your daddy’s farm?
Gilbert: Ninety acres.
Scott: Ninety acres, all of it farm land?
Gilbert: Not all of it—not exactly farmland, but we farmed it anyway.
Scott: Farmed it anyway [laughing]. Did you have to clear it?
Gilbert: A lot of it was bottomland, and one-third was in hillside.
Scott: What’d you farm with?
Gilbert: Mules!
Scott: Did you ever use the oxen? Did your dad use any oxen?
Gilbert: No.
Scott: Had he before that?
Gilbert: I really don’t know.
Scott: Seems like I remember him saying, telling me one time that he did….used
oxen on the farm.Gilbert: I don’t remember.
Scott: What’d you grow then Nora? What’d your dad grow for money crops?
Gilbert: Didn’t grow nothing for money crops, you growed to survive.
Scott: To live?
Gilbert: ( )
Scott: Yeah, yeah, what did you grow?
Gilbert: Corn, big garden and…Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, and everything we
growed in the garden. And…we canned everything we could, and…growed some hay.Scott: Did you have cattle?
Gilbert: Milk cows.
Scott: Milk cows?
Gilbert: For milk.
Scott: Did you have tobacco? Did your dad grow tobacco?
Gilbert: No, nobody heard of tobacco back then.
Scott: Did he sell corn, or….
Gilbert: Sometimes, to feed the cattle.
Scott: Did he work outside? Outside the farm?
Gilbert: If—there was any work available.
Scott: That would have been in the twenties and thirties, in that time. When did
you and Woodrow get married then?Gilbert: December 15, 1932.
Scott: '32—right in the middle of the Depression. Did you all live there?
Gilbert: Well, we lived around in the neighborhood…for…several years.
Scott: Did you buy a farm there, or….
Gilbert: No, we intended to, but we neither one didn’t like it, and went to
Richmond, Indiana and then got a job. Scott: Oh, where did you work there?�Gilbert: I didn’t. He worked in a decoration company.Scott: Oh, he did? I didn’t know that. How long did you stay there then?
Gilbert: We stayed there ‘til after World War II was over.
Scott: And then come back to Kentucky?
Gilbert: And then come back to Kentucky.
Scott: Where’d you come back to then?
Gilbert: We bought a farm, and then we sold it, and bought another small farm.
Scott: And was this in Jackson?
Gilbert: In Jackson County, and we bought a sawmill and sawed lumber and sold it.
Scott: Did you saw the lumber off the…off your farm, or….
Gilbert: Yeah, we sold lumber….
Scott: Contract timber….
Gilbert: …off our farm and then would buy whole boundaries of timber and most of
the lumber went to horse farms in Lexington.Scott: Oh, it did. What kind of timber?
Gilbert: Oak.
Scott: All of it oak. How long did he run the sawmill then?
Gilbert: Oh, twenty years, I guess.
Scott: And you farmed?
Gilbert: We didn’t farm very much.
Scott: But you gardened?
Gilbert: But we gardened, and we had about…four-tenths or something of tobacco,
that’s very small, small acreage ( ) …fifteen acres.Scott: Who raised the tobacco, when Woodrow was in the sawmill?
Gilbert: He never did, we done it on the weekends, because he was off Saturdays
and Sundays.Scott: So you helped too?
Gilbert: I helped too, and growed a big garden.
Scott: Tell me about tobacco. When did you start working in tobacco to raise a crop?
Gilbert: Takes a whole year, by the time you get it sold, you’ve got to sow your
beds and plan out where you want to grow it the next year.Scott: How’d you fix your beds, then?
Gilbert: Burned them, dug them up the hard way, raked them, sowed them.
Scott: How do you do them now—how do farmers do them now?
Gilbert: Most of them…plows….discs them up in the fall of the year and puts
plastic over them, and there’s gas underneath there, and in the spring of the year, and warm weather comes, and it’s time to sow them, why they dust them cans of gas and let that stay on there so long, and take it off, and you don’t have no weeds.Scott: Lot easier now than it was then.
Gilbert: Lot simpler and a lot less work.
Scott: Lot less work. What about the money? How much does it cost to do that?
Gilbert: I think it costs you about seventy-five dollars or seventy-five to a
hundred dollars now to sow one bed.Scott: So before, it didn’t cost anything, other than the seed and….
Gilbert: The seed….
Scott: And the fertilizer….
Gilbert: And… the canvas for it.
Scott: Now it’s about seventy-five dollars?
Gilbert: At least.
Scott: How much was tobacco then? Do you remember? How much did you get a pound?
Gilbert: Oh, in the thirty-cents.
Scott: In the thirties. How much did you get last year?
Gilbert: We didn’t have ours growed last year, we got such a small base—we just
grow it every other year, and year before last got a dollar and eighty-two cents a pound.Scott: A big difference in money.
Gilbert: A big difference in money.
Scott: A big difference in growing it though.
Gilbert: And a big difference in fertilizer, and then….
Scott: Fuel.
Gilbert: And then you’ve got to buy your…diesel fuel for your tractors and
everything and you spray it. You don’t top it and spray it, no suckers—you’ve got expense of that.Scott: Do you hire people to work in it now?
Gilbert: We let somebody grow it and they—we get half, they get half. They pay
half fertilize and we pay half fertilize.Scott: Do you make very much off of it now? When you consider your time, if
you’re doing it yourself, you consider your time.Gilbert: The only thing good about it, you’ve got all of your money at one time,
when you need it the worst, at the end of the year, when taxes and everything else was due. But considering your time, you have put in an awful lot of hours and an awful lot of hard work.Scott: For a little bit of money, really.
Gilbert: For a little bit of money, but you did get it all at one time.
Scott: Well, now, like you said you don’t raise yours but have it raised on the
halves, but do people wait and pay the fertilize bill when they sell their tobacco?Gilbert: Well…. a long time ago….
Scott: Is that pretty standard?
Gilbert: A long time ago, that was the standard procedure. But, we kinda had
enough that we paid for ours during the beginning, because….Scott: But a lot of people still….
Gilbert: There’s a carrying charge on it, that’s so much now, interest rate and
everything that….Scott: What do they charge interest? Until the end of the year?
Gilbert: Until we got…we do, we have for a long time, we’ve paid for our
fertilize in the beginning.Scott: Saves some money.
Gilbert: And that saves quite a bit.
Scott: Well, when did you all buy this farm, then?
Gilbert: In 1961.
Scott: How many acres is it? Do you know?
Gilbert: There was 666 acres then.
Scott: How much of that is cultivatable? Two—hundred acres?
Gilbert: Every bit of that ( ).
Scott: What do you raise now—on the farm?
Gilbert: Hay, and Black Angus cattle.
Scott: How many head of cattle do you run usually? How many could you run?
Gilbert: I really don’t know how many we could run, but we’ve…we’ve got
somewhere between fifty and sixty now.Scott: You raise all the food for them, or do you have to…
Gilbert: We raise all.
Scott: Raise all. Is that good money? Can you make good money on cattle?
Gilbert: They’re so cheap now, means you don’t make a whole lot, but, your farm
would grow up, and rather than see it grow up, and you had cattle all your life, why you just feel lost without them.Scott: What do you do, buy them when they’re calves?
Gilbert: No, we’ve had mixed cattle and then about… fifteen years ago, we sold
everyone of them and bought Black Angus—bought cows, and heifers, and then, we’d sell our older ones, and then they’d get so old, and we’d keep the young ones that was coming on.Scott: And raise your own?
Gilbert: And raise our own.
Scott: Well, the farmers are complaining they don’t make any money, and of
course, I know that’s true. If I went out now and bought a farm, say I went out… we went out and bought 400-acre farm, and of course had to get a loan, mortgage, mortgage it, and buy the equipment, buy the cattle, could we make a living?Gilbert: You couldn’t even pay the interest on it.
Scott: So young farmers don’t stand a chance.
Gilbert: No way.
Scott: If you don’t inherit the land or something, you don’t, you couldn’t do it.
Gilbert: You couldn’t do it.
Scott: When you grow ( ), you grow garden… still. But you did, when you moved here.
Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: Could you grow most of what you ate?
Gilbert: Well….
Scott: Twenty years ago, could you….
Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: ...if you wanted to….
Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: And lived good.
Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: Well, what was the difference in the money you made, say twenty years
ago, and now?Gilbert: Well, you could take five dollars and buy you quite a few groceries and
five dollars don’t take you to the grocery store now.Scott: What about fertilizer? Has that changed a lot too?
Gilbert: Well, it’s about…forty-nine or forty-eight dollars ( ), and now it’s
two hundred and something now, at least. Four times difference?Scott: Four times, five times different.
Gilbert: About five times different.
Scott: Oh, gosh, so young farmers, there’s no way a young farmer could do it.
Gilbert: No way.
Scott: What’s going to happen to all the little farms?
Gilbert: They gonna starve to death.
Scott: Say if you all decide to sell your farm, and I bought it, and this is
gonna happen with all the small farms around, if they’re not inherited, and the young people any more don’t want to farm…they can’t make a living. What’s gonna happen to them? Are they going to be bought up by large corporations and run, or what?Gilbert: I really don’t ( )…I really can’t answer that, because I don’t know.
Scott: But the little farmers aren’t going to be able to make it without outside jobs.
Gilbert: They’ve got to have an outside job, they’ve got to eat, they’ve got to
pay their bills, they’ve got to have an outside job… and there’s a lot of hard work to it.Scott: A lot of hard work.
Gilbert: A lot. You got to make hay when the sun shines.
Scott: On a farm.
Gilbert: On a farm.
Scott: Well the cost of fuel has risen, the cost of fertilizer, the cost of
cattle, everything, plus your living expenses.Gilbert: All your utility bills…have gone up so much.
Scott: And still there’s all these people are going to stay on farms….as long as
we possibly can, we’re gonna stay on the farms. What about the political people, the elected officials? Are they any help in this county, local… to the farmer?Gilbert: Only thing I can say is they ain’t no help to us.
Scott: [Laughing] What about statewide? Has there been anything done statewide
politically that has been a help to small farmers in the last, say, ten years?Gilbert: I don’t know about it if they have.
Scott: What about national?
Gilbert: Now, it seems to be worse than the state
Scott: [Laughing]
Gilbert: I’m gonna tell the truth, Ginny. Ain’t no…
Scott: That’s what I want! So, there’s nothing being done to help from any
source, any political source.Gilbert: None.
Scott: We you all political people, did you campaign….
Gilbert: No.
Scott: …for people?
Gilbert: I ain’t for no politician; I’m for the man.
Scott: Was Woodrow?
Gilbert: He’s no politician; he’s for the man.
Scott: And it’s still—there’s not much local officials can do, is there?
Gilbert: Very little.
Scott: To help the farmer. What about the—of course, you all can buy all your
implements, seeds, fertilizer, everything here in London.Gilbert: Right.
Scott: Do you have one place you’ve been doing it for years, or do you….?
Gilbert: Well, we buy all of our farm machinery at London Farm Service, and…we
used to buy our fertilizer and seeds from Southern States, but we buy it from Burley Belt.Scott: Shop around until you get the best deal for the best money.
Gilbert: And they give us the best deal. And we buy our bailing twine, and all
that stuff from Sherman Benge’s Farm Store.Scott: You was talking about bailing twine, hay. Say you have twenty acres of
hay…that feed your cattle, or you use it to feed your cattle. How much does it cost you to raise that twenty acres?Gilbert: I really, I don’t know because you’ve got to put an awful lot of
fertilize and some ammonia on it or it won’t grow, and then it’s got to be cut at the right time, which we’ve got a hay conditioner, and a roller, a hay roller till, ours is cut with a conditioner and rolled…till. It would be hard to say how much.Scott: We have to buy the ammonia, fertilizer, seed, bailing twine, fuel oil,
diesel for the tractors.Gilbert: Diesel for the tractors, and parts, and all that….
Scott: The machinery…
Gilbert: For the machinery.
Scott: How long would it take if you sold that hay to pay for the machinery?
Gilbert: Hundred years!
Scott: A hundred years [laughing], right. That’s what I wanted to know. You
could never really pay for it by growing the hay and selling it could you?Gilbert: No, because a hay roller, we got two years ago was $7,750. You ain’t
gonna make that on a farm.Scott: What is, and not necessarily your income from the farm, but if you have
anyone else in this general area, you know, Rockcastle, Laurel, if they’re cultivating, tending 250 acres, and that’s all they do, they don’t have any outside income, about what are they making? If they’re doing the very best they can, if they’re really working at it…clear.Gilbert: Well, if they’re real careful, and real good managers, they probably
getting to live from year to year without starving to death.Scott: [Laughing] They’re not going to get rich.
Gilbert: They’re not going to get rich.
Scott: Well, how are these farmers do? How are these rich…how do these rich
farmers get rich?Gilbert: They got rich before the last ten or twelve years.
Scott: Or illegally [laughing].
Gilbert: Or illegally, or they inherited it—but they didn’t work it out.
Scott: If you inherited, you could make it. If you had an outside job…
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: …if you inherited you could make it.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: If you had all the machinery.
Gilbert: If you had all the machinery, cause we got two tractors and I think
that a tractor now, if we had to buy one, runs about… fourteen to sixteen thousand dollars.Scott: So it would take a few years to pay for a tractor and a roller, a hay roller.
Gilbert: A hay roller, and a conditioner—I forgot how much they paid for
it—seven hundred, maybe more than that.Scott: How many acres of hay do you have? �Gilbert: ( ) �Scott: Fifty acres?
Gilbert: Yeah, that, and the waterfront there, and all this down here. Yeah, it
would be fifty acres.Scott: Do you grow corn too?
Gilbert: No corn.
Scott: Did you…you used to though?
Gilbert: Yes.
Scott: That cattle just eat hay?
Gilbert: Just hay.
Scott: You don’t have to buy the—you don’t have to buy any feed for them?
Gilbert: Don’t have to buy any feed for them.
Scott: Well, if you were growing corn, is there any money in that as a cash
crop? Clear money?Gilbert: No.
Scott: So just about the only clear money that a farmer has is tobacco.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: And if you have to hire help, you have to hire it…people to cut it,
people to strip it, and all this, you’re not making a whole lot on it, are you?Gilbert: You’re better off if you can get somebody to grow it and you get half
and them half.Scott: Well how much do workers charge? Say you hire someone to come in and cut
the tobacco? How much would a man make a day?Gilbert: I think the last we had cut was five dollars an hour.
Scott: And that’s from sun to sun, so that’s….
Gilbert: Quite a few dollars.
Scott: Quite a few dollars coming out of your pocket to grow the tobacco. Now
Woodrow doesn’t hire anyone.Gilbert: Not now.
Scott: Not now… but if he did the tobacco wouldn’t be worth anything.
Gilbert: No, if wouldn’t pay for the fertilizer and labor.
Scott: And the labor. Well, the…so cattle it should be a cash crop.
Gilbert: It’s the only cash crop, and we don’t have that much cash left when we
sell them… but we’ve had them all our lives, and we’d feel lost without them and the farm would grow up, right in our face.Scott: So the cattle works two advantages. Yes, gives you the money too.
Gilbert: Yes.
Scott: Well, when you all bought this place, how much have you sold off, the
lake lots and….Gilbert: ( ) Wood Creek Lake. We give them all over a hundred acres.
Scott: Oh, you all gave the property for that?
Gilbert: We give all….
Scott: I mean you owned it before the lake?
Gilbert: Yes, we gave all over a hundred acres, which they never did tell us how
much over it was. We told them we could give them all over a hundred acres.Scott: Hmmm.
Gilbert: Because Laurel County’s got the first water system of ( ) kind that
I’ve ever lived in.Scott: So it worked to your advantage too.
Gilbert: Yes….
Scott: In a way….
Gilbert: And now.
Scott: But you did sell off quite a few lake lots, which wasn’t cultivatable
anyway—after the lake filled up.Gilbert: Yes—which was… when the lakes drained, ( ).
Scott: Well, that helped the farm some, I mean that helped….
Gilbert: Well, that helped…
Scott: Helped you all considerably.
Gilbert: It helped us an awfully lot.
Scott: To sell those off.
Gilbert: And I would say that—forty acres—I don’t know if that would be close to
it or way from it but that includes ( ).Scott: The lake now has a lot of people living around it. There must be, what, a
hundred people living around it. Has that caused any problems here, for you all?Gilbert: No, because we have been cautious who we sold to, and we so far have
been real lucky to get an awful nice bunch of people, which they have resold to some.Scott: That’s what I started to ask you—when those people start reselling, could
it, it could cause problems for you later.Gilbert: It could cause problems, but we have got awful nice bunch of people.
Scott: What about the roads out here? Did you have problem maintaining the road?
Now you have a good road. Is that because of the water plant, or, is that because of the people who moved in?Gilbert: I’ve got a good road now, and…to the water plant, I’d say that helped.
Scott: Did it up the traffic?
Gilbert: [Laughing] Huh—where there was one car, there’s about twenty-five now.
Scott: [Laughing] And a lot of it was because of the roads, wasn’t it?
Gilbert: ( )
Scott: When it was a gravel road, it wasn’t that busy.
Gilbert: It wasn’t that busy.
Scott: So the water plant—the lake is an advantage and disadvantage.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: Do a lot of people use the lake now?
Gilbert: An awful lot. I’ve always heard that there had to be a doctor, a
preacher, and a lawyer in every community, and we’ve got the doctor, we’ve got a couple of doctors, in fact, and we’ve got a couple attorneys, but we sure need a preacher. [Laughter].Scott: Well, you’ve got some people down that qualify [laughing], just give them
a little bit of time. They’ll qualify for the preachers new.Gilbert: Some of them may start preaching any day, I wouldn’t doubt it.
Scott: [Laughter].
Gilbert: Some of them preaches, but it ain’t the word of God.
Scott: [Laughing] It ain’t the word of God.
Gilbert: I’m ( )—I know that.
Scott: You have family; some of your family lives here on the farm.
Gilbert: I have a nephew, a little secondhand Stan.
Scott: And he helps.
Gilbert: And he takes care of all the hay, spreads all the fertilize, cuts and
bales all the hay, and feeds all the cattle. And he has a daughter, and mows about an acre of lawn here.Scott: So that’s a help too. Without that, say he didn’t live here….
Gilbert: There wouldn’t be no cattle, and the yard might grow up until you
couldn’t get in the house.Scott: [Laughing] So you do—small farmers, and of course according to some of
the ones in Lexington, this is a small farm, to me this is very large, but small farmers either have to have the help or they just can’t make it.Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: It’s just too much work for two people.
Gilbert: And when you’ve done all this work, keep the fence repaired and
everything, and when we sell the cattle, why, we half it.Scott: Which is only—right, neither one of you get paid for what you’ve got in
it really.Gilbert: No, no. We’re out all the expense but for the amount of work he does….
Scott: Is that all that….
Gilbert: He don’t get really enough for the time he puts in it.
Scott: Puts in it. And you don’t get enough for what you’ve got in it.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: Well, now, you’ve farmed, you’ve worked on the farm when you had mules.
Gilbert: Yes, indeed.
Scott: All the land was plowed with turning plow, and crops cultivated.
Gilbert: Right.
Scott: It’s a lot easier now.
Gilbert: Oh yes—and a lot more expensive.
Scott: And a lot more expensive [laughing]. The farmer now is not as well off as
he was thirty years ago.Gilbert: No.
Scott: Even during the Depression.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: They were better off than they are now. Well, your father, how long did
he farm? I know he’s still living.Gilbert: He farmed…I’d say about thirty to thirty-five years, but he went to
Richmond, Indiana then and worked there a long time, and then he went to Dayton and worked until he retired—Dayton, Ohio.Scott: But he did farm when farming was supposedly hard and no money in it.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: Are your brothers and sisters, are they farming?�Gilbert: I’ve got a
sister that lives on a farm in Jackson County, very small.Scott: The rest of them aren’t farmers?
Gilbert: No.
Scott: What about Woodrow’s family? Are they still farming?
Gilbert: He’s got two brothers that farms and his brother-in-law that has his
farming done.Scott: Well, here in Laurel County, are there any really big farms, or most of
them this size?Gilbert: Yes, there’s some people in our…., there’s some farms now in our
community that’s awfully large.Scott: Are they family-owned farms, or two or three people own them, or….
Gilbert: I’d say that most of them, some of them [interruption].
Scott: We was talking about the farms in Laurel County, say most of those are
handed down…the larger ones.Gilbert: Some of them are.
Scott: The big farming community, is this, is the northern end of the county the
big farming community? Where is it in Laurel County?Gilbert: Well, some of it’s in…. in more or less, it’s in a number of farms in
the eastern part, quite a few in the western part, and then in the southern part a lot of them down there.Scott: Down around the county line.
Gilbert: Yeah, the southeastern part, there’s an awful lot of big farms.
Scott: What do people here raise mostly tobacco, cattle. Is that the cash crops?
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: No one raises wheat.
Gilbert: No, and lot of them has dairy farms—quite a few dairy farms.
Scott: Which makes it handy for them here because of…..
Gilbert: Chappell’s Dairy.
Scott: Chappell’s Dairy. Is that a big—that’s a big help to farmers, isn’t
it?�Gilbert: It really is.Scott: That and the feed stores like Southern States, and they can be a big help
or they can be a hindering to ( ) you prefer. Most of them seem to a big help, and they’re good about—carrying, and this sort of thing for people.Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: And…the country stores, is another thing I wanted to ask you about. Most
little communities have them.Gilbert: There’s not too many here in mine.
Scott: Not too many in Laurel County. They just….
Gilbert: Not just plain country stores, well there’s quite a few, but they’re
close to the lake or something for people’s that going to Laurel Lake, or Wood Creek Lake, until….Scott: Picnic…type.
Gilbert: The main stores is in town.
Scott: The little country stores, when they had them, is Miss Gray’s is still….( ).
Gilbert: Yeah.
Scott: That’s handy for farming communities, isn’t it?
Gilbert: That’s right, because they stay open seven days a week.
Scott: And you can run there instead of running into town where it takes half a
day to get to town and get back, and everything.Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: Wonder why they stopped? Used to be every little farming community had a
post office and a store. Why has it stopped?Gilbert: Shopping centers, the only thing I know.
Scott: Where people have more time… too….has that made a difference?
Gilbert: Yes, I’d say it does, and then, where they’ve got…Kroger’s, Winn Dixie,
and so many of these larger stores and all these shopping centers, why most people go there, free parking, and….Scott: Well let me ask you this: Is stuff less expensive in those places than in
a country store?Gilbert: Not really it’s…really the line that the country stores carries,
sometimes, is cheaper than it is in the bigger stores.Scott: In the bigger stores. It’s just the idea of going shopping.
Gilbert: And go one place and get everything you want.
Scott: Where you couldn’t do that in a country store….
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: You just had to take what they had. And of course the post offices are
all, just about all out, with the mail routes, rural mail routes.Gilbert: I always did feel lucky to have the East Bernstadt post office, and
wonderful mail carrier. Scott: But the mail carriers has cut down…the store used to be—the post office used to be in the stores.Gilbert: That’s right. Many of us chose ( ).
Scott: The people went to the post office, they also bought stuff from the store
at the same time, so that….Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: That may have made it…some difference then. Well, East Bernstadt’s
really….you really don’t need London. East Bernstadt is big enough to…you could buy everything you wanted in East Bernstadt….any great big problems.Gilbert: Well….
Scott: And yet, it’s closing, so much of it’s closing too….
Gilbert: It’s closed so much of its business places, that…there ain’t a lot you
can buy anyway now.Scott: It’s just the fact that people have more time and can go into town, and
feel like they’ve been shopping, this type of thing.Gilbert: Go to one place, and pick up everything they need.
Scott: Everything. Well there’s still a few stores left in East Bernstadt.
Gilbert: A couple of grocery stores and a hardware store.
Scott: And Shotts, Shotts Hardware store, it’ll be there.
Gilbert: Shotts…and then he has a furniture store right on up the….
Scott: Well, now does he sell seeds, and fertilizer, that sort of thing, or….
Gilbert: Yes, he sells to some extent…
Scott: But not…
Gilbert: But not a huge amount, he ain’t got no storage place for it.
Scott: Not like a big, not like you all have to have for a farm.
Gilbert: No, not like we have to have, because we buy ours and…they furnish a
spreader and they come down here and spread it, with that spreader rack, so you can get about five or six turn, three or four turn, and if you want anything else mixed in with it, seeds, ammonia, or whatever you want mixed, they can mix it up.Scott: And then provide the spreader at the same time. Oh, well, I didn’t
realize that.Gilbert: After you bring that and spread it and take it back and get you another
load, and then, when you’ve finished why you take it and some other farmer’s waiting for it.Scott: What’s the charge for this? Do they charge?�Gilbert: They don’t charge
for the spreader, where you buy…Scott: Buy the fertilizer.
Gilbert: Broad ( ) fertilize, which we usually buy, way over fifteen ton.
Scott: The things like that’s a big help to the farmer.
Gilbert: That’s right. That is very right.
Scott: And they do that at Southern States, and….
Gilbert: And Burley Belt.
Scott: Does it also, so that’s been a big help to the farmers.
Gilbert: An awful lot.
Scott: ….in Laurel County. There’s most of the farms here you say are dairy,
beef and tobacco.Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: No one grows corn for profit.
Gilbert: If they do, I really don’t know about it. Now, I know they might do it,
but I really don’t know.Scott: And no one sells hay, just grows hay for a cash crop profit, and that’s
all they grow.Gilbert: ( )…that’s it.
Scott: If you had your time to go over Nora, would you stay on the farm…knowing
what you know?Gilbert: I don’t think so. Too many long hours, and too much hard work.
Scott: Someone mentioned to me the other day he grew up on a farm, he’s fifty
now, and he said at eighteen he left, because at eighteen, he decided there was a lot easier way to get poor, than staying on a small farm, a family farm. Is that about right?Gilbert: That’s about right.
Scott: Well, I think that’s about all I have to ask you, unless there’s anything
you’d like to add.Gilbert: Only thing I’d like to add…there’s an awful lot of hard work on a farm.
You’ve gotta get up at daylight or before, and when you come in, it’s almost dark and that ain’t no life for nobody.Scott: So it’s a sun-to-sun job, but you’re not necessarily getting hourly wage.
Gilbert: That’s right.
Scott: Not minimum wage.
Gilbert: Not paid minimum wage.
Scott: Not anything you can count on.
Gilbert: Nothing you can count on.
Scott: Well, I think that’s about it. I sure do appreciate you letting me talk
to you. It’s been a big help, and I’ll come back and talk to you again sometime.END OF INTERVIEW
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©Kentucky Oral History Commission
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©Kentucky Oral History Commission
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