Oral History Interview with Eva Dean Edwards Part I

1983OH02.3

1983OH02.3

Family Farm Oral History Project

Interview with Eva Dean Edwards

June 29, 1983

Conducted by Ginny Scott

© 1983 Kentucky Oral History Commission

Kentucky Historical Society

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Kentucky Oral History Commission

100 W. Broadway ( Frankfort, KY 40601

502-564-1792 ( (fax) 502-564-0475 ( history.ky.gov

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The following is an unrehearsed taped interview with Eva Dean Edwards, farmer in Estill County. The interview was conducted by Ginny Scott, for the Kentucky Oral History Commission. The interview was conducted at Mrs. Edwards’ farm in Estill County on June 29, 1983, at 8:30 A.M.

An Interview with Eva Dean Edwards

Scott: Okay, Mrs. Edwards, I’d like to thank you for meeting with me this morning. And I’d like to start out by personal background, with your name, age, your parents’ names, whatever you can tell me, and just go from there.

Edwards: Well, my name is Eva Dean Edwards. I married Ermon Edwards, here in Estill County, and my maiden name was Boian.

Scott: How do you spell that?

Edwards: B-O-I-A-N, and my parents, my father’s name was Thomas Gentry Boian, and that’s because his mother was a Gentry, and I think all old people then named their children after the wife’s maiden name, a lot of instances.

Scott: I do too.

Edwards: And, my mother was a Park, she was from Madison County, and she was the daughter of John Waller Park and Fannie Bowen Park. My mother and daddy were second cousins. Everything that I ever did wrong, I said, well, that’s because I’m…my parents are second cousins [laughter].

Scott: A leaning post there for you [laughs], a scapegoat.

Edwards: And, the year after my mother and daddy married, my mother’s parents moved to Mississippi.

Scott: Where in Mississippi?

Edwards: Brooksville, and not too far from Macon. So when I was a little girl, I always, once a year, we went to Brooksville to see my grandparents. And then we’d stay, you know, like three or four weeks, because it was such a long trip, and it was on the train.

Scott: Oh, you went on the train?

Edwards: And, you know, back in the days, I don’t know if the train windows were open or not, but we had soot on us when we got there. And it was sort of…but, then they came here, and momma had, I believe, well, one sister, and six brothers. We had a lot of company when I was growing up, my daddy’s family too.

Scott: And you lived in this house?

Edwards: Yes, we lived in this house. I was born in this house, up over the living room, upstairs. And, my daddy’s family had lived in this house too. They were William Boian, and Katie Gentry Boian. There was a log house up on the hill, here, kind of to the right of where we are, up on that hill, and my daddy was born there, because his parents lived here too. When he was born, his mother and daddy lived in that house.

Scott: Who lived in this house?

Edwards: My grandpa Billy, we called him. His parents were William Sr., and Mariah Park Boian. When I was born, my grandfather wanted to name me Mariah. See, my mother and daddy were living in the same house with my grandparents. They moved here to take care of my grandparents.

Scott: And you were born here.

Edwards: And I was born here. And when I was born, and I was a little girl, my grandfather wanted me named Mariah, after his mother. But daddy wrote all these names down, and he’d write them and look at them, and he finally decided on Eva Dean, because, and then Boian, because Eva had three letters and Dean had four and Boian had five, and he thought it looked nice, so that’s what they…did that [laughter].

Scott: Based your name on.

Edwards: Yes. Now you want to know about my great-grandparents’ family, and then how he came to be here and that sort of thing?

Scott: Yes, please.

Edwards: His father was named James Boian, and they lived in Virginia. His mother’s name was Zeroiah Eubank Boian

Scott: Zeroriah?

Edwards: Zeroiah. Z-U-R-I-A…no, let’s see…Z-E-U-O-R-I-A-H I’m not sure that’s right. I can’t read what they’ve written here. Let me see if I’ve typed it out someplace.

Scott: I’ve never heard that name before.

Edwards: Z-E-O…no, Z-E-R-O-I-A-H, Zeroiah Eubank, and her family were from Monroe County, Kentucky, and she had married James and they lived in Virginia, and they had…nine, no eight, children. Now their children’s names were Martha, William, Sophie, John, Emily, Dicey and Nancy. My great-grandfather was William. So, when William and Mariah Park married and lived here, and they had children, they named them, Melinda, and Martha, and Sophia, and John and Emily and Nancy. Only they had more children…they had twelve, two babies died though. The only name they didn’t use of that family was Dicey.

Scott: Dicey, that’s also a name I’ve never heard.

Edwards: I hadn’t either, until then. Then, James, my great…great-grandfather James died, and Zeroiah went back to her Eubank relatives in Monroe County, and then she went to Missouri, and all these brothers and sisters went to Missouri, but my grandfather came here, and he came here because in Monroe County he had worked, he was about 15 and 16 years old, as a tan yard apprentice. So there was an old man here who ran a tan yard, and grandpa came to work with this old man. Now the old records show that they had two other, the census records, you know, for family, was just this old man and my grandfather (well, great-grandfather), and two boys, I guess, who worked for him, or were maybe doing apprentice work. But they lived here. There was a little log house right out here in our back yard, and that’s where they lived. We used it when I was a little girl, it was still there, and it was a smokehouse. We hung our meat in it, and sulfured apples in it. And, that’s about all. I mean, you know, that’s sort of the background of what I can tell you. Now, as far as farming, when my great-grandfather lived here, they cooked on a fire—well that’s not farming—but anyway, life was this way. They cooked on a fireplace…and he worked in the tan yard.

Scott: On this farm?

Edwards Right here, yes. And the tan yard was right down this little ravine here.

Scott: Did he buy the farm then from the old man that owned it?

Edwards: Yes, and I think it was just…you didn’t buy…it was just land, and you paid taxes on it so many years, and it was yours, or something like that.

Scott: Oh, okay, so that’s how…

Edwards: It was not a government grant. It was not a land grant.

Scott: But he just paid the taxes.

Edwards: You know, you just…it was just like homesteading. You stayed there so many years, and it was yours.

Scott: Okay, so that’s how he acquired it.

Edwards: Yes, and my, now, of course I can’t remember my great-grandfather, he died before I was born, but my grandfather used to tell me that when he was a little boy, and my great-grandfather was here, that if they wanted meat, they just went out and shot a wild hog. Or they killed wild turkeys. You know, it was no problem…the woods were full of animals that they ate, and as for farming…. well see, grandpa ran the tan yard, so I guess he didn’t farm much, just raised a garden. They plowed with oxen, like two cows, with a yoke to hold their heads together, and they plowed that way, and when they…they had…like a sled, with runners, you know, and a flat on that, and they hauled things on a sled.

Scott: They would have cleared this land, wouldn’t they…your great-grandfather?

Edwards: Oh, it was woods when my great-grandfather came here. And when he and Mariah settled here, they married in 1832. When they had children, and the first little baby died, they buried on the hill behind the house. If you’ll stand up, you can look out that window and see the cemetery.

Scott: Oh, yes.

Edwards: There was ninety graves over there now, and twenty-three, twenty-seven unmarked, just with stones.

Scott: Now, that’s all your family, or…

Edwards: Well, some of the neighborhood people …

Scott: …close neighbors?

Edwards: …have been buried here too, and we don’t sell lots, it’s just free to somebody who wants to buried here. And a lot of our family is there. So that started that cemetery, and then they’re buried there (William and Mariah) and then William and Katie, my grandparents, and my daddy and mother are buried there.

Scott: Oh, that’s great. Now we have a family cemetery at home, that’s about as far from the house as this one, but the last person buried there was in 1863, and they stopped using it.

Edwards: My mother was buried there in February, the last, the last grave here, I guess. She was ninety-six years old, and she died the 19th of February.

Scott: Are you going to be buried there also?

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Me too [laughter]. Me too.

Edwards: Well, so there wasn’t much farming, you know, and when great grandpa’s children married, he gave them land. Now my, grand…before my daddy was born, my grandparents lived out by the Madison County line at Drowning Creek. Daddy was eleven when they moved back out here. But, I can’t tell you how many acres…but there’s homestead agreements with every one of his children, and a lot of other people too.

Scott: But he gave them land?

Edwards: Yes, that he gave them land if, well see, he would move people on to this land, and they were to fence it and clean it up, and it was for a year. If things went well and they were living all right, and…progress was being made, and so forth, they could do it for another year. It was sort of like a lease. And yet, it wasn’t theirs, ever, it was like….

Scott: And it was a matter of getting it cleaned up.

Edwards: But for his children, it was a matter of, if they stayed there so many years they could have the farm.

Scott: But it was theirs.

Edwards: That was his children. So my grandpa William got the farm out by Drowning Creek, out by the Pinola line, out the road here two miles, I guess, on the way to that one, was his son James’ land.

Scott: That must have been a tremendously large farm.

Edwards: Well, see I can’t tell you in acres how big it was, because he just…he just…paid tax on land that wasn’t anybody’s. And, you know, it was just the law back then, that you could sort of just see what you want, and pay tax on it. I guess it’s when tax first started. So, grandpa James, that’s my mother’s grandfather now, see I told you they were second cousins, they lived out there, and then this place across the road up here, was his daughter Sally’s. Let’s see, there was one almost to Pinola but it was still on the left side of the creek, and it was nearer that farm that was my grandpa William’s that was John’s. But John sold his and went to Garrard County. And then, that was all the boys, I guess. Then the daughters, well this was a daughter, Sally Sarah, that lived across the road, and her…and then Maryanne, that married Gilford Wagers, he gave them a farm. It was still back this direction. They had six children, and both of them died five days apart with measles.

Scott: Oh my goodness. Now when was this?

Edwards: Well, it’s…I can tell you just exactly, in a minute. Let me find a list of their children.

Scott: I know we had a measles epidemic.

Edwards: Yes, we did, and they died. I have that…I’ll just tell you in a minute. It was, Maryanne died the 19th of May 1877, and they had six little children, and my great-grandparents brought those six grandchildren here, and raised them.

Scott: With their children?

Edwards: Well, their children, by 1877, they were mostly married and gone.

Scott: So they took another family.

Edwards: They took another family and raised them. Now those children, one of them married, there was two girls. Eliza married Will Thomas and lived here in this community. Laura Todd, Laura Wagers, married a Todd, and she lived at Kingston, in Madison County, and the boys went on to Missouri. There were four boys, and they went to Missouri. Most of our people, who went west, went to Missouri. Although, I see there was only one boy, in my grandfather’s family who went west. First he went to Missouri, but he must have gone on further, because there are Boians in California and Washington. My cousin went to a Bowen reunion and he said they look just like us.

Scott: Huh. Well, the spelling of the name, the B-O-I-A-N, is unusual too.

Edwards: Well, it’s sort of like a French spelling, and yet they say that before Virginia, you know, they came from England. So, I don’t know.

Scott: I've never encountered that. I’ve heard the B-O-W-E-N.

Edwards: Now there’s somebody I don’t even know, some Boian, and he spells it B-O-I-A-N, who works for a newspaper in New York, or something. He says there’s some of this same name in Alberta, Canada, and that in Rumania, there is in the Bucharest phone book, I think, that was the place he said, twelve names right now with that name. So I don’t know if they went that direction; I have no idea how this all came about, but… Then when I was a little girl and my grandfather lived here, we had oxen and horses both.

Scott: Oxen was beginning to fade out.

Edwards: I can’t really tell you that I’ve ever seen a yoke of oxen hooked up, you know, working. I know we had some little yokes, here, in good shape, when I was a little girl. But, grandpa had used mostly horses and mules.

Scott: Well was the land cleared by that time?

Edwards: A lot of it, but not like it is now. They’ve burned wood to cook with and to heat in the fireplaces with in the wintertime, and they used the wood to have it sawed and build the outhouses around. That sort of pushed the woods back all the time.

Scott: Did a lot of clearing.

Edwards: Yes, and then they cleared land just to have it for farmland. But there were still not big fields when grandpa was farming.

Scott: Now what did your grandfather raise on his farm?

Edwards: Well, corn, and you thought of it like this. You raised a garden to feed the family. You raised corn to feed the animals. And the hay, was like they cut the hay with a scythe or a cradle. A cradle is like a big scythe, only it has teeth that stand up, you know, like this high, and you make a big swipe with it, and that gathers it in, as you cut hay. Well, that was by hand, you see. And that was for—they’d make a hay stack—that was for their animals.

Scott: So he didn’t sell anything.

Edwards: They didn’t worry about selling things, or they didn’t worry a lot about buying things. They had it right here. You know, they had their own eggs, and meat, and vegetables. They sulfured apples and they canned, and even I can remember when I was a little girl, we didn’t buy a lot. We didn’t need to. And we had a lot more to eat then than we do now.

Scott: And a lot better.

Edwards: That’s right. It was.

Scott: And an orchard, I’m sure you had an orchard.

Edwards: When I, well we always had apple trees. There were two apples on this side of the front yard, and one on this side of the walk. And they were sweet apple trees, sweet apples. And then there was an apple tree in the backyard. There were cherry trees at this back corner of the house, about three cherry trees right up there, a couple of peach trees out here. And then in that spring lot, there were two apple trees, I remember, and over this way in that field there was an apple tree. Now that was just scattered trees around, when my grandfather was here. But when my daddy took this farm over, he planted an orchard up by that old log barn, and let’s see—he had about sixteen trees. One crabapple tree, and then there were different kinds of apples, you know, like he had one yellow apples, and then there were golden delicious, and Grimes golden, and I can’t tell you the names…Starkes delicious, or something. And then there were peaches.

Scott: So everything you needed, everything he needed….

Edwards: And we gathered peaches when they’d get ripe, bushels of them, you know, and momma canned them, and we could put apples in the cellar and they’d keep until Christmas. At nighttime we’d go down there and get a pan of apples and sit around the fire and eat them, you know, we just had plenty of apples. Then she made applesauce.

Scott: What about the pears? Did you have any pears?

Edwards: We had one old pear tree down here in the back yard, and they were as hard as a rock. And they were a certain kind of pear, I can’t tell you the name.

Scott: Not the Bartlett?

Edward: Well, they weren’t, never, never did they get nice and ripe like a good pear that you go buy.

Scott: Just grainy.

Edwards: Always grainy and hard. They got to be such a mess, after we used the lawn mower and cut the grass, you know, and we had to clean up under the pear tree before we could cut the grass, so we just cut it down.

Scott: Wasn’t really worth it.

Edwards: Momma used to make preserves out of it, and people around the neighborhood made preserves and would come here and get a bucket of pears.

Scott: There aren’t many pear trees left around here.

Edwards: No, we don’t have any.

Scott: We don’t have any anymore. They’re hard to find. So, he really didn’t grow anything to sell. You say he didn’t worry about that.

Edwards: I don’t think so. I don’t think grandpa worried about selling anything.

Scott: Didn’t have tobacco?

Edwards: So far as I know, we didn’t. I don’t know. I’ve heard them talk about selling a little corn maybe, or so many barrels of corn. Oh, I’ll tell you something they sold, they made apple cider, and sold that. I can remember where this house, where daddy was born up here, we used it—once we used it for a hen house—and then it just got to be a place where they put lumber that they didn’t need right then, and I can remember when there were three barrels of vinegar in there. People would come here to get vinegar.

Scott: Oh, so he made apple cider and vinegar and sold it.

Edwards: Cider and vinegar, I remember, and I guess, and honey. He had beehives and he sold honey, and he would sell sides of meat, and hams, you know, but not crops.

Scott: But in a way….

Edwards: In a way, he sold things, but there were just…

Scott: Just when he needed the cash.

Edwards: Yeah. And now my great-grandfather, who had the tan yard, had a commissary, up here at this, what this house is now. There was a log square room which was the commissary. He sold, like they made leather items, and sold, like boots, and…bridles, and saddles, and one time the Union Army came through here and robbed the commissary. They just stood there…grandpa just stood there and watched them take things out of the…anything they wanted. And whiskey, I don’t know who made the whiskey. You know, I never heard that great grandpa made the whiskey, but he bought whiskey and sold it there.

Scott: Sold it at the store. Hmm. Well, were your family, your grandfather, great-grandfather, southern sympathizers? Union sympathizers, which one?

Edwards: Well, let’s see. I can’t, I don’t think the boys were ever the right age to fight in either army. You know, they were little boys, maybe at the time. My grandfather, my great-grandfather himself, and I don’t know what war that was—I can’t pin really thing these things; I hadn’t really thought it out, but he left home to go in the army somewhere and they all just took it like a funeral, you know. And he was gone and they thought he was away fighting and all this, but war was declared about three days after he got someplace, you know, and so he came back home.

Scott: Came back home.

Edwards: And they were all so glad.

Scott: That was your great-grandfather.

Edwards: That was my great-grandfather, yes.

Scott: So that would have been, would that have been the Civil War?

Edwards: Well, it was 1832, that he married, and he was married and had some children. When was the Civil War? 1860s?

Scott: 1861.

Edwards: Yeah…well, I don’t know. That makes him a little too old, it seems. I can’t tell you that; I just don’t know.

Scott: Spanish American war.

Edwards: I don’t know. But I’ve heard them tell that story, you know, that he went away to the war…

Scott: And they knew he’d never come back.

Edwards: Oh, yeah, that’s the way it always was then, you know, and my mother has told me that in World War I, some of her brothers and cousins and so forth went, and that was in Richmond, you see, when the depot was out here at the crossing there, where the railroad still is. And she said that they would go to that depot to see the boys off to the war. The girlfriends would go with them, and parents would go with them. They had a really bad time there when those boys were getting on the train.

Scott: At the end, just like a funeral.

Edwards: Some people would faint, and you know, they’d just scream and cry, and the boys would wave out of the train windows until they were out of sight.

Scott: Just like the movies.

Edwards: Yes, right, just like the movies. Well, then when my daddy was farming here and I was a little girl, and I was a tomboy and followed him everywhere, all over this farm. I could help him hitch up a team, just as good…you know, when he was hitching up the team to the wagon, why I put the harness on one mule and he put the harness on another mule. Excuse me just a minute [interruption]. I was starting to tell you about when daddy farmed. Now, we didn’t have any, anything but horses and mules. The horses were mostly for daddy, just shined them up and rode them. When momma and daddy first married, they had a buggy. And that used to sit in this old wagon shed up here by the barn, and one time, daddy decided he’d move it down to this other barn. And he put it out into the lot, and I climbed up in, and imagined what it would be like to ride in a buggy. I said, “Daddy, I never did ride in a buggy. Why don’t we put a horse in this?” and he said, “Well, I’m going to take it down to the barn, just stay up there.” He pulled the buggy (you know it was downhill) to this barn, but instead of going to that barn, he acted like a run-away horse, and he come around this corner, right here, and I was just screaming, and….[laughter]. My grandmother and momma came out on to the back porch to see what was going on….

Scott: To see what all the noise was.

Edwards: So that was the buggy ride. But my grandfather in Mississippi had a buggy, and he went to town everyday, and I’ve ridden in his buggy.

Scott: So the horses were kept mostly for that, for recreation?

Edwards: They were just…you know.

Scott: Because everyone had a horse at the time, or every farm…

Edwards: Well, we had a white horse, and she was kind of old, and I was just a kid, and I could go out in the pasture anywhere and catch her, and get up by a gate or something, and get on her, you know, bareback. Then, I’d ride her a mile over to the post office, out the Regis Road and these neighbors would come out as I’d go along, and they’d say, Eva Dean, would you care to see if we have got some mail, you know, and as I came back, I had everybody’s mail…not everybody’s, just, you know, two or three families. But the families weren’t so close together, either.

Scott: So you were working at that age, too [laughs].

Edwards: I guess. I didn’t think that was work.

Scott: …as a postal carrier.

Edwards: And, then this white horse had a bay colt, and she had a blaze face, white down her face, and she was born on my birthday, so she was my horse.

Scott: She automatically became your horse.

Edwards: She was my horse, and her name was Dolly. And then, she had, the white horse had another colt, and it had a question mark in its face—just almost a perfect question mark, and he was Prince. One time daddy and I were riding down on the far side of the place down there and had to cross a branch, and daddy was on Dolly, and no, daddy was on Prince and I was on Dolly, and I got a little bit…[tape interruption] and when I started to catch up with daddy, the horse ran away, my horse ran away. I began to look at the ground and think where am I going to land, you know. We were headed towards the woods, and daddy kept yelling, “Hold on Eva Dean, hold on!” and he rode up beside me, just like a cowboy and got a hold of her bridle and jerked it you know, and stopped her. Otherwise, I’d been raked off on a tree limb, maybe killed.

Scott: Legs broken, right, especially legs broken.

Edwards: Yes, but daddy worked hard too. He had, I got Ermon to help me last night think of what kinds of tools daddy had. He had a mowing machine, of course the sickle was not like mowing machines now, maybe it was five foot long, or something you know. But he, the horses, the mules pulled the mowing machine and cut the grass, the hay. All right. And when daddy made hay, he threw it up, you know, he’d rake it. He had a hay rake, horse drawn….

Scott: One of the big ones with the….

Edwards: Yes, with the teeth, like people hang on a post now and hang flowerpots on.

Scott: Right, and those little seats that sat up there were so dangerous.

Edwards: Yes, and he would rake that hay, and then kind of stack it. We either hauled it in on a wagon—you know, he had a hay frame made for the two-horse wagon—and then they’d bring it to the barn, and throw it with a pitch fork up into the barn loft. Then daddy, in the winter, would stuff that down into the racks for the horses and the cows to eat, and that was part of his feeding.

Scott: Did he stack hay?

Edwards: Hay stacks? Yes, he, I told Ermon last night I can remember a hay stack over by the cemetery, up that way, up the hill a little from the cemetery, and then that was mostly where he put them, over on that hill, because that was close to the water in the spring for the cattle, and they ate there. They put a pole in the ground and stacked the hay around the pole, and then the cows would start at the bottom, and keep eating, you know, their height, and once in awhile, it looked like an umbrella. You know, the top was left just sticking up on the pole but the cattle had eaten all out under it. And then daddy would go over there, and maybe take a ladder, and climb up on it and push it down, and he had a new haystack.

Scott: A haystack ready for them.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Now did he bale hay before he quit farming?

Edwards: Well, when daddy was old, and Ermon was farming, they, about 1976, they got some people, a fellow that had a hay baler to come here and bale hay, and then they got their own baler, and then they got their own baler because they liked this; they tried it to see if they liked it, and then they bought their own. Now daddy had a disc harrow, and he had plows, he had—I think they called it, well, he talked about a hillside plow and a turning plow. One of them would, you get at the end of your furrow and you could lift it up and switch it over, and it would plow back

Scott: It would switch the blade.

Edwards: You know, it threw the one direction as you came out, and then you turned it around, and see it would have thrown it in the opposite direction. But you could turn your plow over the other way, and it would plow, throw the dirt in the same direction.

Scott: Oh, well I haven’t heard of one of those.

Edwards: Well, I think it was a common thing, but I can’t tell you what they called it. Now Ermon, would know that. See he should have been here. And daddy had a disc harrow, like a Randall harrow, we called it. And then he had an A harrow, made like the capital letter A, with a cross piece, and it had teeth down through it, you know. You pulled that through the…

Scott: About forty little teeth.

Edwards: Right, well, I don’t know how many [laughs] and then he had a drag was just two logs nailed together that you drag the clods down with. He made a roller, it was like two big cuts off of a log, with an axle all the way through them, and then it had a seat on it like a Randall harrow, or a mowing machine. That would squeak, you could hear him on the hill past the cemetery, rolling, it just squeaked, and squeaked, you know. It made so much noise that when momma rang the dinner bell to call him to lunch, he wouldn’t hear a thing. But he could always tell when lunch was ready because the mules would stick their ears up like this, you know. They heard the dinner bell, so he’d know to come to the house.

Scott: To come to dinner.

Edwards: Yes [laughs].

Scott: Well, this sure put the soil in good condition, though, didn’t it?

Edwards: It mashed it just like a cultipacker does now. And then, he had, well I told you a hay rake and a wagon, and when daddy wanted to go to the grocery or somewhere, he had a two-wheeled cart, and he’d just hook Ole Minnie, the white horse, to it and go. You know, he could get there in a hurry. It was like, well, it didn’t sit down now, like a race cart that you see on the race track, you know, but it had a little seat on it, enough for two people

Scott: Same idea.

Edwards: Yes, same idea.

Scott: And he didn’t have a car then?

Edwards: No, he didn’t have a car until about 1936 or ’37—about 1937.

Scott: So it was good transportation.

Edwards: Yes, and well, the roads were bad. You couldn’t go in a car anytime anyway. So he just got there in his cart.

Scott: Where did he do his, where did he go to the grocery?

Edwards: I guess Rice Station, mostly, and there was a post office there too. Over here where you turned onto the Regis Road, if you had gone a little further, there’s a road that turns left, and that’s the Rice Station Christian Church. Then you go on down that hill, and a little ways to Rice Station Store. That was W. L. Rice and Sons and first, they had been down the hill from that store, by the railroad. There was a railroad that went through here. Like way back there, you could hear the train blow, and you could hear the train go down there, and when we wanted to go to Richmond, or Irvine, we could just go over to Regis, that where Regis Road got its name, you see. We’d go over to Regis and get on the train, and we could go wherever we wanted.

Scott: So that’s when you did you shopping, you went to…on the train. That’ s great.

Edwards: And daddy had about, oh, ten or twelve cows, and daddy and momma had a separator that you separated the milk from the cream, the cream and the milk. So, I’ve helped milk, and momma used to help milk part of the time, and we’d milk morning and night, and when they had baby calves, we kept them away from the cows, but would turn them in, to have their supper, a little, and then we’d finish milking the cows.

Scott: And this was done by hand?

Edwards: Yes. And, then momma and daddy—we used to laugh about my momma and daddy separates every night and morning [laughter]. And they did that out in the springhouse, and no matter how cold, momma took a teakettle of hot water out there and washed the separator—it had to be kept real clean, and then they took this cream. First we had cream cans that went straight up, and in, and two handles and a top that fitted down into the top. And we sold—we took that to Regis and put it on the train, and it went to Tri-State Butter Company. And we got some kind of coupons with that. The first bible I ever had, mom got it with coupons from the Tri-State Butter Company.

Scott: Well, how much did this cream bring? How much did they sell it for, do you remember?

Edwards: I just wish I knew. I don’t know. Momma kept records and I’ve got it here.

Scott: I just wondered how much it brought then.

Edwards: She had a little notebook like this, all the time, and on this page, she’d put down everything they sold—eggs, and butter, and milk, and what it brought. And then she had another page that told what they bought, you know, in the way of groceries.

Scott: So she had her own bookkeeping system, that’s great.

Edwards: And she has one for each year, for I don’t know how many years, and I have them, but I haven’t really gone into checking that out, you know.

Scott: So, your mother and dad sold cream, eggs, milk, cattle….

Edwards: Yes, they just sold veal calves. It took, (I asked Ermon about that last night), it took about, well, I don’t see it here, but I’ll come to it and I’ll tell you, how long it took to top a calf.

Scott: Well, did he take them to stock markets?

Edwards: He’d take them to the stock pens at Richmond. Oh, here it is—ten to twelve weeks to top a calf, and a calf weighed from two hundred to two hundred and ten pounds, and they took it to Richmond and sold it. And I can remember, oh, they’d sell a calf, for, you know, thirty dollars. One time right, like when daddy was old and didn’t fool with them much anymore, he sold a calf for about eighty dollars, and I know momma said that just seems like robbery. You know, it seems terrible to take that much for a little old calf. And now they’re a lot more than that.

Scott: And now, they’re four hundred and fifty.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: And at that you feel like you’re really getting a good deal.

Edwards: Now while daddy was farming with these horse-drawn tools, here, this was a real noisy place when you’d wake up in the mornings, you know. You’d hear the chickens up in the hen house, and the geese, you know what a noise they make. And we had guineas, when they flew off the roost, they must have did everything they knew how to do, because they were so noisy, and then we had turkeys, and they all were—woke up hungry, I guess.

Scott: [Laughs]…or noisy anyway.

Edwards: Yes. Momma used to take the extra milk we had, she’d let it clabber, and then she fed that to the chickens, and fowls, you know. We had little, you know, we kept the little chickens and little turkeys and so forth separate, and if they did run outside—I can remember when my grandpa, just right there in the driveway, he built a slat, roof-like thing, you know, kind of long, and it was like a little roof, but it sat on the ground, and they could put the chicken feed and the turkey feed in that, and the big ones couldn’t get in there, but the little ones went in and ate. Then, of course, we had to keep water out all the time—that was just every morning and evening business, that you took water to the….

Scott: You had your own turkeys, then, and chickens to eat.

Edwards: The foxes got so bad, we couldn’t raise our turkeys.

Scott: Hmm.

Edwards: One time we’d gone across the road to visit, and they had a front porch that just faced the cemetery. From up there, you can see every move that’s made here, at this place, you know. And we were sitting on that porch, and we saw the turkeys going up that hill, toward the cemetery, and a fox just came and he was just biting them, and throwing them over his shoulder; he’d bite, and throw them over his shoulder. He just killed a bunch.

Scott: Ohhh, before you could get back to do anything about it. Well, what did you do with the guineas?

Edwards: [Laughs] I don’t know. I don’t think we ate them….

Scott: Look at them?

Edwards: I don’t think we ate them. I think, you know they go “pop-rack”, “pop-rack”.

Scott: My father has three, and they….just look at them.

Edwards: They flew, they could fly from up on this hill, clear around here to this backyard, and all I know is they made a lot of noise, and they laid eggs, and had they little guineas.

Scott: Did you eat the eggs?

Edwards: Yeah, I have. They were smaller than a hen egg.

Scott: And richer.

Edwards: It took them three weeks to hatch, just like it did the chickens, and for geese, it took four weeks.

Scott: Oh, I didn’t know it was that long.

Edwards: And a goose egg is a lot bigger, you know. And when momma was gathering the turkey eggs, she used to lay them upstairs over that was her dining room, and it was cool up there. She’d lay those eggs up there on the bed; nobody slept up there. Neighbors would come, and they’d like…they’d bring—I’ve known of them bringing eggs to swap to turkey eggs, or they would come and buy turkey eggs. She sold her geese to some poultry man, you know, like she’d pick them, and momma thought that when I got grown and got married, I must have feather bed. So she’d pick her geese and she made me a feather bed, and it’s still here, and I don’t know what to do with it [laughs].

Scott: What do you do with them now?

Edwards: I think I’m going to make pillows out of it, if I can figure out what to do with the feathers while I’m making the pillows.

Scott: That’s a problem [laughter]. I still have my feather bed on my bed at home.

Edwards: Do you?

Scott: At my mother’s—and I still sleep on it. But everyone, like you say….

Edwards: One time when it was real cold in the winter, Ermon and I, we built the house down the road here, you know. We lived down there fifteen years before my daddy died, and then we came to stay with momma. One time, it was so cold, and I said, Ermon, I’ve got a real good feather bed, we’ve never used. And he said, “Oh, I’d like to sleep on that,” so he brought down there and we put it on the bed, and went to bed. At one o’clock, I was still trying to get fixed to go to sleep, and we got up that night and took it off the bed, because we just couldn’t get used to it.

Scott: I love them.

Edwards: You know, maybe we’d have still be sleeping on it if we’d just toughed it out a few nights.

Scott: Made it one night [laughs].

Edwards: We just weren’t used to it.

Scott: Did she sell feathers?

Edwards: No, no, she just made cushions and pillows, and feather bed for me. I think once I tried my luck at picking a goose, but I didn’t know how, you know [laughs]. And she tried to…but she would put the goose’s head under it’s wing and turn it upside down in her lap, and then right back under it’s tail, like, you know toward it’s middle, was the nicest, softest feathers, and out of it’s breast too, and she got those. Geese looked kind of ragged when they got picked, you know.

Scott: Yes, kind of sheared.

Edwards: Another thing that had here when daddy was here—now he had his horses, and cows, and pigs for meat. He didn’t raise a lot of pigs, he just sold them, I mean he just raised them for meat.

Scott: He dried his meat, salted it, cured it, smoked it, whatever.

Edwards: Never lost a bit. We have trouble now. We have trouble trying to keep it.

Scott: Yeah, we do too.

Edwards: But, he raised sheep.

Scott: Oh, he raised sheep?

Edwards: And he raised sheep to keep the pastures clipped. They, sheep will eat; you know it just looks like a yard that’s been mowed, when sheep run on a pasture. And….

Scott: How many did he have, do you remember?

Edwards: Oh, he had thirty, or something like that. And once in awhile there would be—one time an old ewe had died, and she had a lamb. So he gave that lamb to me to feed and take care of it. We kept it in this room a lot, and I’d go to that gate, and call it. I’d just say “Here, lambie, lambie, lambie,” and I had this big bottle of milk with a long nipple. And it would suck that. That was feeding the lamb, you know. Then there came a time when they’d cut the lamb’s tails off, because if you let the lamb’s tail grow, it catches all the weed seeds, and dried stuff, just gets to be a mat of stuff, so they always cut the lamb’s tails off, about that long. So they cut my lamb’s tail off, and it bled, and the lamb bleated, you know when they did it, and I was so sorry for it, and I put a bandage on it. I remember when that lamb got big enough to sell. It brought seventeen dollars. And I was just a little girl, and daddy put that in Waco Bank, and started my bank account.

Scott: With that lamb.

Edwards: With that lamb.

Scott: Oh, that’s great. Well, that was a good price, then, too, wasn’t it?

Edwards: Yes, I guess so.

Scott: Well, did he ever eat them?

Edwards: Yes, daddy loved, we called it mutton. And momma always said, “ Oooh, I couldn’t eat a bite of that, if I was starving,” you know. But one time, we had mutton and beef at the same time, and daddy switched what he had on his plate to…when she got up to take up some biscuits, or something, why he switched this meat, just to play with her, you know. She ate it and talked about that good beef, and she just couldn’t eat mutton. But she was, right then [laughter].

Scott: I think it’s just like me—it’s just the idea of eating a lamb, you know, they’re so precious.

Edwards: Yes, that’s right.

Scott: It’s the idea of eating it.

Edwards: I know when daddy dressed the lamb, well he hung it up at the back of the wagon shed, up there, by its hind feet. And he cut its throat with an axe. And, then he cut its skin, right down the middle of its tummy. And he kept saying we must not let this wool touch the flesh; he kept rolling it out, you know, rolling away from it.

Scott: Wonder why.

Edwards: And I remember that he, you know, he wanted it to bleed good, and he wanted it to, that fur, you know, I don’t know.

Scott: Maybe the bacteria would grow.

Edwards: It had a grease to it, and I don’t, I don’t know that he thought that much about bacteria. I think it had a—it would make it have a taste of some kind, like the oil in the wool.

Scott: It would get on the flesh.

Edwards: Now my uncle on Crooked Creek, over the mountain here, had sheep, and they had sheep shearers. It was a three-legged little thing that stood on the ground, they kept their foot on, and then a pipe sort of a thing and it had some wheels and you turned a handle like this, and out there, there was some shears, like clippers, like hand clippers that you cut people’s hair a long time. Well, this would run, from this turning the handle, you know. And they’d lay an old sheep up on, like a table-like thing they had for that. They put a strap around its neck, and they tied its front feet and its back feet. They laid it on one side, and daddy would start with these clippers and go right around like this, like you’re mowing around the hillside. That fur would lay back, and then he’d go again. The clippers were about 2 ½ inches wide. Once in awhile, he’d nip the sheep, you know, and she’d kick.

Scott: Poor sheep!

Edwards: And then they’d roll that and tuck it back under and roll her over the other way. And then he’d cut on this side down to where he’d meet his cut, you know, at the backbone of the sheep and then, they’d roll that up and we sold wool; they sold that.

Scott: Where did you sell it?

Edwards: It went to some company; it was mailed, shipped away, but I can’t tell you. I just don’t know what company they sold those.

Scott: And you don’t know how much that sold for?

Edwards: And I don’t know what it sold for.

Scott: I wonder. I’m sure it wasn’t very much. It was a lot then.

Edwards: Yes, well, they thought they were getting rich, I guess, with that. Once a year they sold wool, you know, both of them. And it wasn’t too much trouble. And then they’d unbuckle this old sheep, and she was so glad to get down, and she’d shake herself, and snort, and she looked so ragged, and skinned.

Scott: So pitiful.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: How long did he keep those? How long did he keep sheep?

Edwards: Well, I was oh, twenty years old, when…let’s see. I was born in 1922. I guess around 1940, he…the dogs would get in them.

Scott: So many dogs roaming then….

Edwards: It wasn’t wild dogs, but it was police dogs that the neighbors had for pets, and they’d just seem like they’d just gang up and knew where sheep were, you know, and they’d chase them. Once in awhile, they’d kill one.

Scott: Just wasn’t worth it anymore, was it?

Edwards: Daddy just thought that was cruel, you know. He just sold the sheep. But now I can remember when people drove, like, I don’t know where from Wisemantown, maybe, and they were going to Richmond to sell their cattle, or their sheep, or one time, I can remember turkeys. They’d just start out some morning driving them down this country road, you know.

Scott: On foot?

Edwards: On foot, and they’d have four or five people who would look ahead if there was not a fence someplace. Most everybody’s farm was fenced; the roadway was fenced. And they’d just drive them, you know. I heard Daddy talk about over at Pinola one time, somebody had gotten a flock of turkeys that far, and it came nightfall, so they began to fly up in trees, and so they stayed there all night, and let their turkeys roost, and then they took them on the next day.

Scott: On the next day.

Edwards: I don’t really know, now we think of stock pens at Richmond out there a certain street, you know, but I don’t know where they took these to…maybe not that very place.

Scott: But they took them to Richmond to sell.

Edwards: They knew where they were going, but it was in Madison County, near Richmond, that they took them.

Scott: Now when was this? When’s the last you remember, of driving stock?

Edwards: Oh, I must have been, like, it could have been 1925.

Scott: While the roads were still bad, too bad to….

Edwards: The roads were bad, and they were fenced. You know, like our garden’s wide open to anything that might go along the road now, but nothing ever does.

Scott: But it wasn’t then.

Edwards: No, it was fenced; everything was fenced. The road was fenced on both sides, so that you didn’t have any trouble driving a bunch of cows down the road.

Scott: Just driving them.

Edwards: Yeah, that was all there was too it; just on foot, driving them.

Scott: That seems like an awful lot of work now, doesn’t it?

Edwards: Yeah, oh it would be [laughing]. Don’t guess we’d do it now.

Scott: I don’t imagine [laughing].

Edwards: Oh, and when we were talking last night about the horses and mules, Ermand reminded me that when my grandfather was living, they had jacks and jennys.

Scott: Oh.

Edwards: I remember when my mother and daddy tried to explain to me one time about jacks and jennys and horses and mules, and Ermon was good enough to tell me in a way last night that I finally got this into my head.

Scott: [Laughs.] Good, I want to hear it because I’ve never understood.

Edwards: Okay. If you have a jack and a jenny, they are little animals all their own breed, you know. If you breed a jack and a jenny, you get a little jack or a jenny.

Scott: Okay.

Edwards: Okay, now that’s the jack and jenny business.

Scott: And it’s a little mule?

Edwards: It’s not a mule.

Scott: But it looks like a little mule.

Edwards: It’s a little…it’s a donkey.

Scott: A little donkey, okay.

Edwards: If you have a horse and a mare and you breed them, you get a little horse.

Scott: Okay.

Edwards: If you breed a jack to a mare, you get a mule. It’s either a little male mule or little female mule.

Scott: But they can’t breed.

Edwards: But, mules do not reproduce their kind. Ermon said it has been known that, daddy has told him, that maybe one out of a thousand or, I don’t know if he said a thousand, or ten thousand, but it can happen, you know, that a mare mule can have a little colt. But it’s like something that would be in a paper. That’s something for the Guinness Book of Records.

Scott: Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Edwards: Yes, you know, it’s not impossible but it’s very far, far apart, but that was just so clear to me when he told me that last night.

Scott: You never see little jacks and jennys.

Edwards: No, and he said they’re almost extinct. And when there are no longer jacks and jennys, or when there’s no longer jacks to breed to a horse, mare, there wouldn’t be any more mules.

Scott: Well, they’re kind of dying out anyway.

Edwards: Yeah.

Scott: I had never seen a jack or jenny, and we had mules all of my life. Well, we still do.

Edwards: Yeah.

Scott: But I have never seen a jack or a jenny.

Edwards: Daddy’s mules were gray, almost white, and they were called Bick and Ellen, and you could ride Ellen, but you couldn’t ride Bick.

Scott: You could always ride one of a team, but you can’t ride the other…one of them is always wild.

Edwards: And daddy said he decided one time he was going to ride Bick anyway, so he got on her back and she humped up, just like your finger bent up like this, just like a knuckle. And he rode her a mile out to the school house and back, on that little knot! [laughs].

Scott: And her probably kicking and bucking all the way.

Edwards: She just humped up, and went on, but he didn’t think it was much fun to ride her anymore.

Scott: Not too comfortable…[laughs].

Edwards: And back when daddy had the…like the ten to twelve cows and the horses and the mules, he raised like six or seven or eight acres of corn, and that still was to feed the animals.

Scott: To feed the animals on the farm.

Edwards: Yes. He cut the corn and put it in shocks, and then they’d bring it to the barn and put the corn in the crib, and haul the fodder out to the cattle. That was the way they fed the cattle.

Scott: So they didn’t pick the corn in the field, as we do now.

Edwards: No, they didn’t have a corn picker. They had a little thing, a corn shucker, that they wore a strap across the back of your hand, and a little flat thing like a nap that hooked down this way, and you tore into that shuck with that, you know. You shucked the corn.

Scott: Shucked it. Well, I’ve never seen one of those. What about a sheller?

Edwards: And then we had a sheller, and it was made on a box, a big box, and it was screwed onto the side, and you put the ear of corn in that and turned a big handle, and that shelled the corn off. Now that was really getting prosperous, when you had a corn sheller.

Scott: I remember ours.

Edwards: And we used to shell corn, when I was a little girl, and take it to mill. Daddy would save out from the barn the best, you know, good ears of corn for meal. And he would bring it in, and I always thought it was so much fun, when we shelled corn. We had a fireplace going, you know, and grandma and grandpa and mom and daddy and me would shell corn. I’d build pig pens out of the cobs, you know, stack them up. They’d like maybe shell the first few rows out of an ear, and then let me have that to shell, and it would take me….

Scott: So it would come off easier.

Edwards: …maybe if I was lucky I’d shell two ears while they shelled a whole, they called it a turn, of corn. We had mill sacks that were real thick, you know, a special bag that we took that to mill in.

Scott: Now where did you take it to mill?

Edwards: Well, over at the end of Regis Road, there was a Mr. Simp Wagers who had a grinder, a mill, and over on Crooked Creek, there was another one. So, it was just, if daddy wanted to see his sister on Crooked Creek, he went that way, and if he just wanted to run to mill, he went that way.

Scott: Did they charge, or did they take part of the meal?

Edwards: Well, now they took a little meal out anyway. They always took a little meal out. I think either way….maybe daddy left a little meal for the pay; maybe that’s what that was for.

Scott: To pay for grinding.

Edwards: Yeah.

Scott: [Tape interruption]. Okay, we were talking about taking corn to the mill, and grinding our own corn meal.

Edwards: Yes, we had a sugar chest that we kept meal when daddy would bring it home. We would pour it into this piece of furniture, you know. The meal would be in one side, and the flour in the other. And when momma started to make bread, then she’d get her rolling pin, and her biscuit board, and things out if she was going to make biscuits. Or if not, she just lifted that up and dipped out the meal. We always had to sift the meal or the flour, either.

Scott: Did you grind your own flour, grow your own wheat?

Edwards: No, we didn’t grind our own flour; we bought flour in 25 pound bags.

Scott: So you didn’t grow wheat at all.

Edwards: Yes, we did grow wheat, and they would, let’s see…that got ripe…we didn’t have a combine come here, I’ve heard momma talk about that in Madison County, but they’d put it in the crib, up here, and it seemed like, you know, just walk on it, or use it, leave it lay there, and then they swept it up. It came out of its little husk. They swept it up, and then on a windy day, daddy would have that up in the wagon, and we’d lay sheets on the ground, and he’d pour it out of a big bucket down to the ground and the wind would blow that chaffe away.

Scott: What did he use the wheat for?

Edwards: He had it ground, and we made graham biscuits, and they were so good—graham flour, and then we had to sift that. It had a lot of stuff besides flour, you know, and of course we just put that, we had a scrap bucket we called a chicken bucket and we’d put everything we didn’t want like that into the chicken bucket. And even dishwater, we saved for the slop bucket, out there. It had a lid on it and was outside. Daddy carried that to the pigs, and then we fed all the scraps to the chickens. We didn’t waste anything.

Scott: So your father had flour, meal, corn, pork, mutton, beef….

Edwards: Flour, meal, pork and mutton, and we didn’t always kill a beef…just maybe every other year, just once in awhile. My mother told me that in Madison County before, when she was a girl, that would have been, like, well say 1900 or 1910, something like that, they had a beef club. Like different neighbors had beef animals, so grandpa would kill his beef this week, and they’d get it dressed. See you couldn’t keep meat a long time. Everybody in that beef club got some meat, you know. And then, when that kinda was gone, why then a neighbor would kill his beef, and then everybody would share in that.

Scott: …share in that. Well, did your father dry beef?

Edwards: No. No, seems what I remember daddy killed it in the winter, and we just kinda…

Scott: Salted it down?

Edwards: No, I just can’t remember except, I tell you what. All I really remember is that he killed it before Christmas, and his brothers and sisters were here and he gave them all some. And then we ate, and it was just kind of gone, you know. Sort of a one-time thing, you know, for like, one time a year, anyway, but not every year.

Scott: What did your parents buy from the grocery, when you were young, do you remember?

Edwards: Oh, salt and crackers, and things that you couldn’t make here at home, and then…

Scott: That was very little, wasn’t it?

Edwards: Well, we always, and like maybe some kind of fruit, if fruit wasn’t in season and hominy. Daddy liked flake hominy, and that was something that you could get in a package in the store, and oatmeal. Stores weren’t full of things like they are now, you know. A lot of times, momma would send a basket of eggs to Rice Station, and she’d write out her grocery list, and put one egg on it so it wouldn’t blow away. I’ll tell you this funny thing happened. Like we’d leave the basket of eggs there, and maybe daddy and I’d get on the bus and go on to town, for something, you know. Then we’d come back and this man that worked in the store would have the groceries in the basket, or in a bag, or basket and bag, whatever. We didn’t try to save you know; we just, anything we wanted we got, but we didn’t want much.

Scott: Just didn’t need very much.

Edwards: Didn’t want much, didn’t need it. And when we got back that time, the grocery bag, the basket, the egg basket was just sitting there empty. The man said, “Well, I couldn’t find a grocery list.” And I started to say, well, momma, you know, tell him how she fixed it, and I said, “Well, momma always lays an egg” [laughing] and there I stopped, and started looking for it, and then we thought how that sounded, and we all just stood there and laughed and laughed [laughter]. But we found it, you know, so we could get the groceries. The corn, they used to just drop it in the garden like we do now, and cover it up, you know, plant corn that way. And then they got a hand jobber, you know. You know what I’m talking about? A jobber planter? And they put the corn in there and then they did this little trick of putting it down and opening it up, and let the corn fall down, and then they took it out.

Scott: It covered it automatically.

Edwards: It covered it automatically. Now that was a real invention, when somebody invented the corn jobber. Ermine said it was in 1926 that we started raising tobacco. That we started, I’m sure there was tobacco, and at that time, you could just put out any, you know. You could have put the whole the farm in tobacco, if you wanted to.

Scott: There was no base.

Edwards: No, there was no base. You just raised tobacco like you raised anything else, just according to the size of your field, or how much you wanted to fool with. And then, we raised, we burned our tobacco beds, piled wood and burned them. Now we gas them. Then, they waited for a rain, and waited for a rain, and just took a wooden peg and made a hole in the ground and set a plant out, and pushed the dirt back around it.

Scott: Hand set.

Edwards: Yes, but you waited for a rain. And then, after that, they invented some kind of a planter, sort of like the corn jobber, that you stick in the ground, and somebody walked by you, and threw a plant in there, and you pulled a little lever and water went down with it. And you watered them out, but you didn’t do that on a rainy day, see, you could do that in dry weather.

Scott: Had to be dry. But still it was hand?

Edwards: It was still hand. And then, tobacco setter came along. We’ve had a tobacco setter, since a long time, and I can’t tell you when.

Scott: It’s a lot quicker now, isn’t it?

Edwards: Oh, well yes. And a neighbor woman and I tried our luck at riding the setter one time, and Ermine said we did real well. You know, we didn’t miss many plants at all, but I hardly, you know, that I did it for fun that time, and I think once I did it because I was needed, I never do that myself. There’s always enough to do it, you know, they don’t need me.

Scott: Well, do neighbors, when you set tobacco now, do neighbors come in and help?

Edwards: Well, Ermine has some brothers, and they help each other. He helps them and they help him.

Scott: They share out the work. It’s a lot easier now, they gas the beds, instead of burning them, and you have the tobacco setters, and tractors. A lot more expensive isn’t it?

Edwards: Ermine said then that you could raise like 600 pound or 700 pound to the acre, and now it’s a lot more. He told me that too. And that it sold from 5 cents a pound to 15 cents a pound in the 1930’s.

Scott: That low?

Edwards: Yes. He told me the seven grades, that they pulled it and they put it in seven different bunches off of one stalk of tobacco. There were flines, and trash, and lugs, bright, light red, no it wasn’t light red, it was long red, and short reds, and tips.

Scott: Do you know what the best grade was?

Edwards: I guess it was the flines. That’s the ragged around the bottom. Do you know?

Scott: Yes.

Edwards: Oh, that is it.

Scott: Those are the best.

Edwards: So I think he was thinking about it straight up the stalk, you know, as he told me. And then, in the late 30’s, now see that was back in 1930, that they could get 600 or 700 pounds off of an acre. In the late 30’s and early 40’s, they’d put 400 or 500 pound of fertilizer to the acre just in the row, where the tobacco was going to be set. And then they got 800 to 1000 pounds. That fertilizer really helped.

Scott: Made that much difference.

Edwards: And in 1951, (Ermine and I married in 1949), so in 1951, daddy and Ermine decided they’d farm together. And they bought their first tractor, and it was a little International. They bought it new and along with that, Ermine said it was about 26 or 28 horsepower. We still have it, and he plows the garden with it.

Scott: Oh, it still works?

Edwards: Yes, it has the little cultivators that fit the rows and do better in the garden that anything else.

Scott: Perfect for gardening.

Edwards: And along with that they got turning plows, and cultivators, and a mowing machine, and disc harrows, and a fertilize spreader, and a cultipacker, they got all those….

Scott: What’s a cultipacker?

Edwards: That’s like a roller to break the clods. They got that tractor and all those tools, new, for $2200.

Scott: You’re kidding.

Edwards: That was in 1951.

Scott: Does he have any, or do you have any idea, how much that would be today?

Edwards: Oh, no, but we got a Massey Ferguson bigger tractor for $9000 a few years back, so you know….four years ago maybe.

Scott: Quite a rise in prices.

Edwards: And then Ermine got a used tractor, I don’t know what he paid for that either, but it’s kind of a middle-size tractor. We have that little one that he plows the garden with, the baby one, that he can use the cultivators on best, and then the big tractor that’ll blow the silage into the silo, and then he’s got a middle one that he uses. It has…what does he call it…. tricycle front wheels, close together, you know?

Scott: Yes, it’s good for cultivation, big cultivation.

Edwards: Yes, so, he’s got certain types jobs he does with the different sizes.

Scott: With each one.

Edwards: It was in the middle 1950’s they hired a hay baler and I think I told you 1976, and I don’t know where I got that. I don’t know what in the world I was thinking about. That’s when the silo was built, in 1976. But it was in the middle 1950’s, that they hired their hay baled a couple of years, and they liked that, and in 1970, they bought a hay baler. Must have hired it more than two years, and a rake and they got tractor wagons.

Scott: To haul the hay.

Edwards: Yes, and now the tobacco is limited, like, we can raise 4500 pound, is about our base.

Scott: That’s a lot of tobacco.

Edwards: Well, and instead of stripping it into all those grades, I think Ermine divided it into two grades last year, and they baled it. That baling takes about a third off the time of what hand tying used to be.

Scott: What about the strippers? Did you hear, I guess a couple of years ago…I thought that….

Edwards: The what?

Scott: The strippers, where we hand stripped it before, and last year or year before I heard them advertising the automatic stripper.

Edwards: I’ve seen that on television, but I don’t know a thing about it. I don’t know a thing about them.

Scott: Oh, I thought that was the greatest invention that has ever been.

Edwards: Have you ever seen one work?

Scott: No, no I just heard it.

Edwards: [Laughs] I bet that costs a lot.

Scott: That was the job I hated worst, I think was standing there.

Edwards: Now last year, for the first time ever, I helped, well, one time at Thanksgiving vacation from school, I helped them strip tobacco, thought I had a good time. And last year, I helped them a lot, you know if I didn’t have to do something else. I helped strip…but it was easy, and this woman across the road helped us. She’s my husband’s first cousin, and she has helped him a lot of years. But last year, she and I and Ermine, all stripped, and it didn’t take us long, like maybe three weeks or something like that. And it wasn’t too cold, and we just had a good time.

Scott: Nice when it was good room for it, but I have stripped when the ground was frozen…that’s hard work.

Edwards: Yes. And then, Ermine told me that now they put on the ground, where he raises this tobacco, 2000-3000 pounds of fertilizer, just over the whole thing. Spread it with the spreader, not in the rows, but just over the whole ground. That raises this 4500 or 5000 pounds of tobacco.

Scott: How much property, how much land, an acre?

Edwards: No, it’s like, it’s a little less, like 2.5 acres.

Scott: …will raise 4500 pounds?

Edwards: Yes, or 5000. It varies, like this year, maybe it’s 4700, but it’s always between 4500 and 5000.

Scott: How much did tobacco bring last year per pound, average?

Edwards: Seems like $1.89 was our average. Ermine always gets about as good as anybody’s. You know, he tries to fix it to look nice, and….

Scott: So tobacco, for you, really pays for itself.

Edwards: Oh yeah, and it’s not all that much work to it either. You know, now, I think the hardest job about the tobacco is getting it hung into the barn. Last year there was crew came through here and they were housing tobacco. Ermine gave them, I don’t know if it was $500 or $600, and they just went out there and cut it and put it in the barn.

Scott: All of it, for one price?

Edwards: All of it. It took…they just took it by the job. And this fellow who was the head of the crew, see he took that money and paid the hands that he brought with him.

Scott: Oh well, that’s great.

Edwards: It took them about three days, and that was so good, you know, just to have that done.

Scott: And it would have taken your husband and say his brothers that help him…

Edwards: Oh, see they would have had to work through ours, and his brothers, and his other brothers, and they would have been in that for weeks, you know, I mean two or three weeks.

Scott: Yes, just getting it cut and hung, because it’s such a hard job.

Edwards: That is, and it’s so hot, you know. They do that in, I don’t know, is it first of September?

Scott: Yes, last of August, first of September, the hottest time of the year.

Edwards: Yes, that’s the hottest.

Scott: Well, that’s great.

Edwards: And then, Ermon’s getting older and he doesn’t, well, he, you know, he can climb in the barn, but I always worry, you know, when he’s climbing the barn. Now, it was in 1976 that we built a silo, and Ermon began to raise more like, from about 12 acres of corn, and they had to chop the silage. See that takes away no more gathering corn, no more cutting, and shocking, and hauling, and no fodder, and it all just goes into the silo. And then, it has a motor on it that they run the silage down through a big trough, and he can feed about 40 cows now. We don’t milk a cow.

Scott: So the time has been cut, oh,….

Edwards: Well, it takes about two weeks to get that much corn in. They don’t get to work every day, maybe, for two weeks….

Scott: But cutting fodder would take a lot longer….

Edwards: Oh yes, it’s just…you know, hauling fodder, and fooling with it in the field, and picking. For a long time, we picked corn, but now we don’t do that. The corn, the cobs, the fodder, and the whole stock of corn is just chopped up fine, and blown up into that silo.

Scott: And used for feed.

Edwards: Yes, and the cattle eat it better.

Scott: And you said you didn’t have any milk cows, at all now?

Edwards: No, no. The cows have calves, and the little calves just stay with their mothers out in the fields, and run loose, and you don’t fool with them. And then they sell them, like once a year. Ermine usually don’t sell the little calves that are born this year. They’ll sell next year.

Scott: Are these beef cattle? Or what kind of cow?

Edwards: Yes, beef cows.

Scott: Angus?

Edwards: Yes, what he has right now are Angus. He tried that with Shorthorn for a long time

And then he changed to Angus, I don’t….

Scott: Angus must be easier to raise here, easier to care for.

Edwards: And Ermon’s cattle are all pets, you know. If he wants to take them to another pasture, he doesn’t drive them toward that pasture, he just goes himself, and they all follow him.

Scott: Leads them.

Edwards: Yes. And anytime he wants them to the barn, well he can just go up there in his truck, and wait, and they come, you know.

Scott: Dad says you can ( ), you know.

Edwards: Yeah, and they’re, they’re just….

Scott: How many head do you have?

Edwards: Thirty-seven, I believe right now.

Scott: About how many do you sell off, each year?

Edwards: Well, let’s see…about seventeen or eighteen, I think, you know.

Scott: So that’s a good cash crop.

Edwards: Yeah, the tobacco and the cows keep us going, and I found out as we get older, we want less and need less, and all that. You know I saw that with my mother, when she was ninety-six, that in the nursing home, she, she…there was just…you had to think hard to think what to get her for Christmas even, or birthdays, or….

Scott: I guess there’s nothing, there’s nothing you need.

Edwards: No, that’s right.

Scott: I can’t buy my parents anything they need.

Edwards: You get so you don’t need as much, you don’t want as much.

Scott: Well, children being away from home, I think means a lot too.

Edwards: Right.

Scott: You don’t have to buy all the stuff we buy for them, that’s gotta make a difference; I keep hoping I’m going to be rich when mine leave home [laughing].

Edwards: Well, I’ve got news. It’s hard to get rich, I think [laughing]. We don’t have any chickens anymore.

Scott: Oh, you don’t have chickens….

Edwards: And you know, there’s not much outside now. I mean there’s no morning chores for me to do, like go to the hen house, and go carry water from the spring, or all of that. It’s taken care of now. And….

Scott: It’s a way of life that’s, that’s…..

Edwards: It’s a way of life that used to be, just like we don’t carry water anymore. We’ve got it pumped up, and we don’t feed chickens anymore. If we want a chicken—we don’t really love to eat chicken. We don’t like chicken that much. Fried chicken doesn’t sound much to me. And if I’m going to have company, and I want a fried chicken, I just go to the store and get one. But see they didn’t have that kind in the stores a long time ago. You didn’t go buy a chicken.

Scott: You didn’t buy fresh meats, did you?

Edwards: No, and there was no…now a long time ago, let’s see, how long, when I was a girl…say in the forties, we had a big old icebox out on the porch. And we’d go to town, now we had a car—see in ’37—along then we started this. We got our car, and then we realized we could bring ice home in it, and so we got an ice box, and we had a, it was made out of something like tarpoline, and it was a cup-like square of rectangular thing, that didn’t leak, and we kept that in the back of the car, and we’d go to the ice plant, and get 100 pound of ice, and we’d bring that home, and it would just fit up into the freezer, you know. And that would last, like four or five days. And then we’d go back and get some more.

Scott: So you could keep the milk and butter.

Edwards: Then there was an ice truck got to passing here, and we just had a little sign we’d stick out there on the side of the road by the mailbox, that, you know if we just needed 50 pounds, we’d put the 50 out, and he’d stop and bring in 50 pounds.

Scott: So you could keep the milk and the butter in the icebox. Now, what did you do with it before?

Edwards: Well, our water, I can take you down there and show you our spring, if you’d like to see. The spring itself is two streams of water running out of the hill, into a, like a great big tile…it’s four, no it’s not that…not quite three feet across diameter, and that’s full all the time. Plenty of water for us to use the washing machine, and take baths, and everything we needed water. And then it has an over, it spills over that, all the time, into, in the concrete is a rectangular thing they made, and that was our milk box, and we set the milk down into that. And when we got lunch almost ready, why momma’d say, “Eva Dean, run get the milk.” And I’d go down there and bring the milk to the house, and it was cool. You know, it wasn’t ice cold, but it was good and cool.

Scott: It would keep.

Edwards: Oh yeah, it kept. And then I took it back after lunch, for supper, you know.

Scott: Now, when did you get electricity? Do you remember?

Edwards: It was about 1956, electricity came; they came through setting the poles.

Scott: Did that make a big difference?

Edwards: Oh, it made a lot of difference, you know. Then we got the electric churn—we’d had a little churn that you turn a handle and hold it in your lap, to make butter. That was the first thing that I bought momma—an electric churn. And then, well, the tools got to be electric, you know, like saws, instead of a crosscut saw that two men pulled to cut a piece of wood, it got to be a chainsaw, and one man could do more than two men could have done, you know easily.

Scott: Oh, easily, yes.

Edwards: And we burn wood now.

Scott: We do too.

Edwards: And then the electric cooking stove, and momma got an electric cook stove right away.

Scott: Was that the first appliance your mother got, do you remember?

Edwards: I just don’t know. Let’s see, no, I think somebody gave us an electric clock, the first Christmas after that. And I bought an electric sewing machine, and momma and daddy had these kitchen cabinets (that’s not the same stove she had) but an electric stove and this sink put in at the same time, and under the sink is a fifteen-gallon hot water heater.

Scott: Oh.

Edwards: Now for the washer and dryer that we had put in, not many years ago, there’s another hot water heater over there.

Scott: For that.

Edwards: And then, among the first things we got was a refrigerator.

Scott: I think that was probably our first.

Edwards: Yes, and we had, as for washing the clothes, when I was a tiny little girl, the first I can remember, we had a, it was called Terrick’s Perfect Washer, and there was a little thing that came with the advertisement, that said, “Man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work was never done, until Terrick’s Perfect Washer came to her kin, and now she gets through before the men.”

Scott: Oh, that’s perfect!

Edwards: And, this was, it had legs and it was longer than it was wide thing, and had like a washboard, in a circular tub like this. And you’d let this thing back that had another washboard on it that fitted this, and you put your clothes in there. We washed in the springhouse, because it was out there with the water, and we heated water in a wash kettle. And you put your clothes in there, and you’d stand back there and you’d do this—you’d go back and forth and it rubbed, and you counted, you know. Momma’d say, now these aren’t very dirty, just rub them about 50 times, so I’d stand there and work this thing, you know. And, well that’s daddy’s old work clothes, they’re pretty dirty, and so I’d do it a hundred times maybe, you know. And then it had a wringer, screwed on it, with a handle to turn and you would put them out into a tub of water, and that was the rinsing, and then you can run them back through the same wringer, and go hang them on the clotheslines. Now that was our first washing that I remember. I’m sure before that there had been washboards here, and done it in a tub and washboard.

Scott: That was so much simpler.

Edwards: But the next thing we got was a gasoline washing machine that was like, it was a Maytag, and instead of electric, because we didn’t have electric it was gasoline, and you pulled it to start it like a lawn mower. And it popped you know, it just set there and popped, and made a lot of noise, but it washed just like any washing machine.

Scott: It had the….

Edwards: Yes, it had a gyrator in the middle that went back and forth. And it had a wringer on it too, and then after electricity came, we got a square Maytag washing machine that was much like the gasoline,

Scott: Except electric.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: So it made a big difference in the women’s time.

Edwards: Here we were, like people lived, you know, and you didn’t go to Richmond and hunt appliances, and things, but a boy came through the community selling refrigerators. Momma’s first one was a Kelvinator. He put the order in through this boy that came back, and he, kinda liked us, you know, and came…when he came maybe to bring the refrigerator, he brought some little things with him and made electric lamps out of two of our kerosene lamps.

Scott: Oh, you still have those?

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Beautiful.

Edwards: Yes, they’re, they’re pretty. And one… [tape interruption].

Scott: Electricity made a lot of difference in the time the women had. But now, you worked outside the home, is that right? Outside the farm?

Edwards: I taught school thirty-three years.

Scott: Did you teach in Estill?

Edwards: Yes, all of it was in Estill. I taught like, I started…I taught in a one-room school and rode a horse, and our dog went with me at Hoy’s Fork. And I was there about two months, and they moved me to our well, our…. Dimple Heather taught a demonstration school, and I went there to help her. You know, I mean I didn’t do things for people to see, I was just her assistant. And she taught at Lower Bend, and I had to stay in town then. When I was in high school I had to stay in town, because the roads were muddy, and I lived with….

Scott: So you boarded?

Edwards: I boarded with my cousin, Paul Park. Like I’d go Monday mornings, daddy’d take me in the cart, I was talking about, over to the road, Richmond Road, and caught the bus. Went into town and I went to Cherry Street, where they lived and stayed with them until Friday afternoon. I’d come back on the bus and daddy would meet me and bring me home. I’d be so homesick. All through high school, I was so homesick. And momma always said that she’d remember that I said, on Wednesday I’d think day before yesterday I left home, and day after tomorrow, I’m going back [laughs].

Scott: So you just planned it one day at a time, really, to get back home.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: You retired?

Edwards: Yes, in ’77, I retired.

Scott: But you raise a garden….

Edwards: And then I, well, I was going to tell you, I taught out here at our country school a lot of years—just a lot.

Scott: Was it a one room or two-room school?

Edwards: It was a two-room school. And I taught the first three grades, and then I’ve taught upper grades. And I’ve just really had a good time with these kids that I knew. Now that’s what we were talking about that, a long time ago, I knew everybody in this community, and who their grandparents were and what their baby…little new baby’s name was, and everything, you know. But now, I don’t know my neighbors that well, cause it took away the community life.

Scott: The community life did center around those small schools—a lot of entertainment or….

Edwards: We had little programs on Friday afternoon, and invited the parents in, and they’d come, if it was just nothing but little things they’d learned in school that week, or poems they’d say, or anything was entertainment you know. And then we had a pie supper in the fall to make money to have to spend on things we needed at school. And we had Thanksgiving suppers; everybody’d bring something and come in for Thanksgiving supper. You know, we had big crowds at those.

Scott: I started to say, parent participation was a lot better then than it is now, in schools.

Edwards: Yes, and then we had Christmas programs, you know. Anything like that, parents were good to come in, and anytime somebody misbehaved, all I had to do was just go take them home, and talk to momma. And that fixed it; they didn’t do it anymore, you know.

Scott: Were parents more interested then than now?

Edwards: Yes, well I don’t know how it is now, anyway. And then I worked at the high school for sixteen years as the guidance counselor, and problems got bigger and bigger every year. I knew, I was just so anxious to retire, and when I was 52, I had my 30 years in, and they were talking about making this law that you could retire. And I went to the library and looked at the newspaper every morning, but they didn’t do it. And I taught three more years to wait until I could get 55 to retire. And the very next year, they changed the law so you could retire at the end of 30 years.

Scott: Well, you all have had a good life on the farm, obviously.

Edwards: Yes, and I’ve always said, you know, when I was a little girl, and I just followed daddy, and I rode the horse, and I just thought well…and I’d go to my cousins over at Lexington, and we’d go to movies, and we’d roller skate, why I couldn’t do that, but I’d try, you know. And, I thought, my goodness, I must be the most common place one that ever was, here, you know, everybody does things by me. And now I think, I’ve really had the best time.

Scott: Right, right. But it takes you a few years to look back on it like that, doesn’t it? It did me. Advantages definitely outweigh disadvantages, growing up on a farm.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Do you think, well I’m sure that your working has made a big difference in lifestyle.

Edwards: Well…

Scott: Had you not worked, would it have been hard to make a living?

Edwards: Well, I never really…I don’t know. I didn’t aim…when our first little boy was born, I never meant to go to school another day of my life. I was—had a baby and I was going to stay home with him and take care of him. And our superintendent came out and stood in the back yard and talked to Ermon a little while, and came on in, and he said, “Eva Dean, I want you to plan on working this fall.” He said, “We’re going to open a supervisor’s job, and I want you to do that—I just want you there.” And I said, “But I’ve got a baby; I’m not planning to work any more.” He said, “Well, now, you know you can find a babysitter.” And I went to see an old lady that I thought might just come and live with us. Well, that would have been problems, but I didn’t know that, you know. But she began to tell me how she just coughed all the time, and she’d been sick, and I thought I wouldn’t want her coughing on my baby all the time. And Ermon’s mother said, “Well, Eva Dean, I’d keep him, if you’d think I could.” And so Ermon’s mother kept Dwight. And I went on back and did that supervisor job for three years, and wore my car out, and I got to…that’s when schools were three miles apart, all over the county, and I went to all of them. And the new teachers I stayed with everyday for a week, and I’d get there at 8 o’clock when they did, and I’d get home after they got off at 4 o’clock, you know.

Scott: You had long hours.

Edwards: I did, but you see, I didn’t have to do that. If I’d been smart like people are now, I’d got there at 10 o’clock and left at 2, or something. I didn’t have to really beat myself out, but I thought I did; I wanted to do a good job. And I reckon I did. And just, it just too much, you know. And then when Tommy was born then, I came back and taught a year out here. Oh, I stayed home the first year, with him, then I taught a year out here. And then went on back to town to work, like I…seems like it’s been enough variety, you know, that I really didn’t get tired of teaching.

Scott: And evidently liked teaching.

Edwards: I did, I had a good time, and I’m glad I did it, but I’m glad it’s done, and I don’t want to do it again.

Scott: And over [laughing].

Edwards: Somebody asked me about substituting, and I said, no if I’m going to teach, I’ll just teach. I don’t want to substitute. I’ve never done that a day.

Scott: But the lifestyle on the farm, has helped.

Edwards: Well, of course, Ermon and daddy farmed, and I was gone to school, and Ermon’s momma kept Dwight. When I got home, I had to get supper, and I was tired, and, you know, it was a hassle. It really was a hassle. And my momma took care of our garden stuff and canned a lot of things for me, and….

Scott: So that helped a lot.

Edwards: Oh yeah, if I hadn’t been right here with my family, and everybody helping, I couldn’t have done it. And I went back to Eastern, along through that, and some night classes, and one summer school, and university one summer, and I got my masters’ in ’61. And I said then, I ought to tear that in three pieces, and give momma and Ermon’s momma…

Scott: And the children.

Edwards: Yeah, four pieces and five…Ermon too. But you know, I stayed busy. I really worked.

Scott: Well the farm life is such a good life. But do you think young people will be able to go out and buy a farm and make a living, and make the payments; is that possible?

Edwards: I don’t know. I don’t know. And times are different, the economy is different, and it’s seems like that every older generation thinks that the younger generation has gone to the dogs, you know. I’ve heard that from great-grandpa to grandpa to daddy to me. Now here I am, here I’m the older one, and I’m thinking that young people now don’t know how to do anything.

Scott: They’ve never had to.

Edwards: I don’t think girls, a lot of girls, don’t know how to keep house. I’m sure there are some. And they don’t need to learn how to sew, because they can just buy something already made, and it’s quicker and easier, and fits and pretty. And they don’t need to know how to can and stuff like that, because they can go to the store and grab it. Eat pizza, and junk food. I really think it’s a trend all over, not just here.

Scott: Oh, I think it’s universal.

Edwards: Of course I don’t all over, because I don’t leave home much. But, you know, I just see this happening.

Scott: The younger generation is not going to come back and farm.

Edwards: And I’ll tell you when I was little, me and the children around me, made our recreation. You know, we didn’t have to have a toy to have a good time. We got a plow line and jumped a rope and got our exercise, or we just thought up something to do, and did it, and had a good, you know. But now, children, have got to have a toy to have a good time; they don’t know what to do.

Scott: Older children have to have someplace to go.

Edwards: Well, of course, cars. I didn’t have anyway to go except ride that horse, and I did that for fun. But now, everybody in the family has a car, you know, and they’re just all going all directions, and doing whatever they want to.

Scott: What’s that done to the family? The family unit do you think?

Edwards: Well, I’ve seen people, like a man and a woman both work, and they’re on different shifts, and they hardly ever see each other, and the children, if they go to school, they hardly ever see either one of them. And it seems like it’s just a breakdown as far as family.

Scott: Is there an end to it? The economy is so bad you feel like two people have to work.

Edwards: Well, we wonder what life will be like, you know, when our grandchildren get—we have three grandchildren—and we wonder twenty years from now, what will life be like for them, you know. I don’t know.

Scott: But they’re not going to come back on the farm, I don’t think—or not your grandchildren in particular, but that generation. I wonder.

Edwards: But yet, farmers feed the world.

Scott: Right.

Edwards: And then are we going to starvation next, or what?

Scott: I think we’re going to have to get to the rock bottom, and pull ourselves back up maybe, and realize…..

Edwards: But now, there is hard work on a farm. You know, people will get out here and jog around Eastern’s campus and run miles, but if they were in a hay field, they couldn’t do that.

Scott: They wouldn’t last two days, two hours.

Edwards: No, they couldn’t do it.

Scott: That’s exactly right.

Edwards: And all this energy that they’re chasing around doing, they just, work is out of the question. They just don’t seem to want to do that.

Scott: Manual labor—those people have never done manual labor.

Edwards: No, and yet they have the energy to do it, if they were so inclined, or in a place where they needed to. Maybe they would, if they were in a place where they were needed.

Scott: Well, if I went out now and bought a farm, and had to buy the equipment, and of course, pay payments to the bank for the farm, could I make a living?

Edwards: Land is high right now. You’d have to have some buildings; you’d have to have your machinery, and it’s high. Everything is just too high to reach, now, the way—right now. And I just don’t know. There was a farm sold by us, the old Uncle Jordan Dunaway Farm, it’s like over on this old railroad—there’s no tracks there anymore, it’s a road now. And, it’s off of that, back in a place nobody ever sees; it’s just you’re there, you get there, you’re there, and you come back out the same way you went in. And there was 161 acres sold, just not long ago for $73,000.

Scott: That’s a fantastic price.

Edwards: That’s how land sells right around us, right us, you know.

Scott: But that was with…

Edwards: And Ermon says with this old farm, you know, like, we could, at that rate, we have 250 acres, something like that. It would be like $250,000 maybe, with the improvements that are here, and with the land all clear. This farm is about one-third woods.

Scott: You cut your own wood then; you said you heated with wood.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: You cut your own wood off the farm?

Edwards: Yes, Ermon takes the chain saw right over there. Well, we did have gas furnaces. Mom and daddy put in a gas furnace, and we got a new one after we came here in 1968. Daddy died and we moved up here with mom. And we had gas, down in the house where we are. And it just got so high, it was like $600 the last year we used gas, and the thing almost blew up. The men came to fix it, and unhooked it, and said it’s not safe, and so, we had a wood-burning stove, in this flue right here, and we used that right after we took momma to the nursing home. In two weeks the furnace went bad. Just worked out perfect, that way. And Ermon and I just about practically lived in the kitchen that winter, you know. Then we torn that flue down—you talk about a mess—have you ever torn a flue down?

Scott: Yes, oh yes.

Edwards: And then put that one up, and it’s safe now, and we have a fireplace insert in that room, in the living room, and a wood burning stove in here. And we’re warming than we were with the furnace.

Scott: Oh, much warmer.

Edwards: Because you could come in cold, and stand over one of these little vents—just like that one—and you just never did really get good and warm. You just kind of weren’t so cold. But we didn’t have bad colds.

Scott: With the, you mean with the gas furnace?

Edwards: With the furnace, with the furnace, and kind of shivering around and wearing our sweaters in the house, and so forth, we just never did get colds.

Scott: Kind of built up an immunity to it maybe.

Edwards: Maybe.

Scott: Well, I know we have a wood insert in the fireplace, and I don’t know how we lived without it. I think we froze to death for years.

Edwards: No, it has a fan on it that spreads the heat out and it’s warmer upstairs than it is in the living room.

Scott: So it heats, it heats well.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Well, you have your own wood. If you had to buy it, it would be…quite expensive.

Edwards: Well, yes, right. We just go out and cut some wood when we need it.

Scott: That’s the great part of farm life. One more thing I wanted to ask you about the crops. You said your husband is growing peppers now.

Edwards: That’s the second year we’ve tried that. Last year we had an acre of peppers. This is Campbell, some initials, Campbell Company, it’s like Campbell’s Soup Company, in Tennessee, or whenever they’re…Georgia, Georgia. And they have a weight station and a place to sell your peppers at Beattyville.

Scott: Oh, you have to take them to Beattyville?

Edwards: Yes, and you go there to get your plants. They furnish the plants. And my job, when they set peppers, and me…my sister-in-law and I sorted the little ones that were too small to set, and threw out, and put the good plants that they could set, in a place so that the could just take them and keep setting. They set them with the tobacco setter.

Scott: That’s what I wanted to know—how did they set them.

Edwards: And then, I can’t remember that last year Ermon chopped peppers like he’s doing now, because they were in a different field, and the weeds just didn’t seem to grow up so much, but this year, he put them in a more sandy place, and the weeds—maybe all this rain….

Scott: Probably, especially the last two weeks. But, is there a base on them?

Edwards: You get an acre.

Scott: So there is a base—you can’t just raise as much as you want.

Edwards: No, they furnish plants for an acre, and you just set out an acre, and that’s it. And last year, we took…I don’t know how many, like pickup trucks loads that will round up, you know. We took about five loads in the pickup truck, and then the big truck holds, I don’t know…but lots more, a lot more than two pickup, more like three pickup loads maybe, and he took a big load like that. I have a picture of it. He parked it out here in the shade overnight, and took it the next day. And right in the middle of all of that, I fell on the back steps out here, and broke my foot. So, I had a cast, and one of the girls that had been helping pick peppers wrote on my cast, “Anything to keep from picking peppers.” [laughing].

Scott: That’s pretty good!

Edwards: But I kind of liked to do that.

Scott: Is there good money in peppers [interruption]. Talking about peppers, is there good money in them?

Edwards: We just cleared about a thousand dollars on them last year.

Scott: On an acre.

Edwards: Yes.

Scott: Was that counting your labor, did you have to hire pickers?

Edwards: We didn’t hire much labor. Ermon’s brother had some, and they helped us and we helped them.

Scott: So again, a share-type of labor.

Edwards: Yes. They told me last year that you can freeze pepper, you know stuff peppers and freeze them. Well now one of our neighbors did some of that, but you can freeze just the peppers, and then put your fresh stuffing in, when you thaw them, and I like them better.

Scott: Are they good, frozen whole like that?

Edwards: Yes, they’re real good.

Scott: I know the chopped ones, I’ve used, but I’ve never frozen whole ones. You have to pick them when they’re a certain size.

Edwards: They’re supposed, for this company, you’re supposed to pick them when they start to turn red. You know, maybe you pick through the patch, and if there are small ones or they’re green, or, you know, you just kind of leave them until next time. We picked over our patch about three times last year.

Scott: So they used them for ( ).

Edwards: Yes, after it frosts, they won’t buy anymore.

Scott: Oh they won’t.

Edwards: If, you know, you have pepper at home, and you think you’re going to pick again, and if it frosts on them, they can’t use them.

Scott: They won’t buy anymore, but now they furnish the plants.

Edwards: Right.

Scott: And you furnish the labor, and the fertilizer, and….

Edwards: But this year, after Ermon had to go over there and chop the weeds out, he said, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore or not.” [laughing]. You know, he’s letting some of his other work go, while he’s doing that. That is one job he didn’t figure on.

Scott: Well, there’s not much mechanization in that job either, is there?

Edwards: No.

Scott: No pickers yet.

Edwards: No, that’s right.

Scott: Well, tell him it’s better than cucumbers, at any rate…it’s got to be better than cucumbers.

Edwards: Well, our son Dwight, the oldest one, and his little cousin Jimmy, they had that same sort of thing with the cucumbers, one time. So they raised an acre of cucumbers and they’re hard to seed. And they couldn’t hardly pick them. I’m sure they just got half of them, and they went over there to plant them, and they were just kids, you know, fourteen or fifteen years old. They got tired of planting cucumber seed, so they decided they’d just bury the rest of them. And they didn’t know that they’d come up and just be so thick, that anybody’d ever know [laughing].

Scott: You have to be very careful with those seeds.

Edwards: With what you bury.

Scott: Well, did they make any money on theirs?

Edwards: I think so, we just took them to South Irvine. You know there was a grading thing, hey went through there, that let the big ones roll out, and then the next size and the next.

Scott: But it wouldn’t be worth growing them now. It would not…the labor is too much.

Edwards: Well, I’m sure we wouldn’t try it. I don’t know. Some people might still grow them. I guess somebody does.

Scott: Somebody must, but it wouldn’t be worth it to grow an acre of cucumbers.

Edwards: No, I don’t think so. I don’ think I want to help hunt them.

Scott: Well, your son, you inherited the farm. Your sons will inherit.

Edwards: Well, yes.

Scott: And like you said, one may come back…and farm.

Edwards: Well, he’s doing drafting. Now the other one is a minister, and he’s going to Clear Creek Baptist Assembly, or School, in Pineville. And he has one more year, to do—his fourth year. And then, if he’s pastor of a church, he’ll just do that. And settle down someplace, or it he’s not a pastor by that time, he’ll go on to the seminary. And you know, there’s not much future, maybe someday he’d like to retire, and be here when he’s old. But he’s not going to farm.

Scott: Not going to want to involved on the farm.

Edwards: He’s not going to have time to farm. And Dwight is doing drafting, and Dwight has always liked the farm, so you know, it just depends.

Scott: He may come back and….

Edwards: We just have to wait and see what happens, as the time passes.

Scott: We were talking about young people not realizing what work is. What’s going to happen to all the small farms, to family-owned farms, the next generation?

Edwards: You know, I lot of farms are just divided up. Ermon says if we were going to sell this farm, see it goes from over this next hill out here, on this road, going that way, back around this way and out to the first brick house on the Regis Road. And that’s a lot of road frontage, you see. We’d sell lots for houses and make more than we would to sell the whole farm, you know.

Scott: Oh yes, triple probably.

Edwards: Yes. But Ermon says if you sell any off, then you’re selling your pastures in case Dwight ever wants to come back. So we’re just holding on, you know.

Scott: And, it seems like with you and your husband, it’s kind of a love for the land too. You really don’t want to get rid of one lot.

Edwards: Well, you know, we owe across the road there, where the tobacco patch is, and out this way, not very far, just to the top of the hill, just right out there. But all down in that left side of the road is just woods. Now daddy used to have cow pasture down in there, in fact, he raised corn down in there a year or two, but you have to go a half-mile before you come to the open places, you know, and now it’s grown up. It doesn’t even have a good fence around it. So that we, we don’t use it for anything.

Scott: So that, you wouldn’t feel bad about selling?

Edwards: I’d sell that in a minute, but Ermon don’t want to sell a tobacco barn, and the tobacco patch, and that little hayfield right there at the front of the road, you know, and he doesn’t want to sell anything along that roadway.

Scott: Anything he that he can see.

Edwards: But way over in there, we can sell that back side of that.

Scott: How many acres are back there?

Edwards: Seems like he told somebody around 30 or 35 or something like that. And Ermon says nobody would want it but a hippie, and then they wouldn’t be good neighbors, maybe. They’d come right up to the top of that little hill, and just steal us.

Scott: Steal you blind.

Edwards: I’m not, I don’t…. I’m saying things here I shouldn’t. I don’t know that all hippies steal, or anything like that now.

Scott: But it could be undesirable people, maybe.

Edwards: Well, yes. You know, everybody’s somebody. We don’t mean that there’s people we don’t get along with, but Ermon just says, in case somebody—it could be some real nice somebody, that we think is—but they wouldn’t be.

Scott: Right, and it’s such a good place for illegal activities, if you’re back off the road.

Edwards: Maybe, you know we might just start something there that we just wished we hadn’t.

Scott: Wouldn’t be worth it.

Edwards: No.

Scott: Sounds like a nice little farm for someone.

Edwards: Yes, it would maybe. There used to be an old house, right straight on over the hill, past the tobacco patch, out there, down in those, down the hill in the woods and out a little point, there’s an old chimney pile of rocks there now. Wash Woodsten lived there and helped great grandpa in the tan yard.

Scott: And it’s still there?

Edwards: I think his name is Woodsen.

Scott: Woodsen, W- O- O- D- S- E- N?

Edwards: Yes, Washington Woodsen. He’s buried over here in the cemetery—he and his wife, and a brother.

Scott: Well, can you think of anything else you’d like to add, a summation?

Edwards: I feel like I’ve told you everything I’ve ever thought about in my life [laughing].

Scott: It’s been great.

Edwards: No, only that I just wouldn’t want to live any place else. I’m just happy as I can be right here, and I like it just like it is, and I mean, there’s things to the house I’d like to do.

Scott: But there would always be things….

Edwards: Maybe. I’d like to glass in this screened-in big back porch, that’s on this side, and….

Scott: But then you’d find something else you wanted to do.

Edwards: Surely. And we do something every once in awhile, just little things, but there’s no great big things.

Scott: If you had your time to go over, if you were young, and your husband just married, would you pick staying on the farm again?

Edwards: Yes, I would. Ermon asked me one day, “How would you like to be, (I don’t know who’d been around here that day, just somebody, some young person)…he said, “How would you like to be sixteen, and live all your life over again?” And I said, “Do all that again?” I wouldn’t, and I’m glad I’m this far, you know. I’m glad I lived when I did, and things were like they were. And then it’s been good, you know.

Scott: You wouldn’t want to change your life.

Edwards: I don’t mean when I say life’s been good, that we haven’t had any troubles, you know. There’s been troubles. My mother and daddy had a baby that died at birth, and then there was me, and I had a little sister, who died, when she was seven months old. And you know, there’s been sickness, and things happened, like well, the cattle got the bang, that disease, you know, and…

Scott: Regular farm life troubles.

Edwards: Regular farm, somebody get hurt once in awhile. There’s hazards to farm life, you know.

Scott: But it’s still a good life, and you wouldn’t change it.

Edwards: I guess anything else you were doing, there’d be some things like that too, you know.

Scott: But you wouldn’t change it.

Edwards: No, I don’t want to move any place else, or you know. I’m really maybe a little too satisfied at home, because I just hate to go to town even.

Scott: I would too if I lived on this farm.

Edwards: I just like it where I am, and I’m happy. This girl who called me just now, she and I are doing the marriage records for Estill County.

Scott: Oh you are?

Edwards: And we have our, the manuscript part finished, and we’re working on the index. We have it about…manuscript is 729 pages and the index will make it like 800 pages in all.

Scott: So you really haven’t retired, you do keep busy?

Edwards: We’re doing that, and then right now, and hopefully in two weeks we’ll have it finished and out, our church history. The church where we go is Thomas Baptist Church, a mile out the road.

Scott: Is that the same church you’ve always gone to?

Edwards: Yes. And….

END OF TAPE

©Kentucky Oral History Commission Kentucky Historical Society

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