Living without money was not unusual

Living without using money would be quite impractical these days, and even in the old days people didn't do entirely without money; but there was a time in rural communities when money was not so essential to everyday living. It seems to me that since the 1950s we as a society have moved more in the direction of depending on things purchased by money, for survival, for entertainment and for the general functioning of the nation.

My parents purchased the farm on which I grew up in 1943. I have not been able to learn just what they paid for the place at the time, but I think Dad arranged for a loan of about $5,000 from the Federal Land Bank to accomplish that purchase. That was for approximately 100 acres of farmland plus the old farmhouse which would at the time have been about 80 years old.

During the earliest years that I remember, my Dad was busy not only farming the land, but also building the farm buildings which we would use all through my growing up years. The first building to go up was the big barn, sometimes referred to as the hay barn. Actually it was a general-purpose farm barn, designed for milking cows, storing and feeding hay, housing and feeding horses, feeding out a few hogs, accommodating new baby calves, storing harness for the horses and keeping some items of farm equipment.

To obtain the lumber for the barn, my Dad and my Grandpa would cut oak trees from the woods to the east of our farmstead, and haul the logs over the hill east to the Lewis Patterson place, where Ray Patterson and Oscar Coughlin were operating a sawmill. They would saw the logs into boards and posts and beams of various sizes. To pay for their work, Dad would pay them by giving them some of the lumber produces from our oak logs. So the arrangement was more of a trade of lumber for labor and service, without having any money passing between the parties.

I know that in building the barn, Dad would have had to purchase a number of bags of concrete, but for the aggregate he used creek gravel from Otter Creek, which was about 50 feet away from the barn. He also would have had to purchase nails and hinges for the barn doors. Most of the doors had no locks other than a block of wood with a nail in the center which would be turned to hold the door shut. Only one door, the one through which the cows came for milking, had a factory-made latch. Probably the most significant expenditure of money in building the barn was for the hay fork system, which involved a rail down the center of the rafters front to back, plus the machinery and rope which did the work of unloading hay from the wagon into the barn's massive hay mow.

I'm estimating that building the barn would have cost my Dad about $200 in money, not counting his labor and my Grandpa's labor and that of a number of neighbors and friends who pitched in to help at strategic times, and not counting the value of the lumber which came from trees from the farm woodlots. Of course that $200 was 1943 money, and the equivalent today would be quite a few more dollars.

In the earlier days, farm people often traded labor for labor, time for time, helping a neighbor with his farm projects, and also receiving help in return from that neighbor when help was needed on their own farms.

For example, harvest time, especially grain harvest, often saw large groups of men working together to run the machinery and doing the labor of handling the harvest in each of their fields in turn. All would work for the one, and each and all were working for all the others. The labor was not paid by money, but by returning work and time to cover one's obligation.

Also, in those earlier days, farm people purchased far less foodstuffs from the stores. They produced much of what their family would eat on their own farm, both in the fields and in the garden. Large gardens were not just for those who had a special interest in growing things and being outdoors, but were the norm for farm families. Everyone worked in the garden -- father and mother, sons and daughters, teens and youngsters, all had a part to play in putting food on the table for the family.

Family members were working, not to make money to buy stuff, or to think how their labor might be compensated, but they were working so as to have good stuff to eat, potatoes and corn, beans and cabbage, beets and carrots, lettuce and onions, raspberries and blueberries, peaches and apples -- all the good stuff!

Today, for the most part, we no longer see the kind of subsistence farming that used to be the norm in our area, where country living meant living mostly off the land and the goods it produced. Off course some money was necessary, when purchases had to be made for things the family itself could not produce in a practical way. But wealth was not just to be measured in money, people could be reasonably well off without having much money. Wealth was to be measured in the expanse of land, in teams of horses, herds of cattle and other livestock and poultry, and by the land's potential for continuing production.

I'm not going to suggest that we should try to bring back that way of life, but we do need to appreciate in a greater way our dependence on the land, on the springs and wells and streams of water around us, and on the great fresh air we have to breath.

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Editor's note: This column first ran Nov. 1, 2017. Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

Editorial on 01/22/2020