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D.B.: Okay, we'd like to start with just simple questions; like where were you born and raised? A.D.: Well, I was born and raised about midway between Greenwood and Milford. About a mile from a little town or village called Statonsville. You come through it, or you didn't come from Milford. I was born in the same house my father was borned in. He lived there all his life and I lived there 'til I was married and then I moved away. But anyways, through the woods from our home was Johnson's Blacksmith Shop and Johnson's Blacksmith Shop was on a crossroads by the same name - Johnsons Crossroads. Mr. Howard Johnson was the blacksmith. He was a tall, raw-boned sort of a man, big arms, big hands, very mild, very low-key and a lot of humor. Besides,. of course, in those days there were a lot of horses to be shod, because there was no tractors. Every farm had several horses and he done a lot of horseshoeing. I've watched him do it a lot of times. He started out with a blank shoe.. Just a piece of iron -looked like a shoe.. He made it from that. He'd heat it and he'd knock the holes in where the nails went. Course you drove nails in the horse's hoofs. I watched him do that a lot. He'd heat that. First he'd trim the hoof. File it all down nice and trim the frog - called the frog of the hoof Clean that all out. Then he'd heat the shoe and press it to the horse's hoof just for an instant. Then he'd cool it off and. then he'd nail it to the horse's hoof. And that was that. Sometimes he'd get ahold of a horse that was unruly. and he had what they called a twitch. A-piece of wood about fifteen inches long, a inch and a half in diameter and it had a hold through the end. They'd put a rope through there and made a loop. They put that loop over the horse's upper lip, nose and twisted it. That would quiet him right down and you could do anything you pleased then. Of course, where my father come in, he helped him make wagons. It was heavy work, you know. Particularly when they put the irons - the iron rims on the wagon wheels. They built a huge bonfire in the yard and they'd heat this iron rim. Oh it would stand, some of them, five feet tall. They'd place that over the wooden wheel and right away pour water on it to stop it from burning. That's mainly the work my father done at the blacksmith shop. D.B.: Did he have other work that he did or was he just a farmer? A.D.: Well, he was a farmer and then he farmed a wheat thresher. If you know what I mean. I think theres one in the Museum up there. At that time you had to seed the wheat in by hand. That was his job. He went with Mr.?? and had a thresher and engine he went with Mr. Sil and fed wheat into the thresher among other things. He did work some in a sawmill. I remember sawing a piece of timber off. Mr. Roy Smith he put a sawmill in the woods. Well, the bargain was that he was to saw us enough lumber to add on to our home two more stories. So, he helped there. That's about all he did do, I guess, other than farm. D.B.: When was he born? A.D.: Born? I'll have to go to the graveyard to find it. His name was William Clarence Davis and he was born 1882 and died in 1969. Wife:: We went out to the cemetery and found that out. A.D.: My mother was Hattie Mae Davis. She was born in 1883 and died in 1971. Lived to be a ripe old age. D.B.: Really. A.D.: Course we lived with my grandmother and grandfather. My father's mother and father lived together with us all the time. The whole bunch was there. D.B.: Sort of a Walton's Family kind of thing. A.D.: We had a room-. we called an old summer kitchen. We didn't use it only in the summertime. Only in the winter my grandmother set up a room in there and we ragged carpets. Bang, bang bang, all winter long. We had a fireplace , enough to keep the chill off, you know. D.B.: Did you sell those or did you use them yourself? A.D.: Mainly for our own use. That's all we had on our floors, rag carpets. All over. Pretty, beautiful. D.B.: Neat. Did you go to school right near where you lived? A.D.: ? miles. ? School it was called. Six grades. All in one room. I was designated fireman. I kept the fire. Twenty-five cents a week teacher paid me. D.B.: Oh, you got paid. How wonderful. A.D.: Twenty-five cents a week, yup. It were quite an experience. ? than the teachers at that time. Some were away, didn't have no transportation and they would board in the neighborhood with some of the families 'til the weekend. Then they would go home. If they were close to home then they'd go and come. There wasn't many that close. I remember one in particular, Mrs. Rosahanick, she boarded at our house. Another thing, my experiences at school, one winter, talking about the winters; we had sleet on the ground for a whole week. I slid to school, that mile the whole week. Couldn't get there any other way, couldn't walk. D.B.: Made it kind of fun. So you went there for the six grades. Did you go on? A.D.: Come on into Greenwood in the seventh grade and I graduated. Graduated in 1928. We had a - I played soccer. Had a soccer team. The year I was on the soccer team, my twelfth year, we had the state championship. Little old Greenwood. And then in the summertime, spring, early summer all the schools in Sussex County would meet at Georgetown and we'd have a thing that we called field day. Compete in sports, you know. I was the last man on the relay. I carried the stick home. D.B.: I'm sure you were wonderful. A.D.: Yeah. We never got beat. We never got beat. I was pretty good runnin' a mile. Statonsville, speaking of Statonsville, my earliest recollection of that was store down there two ? houses. I don't remember the ? house but my mother said she worked in there. Little old country store done a big business. Another thing, I remember my mother say, "Will you got to go - we're out of coffee - you got to go to T town". We called it T town - and get us some coffee. It was ? coffee. I don't if you remember it. It come in a bag and in that bag was a stick of peppermint candy. We thought that was the best thing we ever ate in our life. D.B.: Couldn't wait for the coffee to be emptied. You talked about some soccer games and things. What other kind of activities took place throughout the community? A.D.: Well, of course, in those days when I was home they was visiting neighbors then. Course today they don't so much. But we'd visit one another and maybe in the wintertime make a freezer of ice cream, play some cards. That's the way we spent our time. About two miles from our house there were people by the name of Hoey. They had eight children. We'd visit back and forth. We'd walk that two miles of a night. We'd sit there and talk. They always grew sweet potatoes so we'd put sweet potatoes in the oven and bake them. We'd eat them. Had a heck of a time, sweet potatoes and milk. Then we'd walk the two miles back home. Of course, in Staytonsville, too, there was a Methodist Church, had a real congregation. Course that's all gone. Had a cemetery there too. But I can remember going to that church. We walked, of course. Going barefoot all day, all summer, then put on shoes to go to church. Kill your feet. Soon's you got to that church off come your shoes. Yes, indeed. I've been around. I've had a little bit of everything. D.B.: So this little town, Strattonsville? A.D.: Staytonsville. We were about a mile from there, that's where I lived. It's still there but the church is gone. D.B.: It didn't have a - maybe like a harvest festival? A.D.: I've cranked an ice cream freezer until I turned blue in the face. We'd have a picnic. And the women that we turned the freezer would be a little generous about leaving some ice cream on the paddles. That's what we got. But some of them would scrape it right down to the bare bones and you wouldn't get nothin'. D.B.: So you went through the twelve grades, And then what did you do? A.D.: I was still home with my father. We got married young. I was twenty and my wife was sixteen. We stayed with my mother and father and farmed until 1930. No, we was married in 1930 and we stayed with them until 1932. Then we moved here and we've been here ever since. In fact, her mother and father owned this place and we bought it from them. And that's where we stayed. Moved one time and quit. D.B.: Smart man. So you're a farmer or? A.D.: I have two small farms. I used to be quite a big farmer. D.B.: Why is that? A.D.: Why, it didn't pay you nothin'. So I finally quit and I graduated. I went with Pet Milk Company, selling milk and they give me $1.85 a hundred for the milk. Today they're gettin' about $15.00 a hundred. D.B.: Is that right. A.D.: So I been through it all. A.D.: Well, we probably moved in the Depression in '32 -'30 or '32. It was rough going I'll tell you. We tried to grow all of our staples at home. We had our own meat. We had our own vegetables like cabbage and potatoes. Grew our own wheat. Took it to the mill and got flour. So much flour, so much middlins', and so much bran. So we got our flour there and middlins' and bran to feed our hogs. We grew enough corn to feed them too. That's how we got by. Couldn't do it today. Just couldn't happen. We killed about four hogs a winter for our meat. We had an old smoke house there. They called it a smoke house. I call it a meat house. We never smoked any meat. We'd kill these four hogs and we'd keep it there all winter. In those days the winters were cold winters. When it turned winter, it stayed winter. We could afford to go out and buy a quarter of beef. Hang it in the old smokehouse and when we wanted a piece of beef go out there and cut off a chunk. Cook it and go on from there. It would stay there. D.B.: I don't know if I could do that. A.D.: Don't you? Oh yes you could. My grandmother, I say she was there living, took charge of the chickens. You see, we only had fried chicken one time in a year. It's different today. She'd set these hens. Settin' hens they called them, they were old hens. They'd hatch their biddies. She'd ? them up until they got to be about three pounds and would kill the roosters off. She kept the pullets for layers again. That's the only time we'd have fried chicken, when she killed the roosters off. D.B.: The rest of the year you would eat the pork and the beef. A.D.: And eggs, we very seldom got - the only time mother would D.B.: How many were there in your family? A.D.: There was four of us boys and one girl. Of course my grandmother and grandfather and mother and father. Set down to a table and something had to leave it. D.B.: So, do you have any children? I see pictures everywhere. A.D.: Oh yeah, I have a daughter lives at Harrington, works in the Wilmington Trust at Milford. My oldest son has left here with his family. He's a minister affiliated with the Church of God. He lives now in Pennsylvania. But he's been all over this world. Traveled. He's the overseer for the State of Pennsylvania for the Church of God. They were staying here for Easter yesterday and had to go back today. I got another son lives in a new house right up here. Did you see? You seen that? That's my youngest son. Got two big chicken houses back. He came over here one day, about a year ago or more. He said, "Daddy, how about selling me this farm? I want to get closer to you. You know I'm going have to 'tend to you." So when he left we made a deal. The deal was he was to pay me so much a month. I don't charge him any interest. Have lifetime rights to this house. Everything's going along lovely there. He's got two five hundred foot chicken houses there. He has a chicken crew catches chickens for Allens Hatchery. He'll go out and catch them with them, so he's doing all right. They all are. D.B.: He's the only one that followed in your footsteps? A.D.: Sort of followed me, yeah. D.B.: What changes have you seen, like your son uses now, to raise chickens compared to way back when your grandmother raised them? A.D.: Well, I tell you she set these eggs under hens in the hen house and they'd stay there until they hatched the eggs. They'd come off to eat and go back. Now they have great big incubators and every kind of a thing. D.B.: I think they put them on trays, put them in big trays. Is that how they do it? A.D.: In the hatchery they got huge, great big buildings of them. They turn the eggs every day, you know. You have to turn the eggs every day while they're in the incubator. D.B.: The hen didn't have to turn the egg? Oh, did she turn it over? A.D.: She'd take her bill and turn 'em. D.B.: I'll be darned. A.D.: My grandmother, she would, she was a big woman. Weighed about two hundred fifty pounds. She had guinea hens. Ever heard tell of guinea hens? They'd go off and steal their nest. Grandmother would follow them. When she found their nest she'd get their eggs and bring them up and put them under the old hen. Same way with the turkeys. But the funny thing about a turkey, if you went into her nest and picked up an egg, she wouldn't come back to it. We had a big wooden spoon in the egg house. D.B.: I can see your grandmother out there swooshing them away. A.D.: My father would go to plant corn. Of course, you had to run D.B.: How do you salt fish down? A.D.: Well, me and my grandmother did that. We were experts at it. We had a wooden barrel. She had a great big dish pan. She couldn't get down, She set up on a stool. It was coarse salt she used. She'd roll that old fish around in that. We'd split them open, roll the old fish around and I'd place them in the barrel. Tails to the center. Place tails to the center and one fish on the center. Then we'd go with another row. you let them sit there for nine days. You take them out, let them drain, resalt them, and pour that old brine off first. And they would keep. Lived here all my life. Within six or seven miles of where I'm living today. D.B.: What did you do, did you go to war or did you get to stay? A.D.: I was exempt, farmer, you see. D.B.: I didn't realize they did that. A.D.: Oh yeah. Had to have somebody to feed them. Wife: He was married when he was twenty-two - twenty. That's another reason. A.D.: When I came here to show you the difference in farming, I had two horses that her father left here. And I had, maybe, four cows. I had what they called a nineteen Oliver plow, if you know anything about plows. It was a walking plow. Cut a furrow about ten inches wide That's what I did all this farm with. D.B.: How many acres did you have? A.D.: There was sixty here. Every year sometime in the year I'd plow that sixty acres with that nineteen Oliver plow. Well, I graduated and got a John Deere riding plow. It cut fourteen inches and I had to have three horses to it. Mr. Calhoun, next farm, was the first one in this neighborhood to buy a tractor. I'd work all day and he'd go out there about an hour after supper and plow as much as I did all day. D.B.: Was there any sharing of tools, like did he let you borrow his tractor? A.D.: Yeah, not too much tractor but different told we'd swap D.B.: So when did you get your first tractor? Or are you still walking behind your horse? D.B.: No, I don't farm no more anyway. I don't remember the year that I got it. I started out with a little Case, pulled two twelve inch plows. I used that awhile. Then I got a bigger tractor pulled three plows and I thought I was in heaven. Now they got them that pulls twelve plows. So I just couldn't catch up with them. I used those tractors 'til I quit farming. Wife: He'd say whoa to the end of the row too. D.B.: I borrowed Mr. Calhoun's tractor one afternoon. I had fences around the field. I got to the end and was wantin' to turn, and she kept right on a pluggin' I said whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Got in the corner round and had to take the durned fence down to turn her around. Wife: No he didn't want a tractor. They just packed the ground down. He didn't want a tractor. D.B.: You were against technology. Wife: Right then he was. ? didn't want one. A.D.: You said packed the ground down. I remember one time around to the other farm, they'd had a ? . We were trying to get our ground ready to plant soy beans. We were discing and pulling a drag behind too. So I said to David Richards, you've heard of David Richards? D.B.: They gave quite a bit to the Museum. A.D.: He's the one give my name in. I said, Dave, let's quit pulling that drag. I believe it's packing the ground too hard. I tell you what you could tell right to the row where we quit dragging it. Much taller, much nicer beans. He ? today. It's been twenty years ago. Wife: In 1975 he had a terrific operation. A.D.: I was up in Dover, Kent General, in April. Came back in September. Wife: ????????????? A.D.: I was an expert scrapple and sausage maker. D.B.: Is that right? A.D.: Do you like scrapple? D.B.: I bought some but I haven't tasted it yet. Wife: What kind did you buy. D.B.: I don't know. Wife: Hughes is the best. Tastes more like his. D.B.: Now you can tell me all about scrapple. What is it, how you make it and all that other stuff. A.D.: The old saying is scrapple is made out of seven kinds of meat, all of them fit to eat - ? of the head. Use the head, tongue, heart, liver, scraps of meat, whatever. Cook them all with fatback. Cook them all up. ? them up good. Dried it after it's cooked and mixed it with meal and flour. Two of flour and one of meal we call it. Twice as much flour as you would use of meal. Stir that all in there and it'll bubble. Thicken it 'til a big paddle - stick it down in there - and it won't go together. Wife: Then you poured it in pans. A.D.: My sausage recipe was for ten are two and ten pounds. All these measures level, struck off level. Four tablespoons of salt, tablespoons of pepper, two tablespoons full of sugar, one tablespoon full of sage, all level tablespoons for pound of meat. I tell you what that's good sausage. Wife: It's delicious. D.B.: I'll have to make a copy of this. So did you make scrapple right here or did you go somewhere else? A.D.: Ever since I was big enough to shoot a hog we had hog killings on the farm. Each farmer had a hog killing sometime during the winter. We'd all go help one another. They'd all come here and help me and go with the rest of them to the next place. That's how I got into it. My mother was a good scrapple maker. So that's how it happened. Now that's all gone. You can't find a farmer has a hog killing anymore. Wife: They have it done. A.D It was fun. At dinner, man we turned on, we had everything. Tenderloin, the liver, sweetbreads, yes indeed. D.B.: It was a good meal, huh? A.D.: Good meal. Same way as with wheat threshing. To get a meal like they had at a wheat threshing today it would cost five hundred dollars. They had ham. They had chicken. They had beef. All you could eat. Some of them old codgers would sit through two tables. Eat with this bunch. They'd go and leave them. New bunch would come in and they'd go right on eating. D.B.: On shows they show them building houses and then everyone sits down to big long tables. So that's really the way it was? A.D.: Well, the Amish people still do that. Wife: You couldn't see a bigger table than we sat down to yesterday. Seventeen of us or was it eighteen with the baby? She sat there in her highchair. Get that chair and all at the one table. A.D.: Getting back to that cancer remedy. I can make it. They made it out of white rail tree. You burn the rail tree wood, save the ashes. Make it out of the ashes. That stuff would eat through a - had to put it in a glass bottle. Couldn't use a regular cork had to use beeswax. For some reason it wouldn't beat beeswax. The day he started to work the cancer would be right black and he'd trim it off with his scissors. Put a little of that on there in a poultice. Let it stay so long. Take that off and then burn off again until it begin to bleed. Then he'd quit. Mother would make him a poultice to put on there like a ? poultice or something like that. Wife: It was painful. I watched him do it many times. A.D.: And while my father, grandfather and grandmother worked on them I don't remember any of them come back. Course today I couldn't begin to do that because they'd have the sheriff and everybody else after me. It's quack. D.B.: Sounds like your grandmother was right out there hands and knees into the farm just like your grandfather. A.D.: She was a great old - and during the winter we never did have a whole lot of money. But we had good clothes and good eating. During the winter my mother would make holly wreaths to get us something for Christmas. During the day we'd go in the woods and break the holly. Trim the leaves off of the berries and we'd bunch them. Our grandmother would bunch them. That night, why, we'd wrap holly - leaves. Course you could wrap them, we had kid gloves with the fingers out of them. Which she used to keep the holly from sticking her hands. I'd bunch the holly for her and she'd get ahold of it and she could wrap a holly wreath in nothing flat. We'd do that in the wintertime. I guess my first real job was farmwork. Ten hours for a dollar. Worked ten hours for a dollar. Plant corn, settin' out tomato plants. All hand work. Through the woods, right close to the blacksmith shop it was. I don't remember it, but it happened. My uncle Charlie Warren, my father's uncle, he made apple brandy. It was legal at that time. You know what apple brandy is? Yep he certainly did. D.B.: Did you all make any kind of a schnapps or a moonshine out of your potato skins or anything like that? A.D.: We never did. Some might have. I guess most of my adult like I was half way a veterinarian. D.B.: I guess you'd have to be if you had animals. A.D.: I helped cows that were having difficulty calving, giving birth, you know. I did a lot of that and then cleaned them up after birth. Wasn't too tacky job but I did it. Couldn't charge nothing. Wasn't licensed. They just give me what they wanted me to have. Wife: Coldest nights too. I remember you getting all bloody. A.D.: You know you look back on those things and you wonder how the heck I'm here today. That's the truth. D.B.: I can believe it. That's just about all of my questions that I really have. A.D.: I can tell you a little something about Milford. I think you mentioned that. D.B.: Yes, I'd love to hear it. A.D.: At one time it was an up and coming town, It had two county houses right in the town. It had a boat landing which it still does. Had a shipyard. We'd go in town Saturday night, us boys, and we were allowed a quarter apiece. First thing we'd buy a bag of peanuts. You could get a quart for a nickel. Then we'd head for the theater. Fifteen cents to get in there, so we come home with a nickel. That's the way we done it. An hot dogs, if you wanted a hot dog, were a nickel. Hot dogs were always a nickel and all the mustard you wanted. And there was a Mulholland's in Milford - Mulholland's spoon factory. Made wooden spoons. Did you ever see any - wooden spoons? If you went into a ice cream parlor and got a dish of ice cream it would have a little wooden spoon. They were made right here in Milford. They were made out of gum - gum tree. That's all gone. Milford's beginning to die, pret' near. I guess I shouldn't say that it might be coming back a little. These shopping centers kind of gutted Milford. You could go in there in the time I was talking about, on Saturday night in Milford, you had a job walking up and down the street for people. In the wintertime, around Thanksgiving and Christmas, they had the turkeys hanging out by the neck dead and clip picked. Hanging out on the street. People could buy them if they wanted them. D.B.: So Milford then was the hub, the big city? A.D.: Yes, it was. It was until these shopping centers kinda made a difference. I don't mean to say Milford's gone. I don't mean that, but it's not the same as it was. I guess I was about eighteen years old I took a job in the wintertime in the butcher shop. Strictly a butcher shop, in Milford. Earl Robinson was the butcher's name that owned it. He told me - I boarded with him - after work - we were sitting there talking - I was proud of my father when died. He said he didn't have a cent left, but he didn't owe a cent. He said I think if anybody goes through this world that close he's doing all right. D.B.: I'm curious as to your opinion as to whether you would want to be a farmer today. A.D.: Oh yeah, it's born and bred in you. You can't change an old dog to new tricks. D.B.: I guess what I'm getting at is the life was so hard for you all to go out and do everything by hand. And today there's so much modern technology but yet the farmers aren't making it. What are your thoughts about that? A.D.: Well, I tell you, a lot of the farmers are going bankrupt and all this, that and the other. They over-extended. They just thought this thing was going to go on forever and it didn't. I can't always them. I can blame the money lending institutions. They encouraged them to borrow. They wanted to loan money. And they over-extended and by jury come a payday and they weren't there. We had hard work, but we enjoyed it. We never thought of it as hard work when I was coming up. We'd get our farm work done. We cut our corn, put it in shocks and in the winter we'd husk it. We'd get that finished we'd go into the woods with our axes, cut a pile of wood for our fuel in a long neck. Haul it on one of Mr. Johnson's wagons and get it up there and have a wood sawing. Just the same as a hog killing. Everybody come and helped you and you went and helped everybody else. They would split that wood. We'd try to get that all done by November 15th, cause that's the day the rabbit season opened. We had to go rabbit hunting. So I really enjoyed doing rabbit hunting. So we still had fun, too, you know. Had plenty of time. Wasn't hustle, bustle. Now today why you ain't even got time to say How-do to your neighbor. D.B.: Sounds like a wonderful life. It really does. A.D.: I've often said, and I still say it, if everybody would go back to my childhood, the way we lived then, I'd go with them gladly. If everybody, my equals, you know. Yes I would. D.B.: Well, I agree. Wife: We going back to the farmers, young folks now, you can become a doctor lot's cheaper than you can become a farmer. Equipment is so high. A.D.: Thinking about going farming today, if he's got that kind of money, he don't need to farm. D.B.: Family farms are almost extinct. A.D.: If he can accumulate that much money and still farm it and make a profit. Well, your hundred thousand dollar combine, you see. Some of the tractors are selling for hundred thousand. That's just a start. You have to have others. Wife: Got big, everything got big. D.B.: Need to go back to that horse and that three plow. A.D.: It would help. It would help. D.B.: I really want to thank you. A.D.: Did that accounting come up to your expectations? D.B.: Oh, definitely. I really want to thank you. Even getting lost was just wonderful. I loved hearing about your grandmother and you making scrapple. I just think that's wonderful. I was in the store and they were frying it up. You know, sampling it and she really wouldn't tell me what it was. But I bought some anyway. She said scraps. A.D.: I was working in this meat market. I had a six hundred pound pot. Make six hundred pound at a time. I made a pot a week for a whole week. Six hundred pound a day for a whole week. Then he expanded. He took on two or three more stores and he needed it. But the hitch was he was selling over the state line. It wasn't federal inspected. So they cut that out. But I'd still make a pot a week just for this store. D.B.: Still today? A.D.: No, when I quit, when I was there. And sausage, I went in there one morning, Saturday morning and I made fifty .pound sausage at a time. We had fifty pound. Seasoned it, grind it. And all I done that whole Saturday, make fifty pound of sausage. One right after the other. Couldn't keep up. D.B.: Big pork eaters up here in Delaware, huh? A.D.: Come from everywhere. We had a customer he'd buy ten pound of scrapple every week. We molded it in ten pound pans for him. Pan would hold ten pound. He'd use ten pound of that a week. Don't seem possible, but he did. D.B.: That's a lot of scrapple. A.D.: He must of eat it three times a day and midnight lunch. Wife: Our grandchildren are about that bad, aren't they? A.D.: Yes, they are. They were born in the south. Lived in Tennessee
for a year before they moved to Pennsylvania.idn't know what scrapple
was down there. Got them up here and I cooked two pound this morning
for them. Wasn't nothing left. They fought over the last piece. D.B.: I really want to thank you again.
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