One of my brother’s current projects is reading of the journals of our Uncle Emory Oyler and summarizing information from them. Emory began to keep a daily journal in 1901 when he went to work for the Cumberland Valley Railroad, a practice he continued until his death in 1960. In addition to being an interesting record of his life, the journals present a fascinating picture of the life of my Oyler ancestors twelve decades ago.
My father was born to Adam Douglas Oyler and his wife Annie Malinda Smith Oyler on December 16, 1891. He was the youngest of six children; the eldest being his fourteen-year-old brother Harry. The family lived in a comfortable farmhouse in Quincy Township, Franklin County, between Waynesboro and Chambersburg, adjacent to the 100-acre Smith family farm. Four generations of Smiths lived on that farm, dating back to pre-Revolutionary War times.
The following summer my grandfather was killed in an accident while working for the Mont Alto Railroad, leaving the young family without a breadwinner. We have always marveled at the fact that they were able to survive this tragedy and wondered how this could have been accomplished. Emory’s journals and other family records have helped us understand this.
The key, of course, was subsistence farming – growing nearly everything a family needed to eat. This required a small complement of farm animals, a large vegetable garden, and a few acres for grain and hay.
By the 1940s the Oyler homestead was occupied by two of my father’s siblings, his brother Joe and his sister Ethel. His mother had died in 1926; he and the other three brothers had established their own families. Our memories of the homestead helped us extrapolate back fifty years and imagine life there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another valuable resource was our cousin, Evalyn Rice. Born in 1911, her memories predated mine by twenty years.
We know they had a horse, Prince, two dairy cows, four hogs, and a large flock of chickens. The bulk of the meat that they ate came from slaughtering the hogs every winter. Four three hundred pound hogs would produce six hundred pounds of ham, bacon, pork loin, and sausage – sufficient for a family of seven for a year.
Butchering day was a major event each year, involving a large number of family and neighbors. The hams and bacon were smoked in the smokehouse. Pork tenderloin was “fried down’ and put into crocks. Sausage was ground and put into casings. An important byproduct was lard, valuable as shortening for baked goods.
Chickens were essential for eggs and, in addition, for Sunday dinners. It is not clear if they raised specific chickens to be eaten, or if it was more of a random thing. The chickens had a big “yard” to roam in during the day, but were happy to come back to the chicken coop to be fed.
The hogs were fed table scraps, collected after each meal in the “slop bucket”, and dried field corn, still on the cobs. The corn was stored in a well-ventilated corn crib; somehow a full corn crib implied a sense of security.
We think they farmed a small plot, perhaps twelve to fifteen acres, adjacent to the chicken yard. I suspect it was in four equal parts – field corn, wheat, hay, and fallow, regularly rotated. In the Fall they would plant rye grass, to be plowed under in the Spring. Evalyn remembered Uncle Joe taking wheat to a mill in Quincy where it was ground into feed; we suspect some of it was ground into flour, as well.
Vegetables, of course, were not a problem. My father’s hobby was gardening, and based on the quantity of vegetables he produced from a small plot, working evenings and weekends, it is easy to believe a family of serious farmers could feed themselves.
He grew green beans, lima beans and peas in sufficient quantity for my mother to can and provide for us all year around. The same could be said for sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, and beets. We rarely ate commercially canned vegetables. We had a “cold cellar”, a small unheated room off the basement filled with Mason jars carefully dated. Most of the time there was a crock of sauerkraut sitting on the floor, with a weight on its lid to keep it airtight.
Add to this list potatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, etc. plus fruit that we know they grew – apples, cherries, raspberries, and grapes, and the idea of self-sufficiency becomes easy to accept. All that was required was a little bit of arable land, an understanding of the interdependence of things, and lots of man-hours of hard work.
My father was fifteen in 1906. It is interesting to imagine his enjoying a fine dinner of pork tenderloin, green beans, and boiled potatoes, supplemented by a big salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, and fresh baked bread, capped off with a slice of apple pie, and realizing that he and his family personally were responsible for almost everything in the meal.
We worry a lot about job satisfaction these days. We have gradually eliminated the dirty, dangerous, physically demanding jobs that were prevalent a century ago. Automation is gradually eliminating the boring (tighten the bolts on the right rear-view mirror of three hundred cars a shift) assembly line jobs. Included in what is left are far too many jobs that are justified only by the fact that that wage-earner is making enough money to support a family.
In contrast, the subsistence farmer had instant direct job satisfaction. The wheat he planted this morning will provide feed for his chickens and flour for fresh baked bread next summer. Small wonder my father was so eager to get out in his garden immediately after dinner each evening.