PEA RIDGE — The past two weeks have been remarkable times for me and my brothers Ben and John. We have been gathering together our dad’s old farm machinery from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the newer equipment.

One of the unique parts of our “explorations” has been sorting through Dad’s farm shop. As a true child of the Great Depression, Dad was not one to get rid of old things just because they weren’t being used anymore. Old implements and tools were considered as having possible uses that hadn’t been thought of yet. So we were sorting through pieces of iron and steel which had been around the farm for 60 or 70 years. Dad had collected so many pieces of this and that that we couldn’t know what we had. Much of it was stacked on top of other pieces on the workbenchesor underneath. But as we picked through and sorted things we came across some “treasures” that brought back memories of growing up for us.

Through the years since 1938, Dad has had three farm shops. The first shop I recall had been a small chicken house used by the previous owners of the farm. It stood near the bank of Otter Creek, 100 feet or so in front of our big barn.

At the time of my earliest memory, the old shop was already stashed full with pieces of old cultivators, shovels, rakes and hoes and miscellaneous boards. But Icould easily get to the workbench on the south wall, and very early in my life I was clamping pieces in the vise, driving nails, sawing boards with the handsaws and boring holes with the brace and bit. That was well before farm electricity, so there were no power tools; all the tools were hand tools.

I guess Dad was not too fearful that we kids might cut our fingers, or that we might miss a nail and hammer our thumbs. He did show us how to use the tools, including some tips about keeping the fingers on; but he allowed us to use tools at a very early age.

It has been the strangest feeling during the past few days to handle the same old handsaws with which I learned to make a cut straight and square. Memories of sawing boards and driving nails in the old, old shop came back so fresh that I could almost smell the new sawdust, hear the sound of the wood rasp, and feel the miss-lick as my hammer grazed a nailhead and bent my nail out of shape. We didn’t stay perfectly safe in the old shop, we boys learned how it feels to pinch a finger, to ram a splinter into a palm or to raise a blood blister whensoft skin gets smashed between hard metal! I guess we didn’t know that we were never supposed to get hurt. We learned to soak hurt fingers in coal oil, and to expect that soon they would be healed up again.

Outside the old shop, stacks of new lumber still stood after the new barn was built, still giving off the scent of fresh-sawn oak planks.

Dad’s second farm shop was built about 1948, shortly after we bought our first farm tractor. It was really built as a garage for the car, but as time went on the tractor was spending more time in it than the car, and little by little the collection of stuff that had been in the old shop was moving into the new garage. The garage was becoming the farm shop. In the early 1950s we actually lived in that garage for the summer, while we built our new house. It wasamazingly comfortable.

We had a linoleum floor, a couch, beds for everyone, kitchen cabinets, an electric range, water heater, running water and an outhouse. Life was getting better all the time!

Later, after we moved into the new house, the garage fully became the farm shop;

its cabinets became shelves for Dad’s bolts and nuts and cotter pins, and the old sink collected everything from tractor parts to plow shares to milking machine parts.

It was during that time that I began building simulated toy farm tractors and implements, mostly using smallboards with nails driven into the right spots, hitches made of fence steeples and nail points as tiller shanks.

My homemade implements really worked the soil, and were much finer to play with than store-bought toys.

Every couple of years our dad would reorganize his shop, going through the buckets and baskets of bolts and washers and miscellaneous metal parts, putting some in new buckets and basically moving the junk from one side of the shop to the other. When he built the new shop in the 1970s, he seemed to have stopped reorganizing on any major scale, but he continued collecting. We found our old post maul, a sledge hammer and wedges we used for splitting logs, the fence post hole punch that could be a pry bar or a shaft for unrolling barbed wire, some handcranked broadcast seedersused to sow oats and our old two-man crosscut saw.

At one point, Ben pulled out a wooden level with one glass broken. I told him be sure not to let that get away, that’s the very one I first learned on! So it has gone for us, handling again old tools on which we learned our working skills.

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 06/16/2010