On our spring vacation trip earlier this year, we spent several days in western North Carolina, staying at a church retreat center on Lake Junaluska near Asheville, N.C. This is the area of the Great Smoky Mountains and of the Eastern Cherokee Reservation. It is also where some of our own ancestors and others had lived before they migrated to our part of the country and settled in northwest Arkansas. So we found many interesting places to visit in that vicinity.

One of our day trips was to Cherokee, N.C., and the nearby Oconaluftee Visitors Center. The Visitors Center is named for the Oconaluftee River, which runs down the eastern part of the Great Smoky Mountains and through the town of Cherokee. One of the features of this site on the Oconaluftee is a Mountain Farm Museum, a small acreage outfitted with buildings and farm implements that would have been common sights in theSmoky Mountains during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Although a few farm machines were coming into use during that time, tractors were for the most part non-existent in small mountain communities.

Horses and oxen were the main sources of power for pulling plows and harrows to till the soil, and pulling the wagons, carts and sleds that were typical means of farm transportation.

The Mountain Farm depicted a time and a way of life that were greatly similar to that around Pea Ridge and the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks prior to the 1920s. That might come as no surprise since many of the families who came here in the mid-1800s were coming from the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky; and already were accustomed to making their living on small farms and living as members of small communities. The museum farmhouse was constructed of chestnut logs and lumber, a wood that we didn’t see much in our Ozarks. But the methods of putting the logs together and framing the beams for the roof were similar to the methods used in our Ozarks. Ozark farms used more white oak and other similar hardwoods. When I was young, I used to suppose that when people in the old days constructed houses and other buildings without metal nails, their buildings couldn’t be as strong and good as what we built with our nice nails. I was to learn differently. Many of the craftsmen in the old days were very skilled at fitting and joining wood beams, and the houses they built withfitted and pinned joints were stronger than nails can provide.

As I began walking around the old-time farm yard, one of the first thingsI came across was the ash hopper. My mother used to talk about her mother and grandmother using an ash hopper to make lye for soap, but I had never seen an actual ash hopper. Rather than just dumping the ashes from the fireplace or cooking stove, people used to put their ashes in a hopper outside, where the rains could leach through the collected ash and the liquid which drained off formed a solution which was part of a recipe for soap making. Lye soap was used for washing clothes and scrubbing almost anything clean.

I also noticed the smokehouse. I suppose almost everyone in those days had a smokehouse.

Most families would raise hogs and cattle, and their meats for the table came from their own herds. The work of butchering, cutting up, preserving, curing and enhancing the meats called for a smokehouse. A smokehouse was a sturdy building where meats were hung for curing andsmoking. The smokehouse protected the meats from pilfering wild animals, but its main purpose was to expose the meat to the smoke of a low fire, usually of hickory wood because of the distinctive taste it added.

Not far from the smokehouse on the museum farm was the corn crib. That one brought back memories for me. We always had corn fields, picked corn for feeding cattle and chickens, and the corn crib was an important part of the farm.

It was made of sturdy oak in the hope of keeping the coons out, but ventilated so the corn would dry and not spoil. It was also important to keep out the rats and mice. That’s where a few good farm cats came in, and it didn’t hurt to have a good old black snake either, if you could keep him out of the henhouse andaway from the eggs.

The sorghum mill and the nearby cooking shed was as fascinating to me as anything about the farm, since my owngrandfather, mother’s dad, used to do custom sorghum making on the farm north of Bentonville.

At the Oconaluftee farm, the cooker was elevated, over an oven-like structure about waist high. My granddad’s cooker, on the other hand, was about knee high and placed over a long low fire in the ground.

The farm shop with woodworking tools and blacksmithing tools was also an important part of an old-time mountain farm. Farm people learned many different skills. Being able to make the things they needed was basic to surviving, since there wasn’t much money economy back then, and you didn’t just go to the store to get everything you wanted.

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Editor’s note: 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 07/27/2011