The Feedsack Dress

Milking the cows in the 1940s

Cows dictated almost all Missouri farm families’ schedule in the 1940s. You couldn’t go anywhere until finishing the morning milking and you had to be back in time for the evening milking.

Before electricity came to our farm, we usually milked eight or nine Jerseys and Guernsey by hand. My parents sat on stools and squirted the milk into a bucket. They finished the morning milking before breakfast, and before dawn much of the year. Kerosene lanterns hung provided the light. You had to be careful because the loft above the cows contained hay, and any spark could set the whole barn on fire.

My sisters and I helped only with the evening milking, doing the most in the summer when my father worked late in the fields. We drove the cows from the pasture to our red barn, put ground grain in the wood box in front of each cow’s stanchion (boards that closed on her neck and kept her in place), pumped water from a well into a tank, and occasionally helped clean out the manure trench.

Electricity let us double and then triple the size of the herd because the milking units, which attached to all four teats at once, increased the speed and ease of milking. My jobs didn’t change much, except that we didn’t have room to put all the cows in the barn to milk at once. Most were eager for their turn, both to have their bulging udders emptied and to get their feed. Some of them knew their names. One of us would open the barn door and holler the name of the next cow and she would hurry in and to her place.

Naming thirty cows gets to be a challenge. If my father bought a cow from a farmer, he named it after the farmer’s wife. If a heifer calf was born to one of our cows, she might get her own name or be named after her mother. At one time we had Spot, Spot 1, Spot 2, Spot 3, Spot 4, Spot 5, and Spot 6. They all bore similar markings, and they were all more nervous than our other cows. A couple of them (4 and 5?) were hard to tell apart. 

Most dairy cows, particularly Jerseys, appear serene, and they gaze at you with beautiful brown eyes. Nice as they are, the necessity of giving them priority twice a day year after year is enough to drive you off the farm.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Planting potatoes on Good Friday

I didn’t plant any potatoes today, but in the 1940s my parents talked about planting the crucial staple on Good Friday. I remember them actually doing that only once, and that year we dug up the abandoned garden on our back 40 where a house had once stood.

Most years the soil remained too cold until well after Easter. My father didn’t usually till the big garden behind our house until early May.

You have to prepare not only your soil but also your potatoes. My parents took potatoes stored in the storm cellar and inspected them for quality and eyes, the little white sprouts peeking out of the brown skin. A little before planting they would carve the eyes from the potatoes, leaving a sizable piece of white to ground the sprouts.

They’d toss the eyes into a bucket, and the whole family would go to the garden. My father would work one row, creating a hole with one whack of his hoe, and my mother would go down another. My older sister and I dropped in the eyes, making sure they were looking up at us, and our parents covered them.

I much preferred planting to harvesting, which came months later. When you dug up potatoes, you couldn’t jump on a spade to drive it into the earth or even attack with a hoe. You had to be careful not to cut the potatoes under each plant, and that often meant loosening the soil with the hoe or spade and then digging with your hands. Dirty work, but we had to do it.

—Carolyn Mulford

Raising peanuts

Driving through Tifton, Georgia, recently, I stopped at the National Peanut Museum.

Although I’m fond of peanuts and a great admirer of George Washington Carver (the Missouri-born scientist who found numerous uses for peanuts), I knew little about peanuts as a crop. My parents planted some in the garden one year when I was a small child, but so few grew that they never tried it again. No one in northeast Missouri planted peanut crops.

Georgia farmers, including James Earl Carter’s father, turned to peanuts as a cash crop when cotton failed. Americans had been raising peanuts since Europeans introduced them in colonial times. The Europeans had brought them in from South Anerica.

One reason Georgians and their neighboring states succeeded in switching to peanuts in the late 1940s was that in 1948 someone invented a combine for harvesting peanuts. It greatly increased productivity and made peanuts, raised primarily for hog pasture until the 1930s, a viable crop.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, farmers were turning soy beans into a major crop, tractors were replacing horses, and combines were replacing threshers.

The United States was becoming one of the world’s major food producers.

Carolyn Mulford