Chores we did as youngsters

The first memory I have of chores on the farm was from before I was big enough to do any chores.

When my brother Ben and I were very young, our mom used to go out and help Dad milk the cows each evening. I think Dad did the milking himself in the mornings. Ben and I were strictly directed not to get out in the dark to go to the barn. I guess if the house had caught on fire it would have been OK for us to go tell Mom and Dad, but otherwise we weren’t supposed to get out of the house in the dark. That was back before electricity, so there was very little light outside at night, especially if the moon was behind a cloud. We had a high creek bank not far from the house, and Mom didn’t want her boys falling into the creek.

As I recall it, the first chore that I was assigned was to churn butter. Mom put the milk and cream into a half-gallon fruit jar, turned the lid tight, and had me shake it. I shook that jar this way and that, and that way and this, and over and over again. I thought I was going to shake my brains out before that butter finally “churned.” Thankfully I didn’t have to do that churning chore very often, and we soon got a Dazey butter churn which made churning much easier and more interesting. I liked to churn with the Dazey churn. If you turned the handle really fast, the dasher inside the jar made real, dashing chaos. I liked to make it churn really fast.

I’m not sure it was good for the butter, but I had a sloshing good time.

Another early chore that was assigned to me was to pull weeds and hoe around the garden plants. I didn’t really like weed pulling, especially when an old weed was stronger than I was, but Dad and Mom were usually working the garden at the same time, so I sort of thought I was being big stuff to be able to work with them. Early on we had a hoe with a short handlein it. I could do pretty well with that. But I was proud when I got big enough to handle a regular hoe.

We always had chickens on the farm, and another of my early chores was to shell corn and feed the chickens. At first we didn’t have a corn sheller, we would shuck the ear of corn, and then use a bare corncob to rake the corn off the new ear. It was pretty simple once you got the hang of it, but it was really nice when Dad bought a real corn sheller. Our corn sheller was in a box about two and a half feet square.

There was an operating crank with a rotating wooden grip, and on the back of the box was a large flywheel. With that, you could get up some real momentum. All it took was to drop the ears of corn into the opening at the top, keep cranking, and the shelled corn would start falling into the box under the sheller. With that sheller there really wasn’t much chore to shelling corn.

I’m trying to remember the kinds of chickens we had as laying hens.

We were selling hatching eggs, so sometimes we had hens of one breed and roosters of another.

The idea was that the hybrid chicks made better broilers. Sometimes our laying hens were red, and the roosters were white. I want to say the hens were Wyandottes. The roosters may have been Leghorns, I’m not sure. Quite often one of our old roosters got the idea that he ruled the roost, and he wanted to flog anybody who came into the chicken house. I soon learned to carry a broom or something to ward him off. Sometimes after you bowled him over a time or two he would quit the flogging, but old roosterscan be cantankerous and aggressive.

Before I learned to milk a cow, Dad let me start feeding the cows as they were brought in for milking. In those days, we did the milking in the east side of our big hay barn. There were six stations which locked around the cows’ necks behind the head and ears, so they wouldn’t be walking away while you were trying to milk them. I would give each cow a scoop of feed from the burlap feed sack nearby in the crib.

We called our feed room a crib, because it was also the corn crib.

When I was about 6 years old, I learned to milk a cow, and started helping regularly with the milking.

At first I was only able to milk one cow, Old Red; but before long I was milking two cows, or even three.

Ben also started helping with the milking, and after that Mom no longer helped at the barn. She said she had boys to do the milking, so she would work at the house. I don’t think she really liked milking cows.

Farm chores can be tedious, especially in bad winter weather with freezing rain and sleet. But for the most part, I enjoyed working with the cows and chickens, and didn’t mind the chores; even though on a dairy farm the chores have to be done night and morning, almost no matter what! I was bothered that as a parent, the chores I could assign my kids were for the most part not very interesting like take out the trash, mow the lawn, clean your room. I remembered that my chores with farm animals as a kid were interesting; I was taking care of “my” cows.

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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.