Farm Life

"...I grew up on a small farm in the southern part of Buckingham County in central Virginia in between Charlottesville and Farmville.  It was a farm where my father tried all sorts of different things to make a living.  So in addition to growing as much of our own food as we could in the garden and raising hogs that we killed for meat, he also grew some tobacco to sell, he grew corn which of course was used to feed the animals, but he also occasionally would sell some that was left over.  He would grow wheat which he could also sell for cash in nearby Farmville."

"The house was very old, at least the main part of it.  I'm not sure how old but certainly built by 1830 or 1835.  It was very simple.  There was a basement with two rooms and a dirt floor.  A stone foundation and then the main floor had a large room and a small room.  There was a crooked little staircase in the corner and there was a large room and a small room in the upstairs.  The upstairs was what we used to call a half-story because it had sloping walls.  And then some time around World War I my great aunt and uncle added on two little rooms on the side that were used as a kitchen and dining room.  My own mother and father had tacked on a little porch on the side of that."

"It seemed like there was always, always, something to do.  When I got to be about ten years old and I was reading I wanted a lot more time to read, and it didn't seem like I had any time.  I would always want to go away with a book and my father would always have something he wanted me to do and that was true on Saturdays just as much as any other day of the week.  So really the only day I had that no one expected me to do things was Sunday after church...so sometimes on Sunday afternoons I was able to go away if we didn't have company coming.  Or I'd go away and wander in the woods which I loved to do since I was about ten years old."

 

        Ed Ayres, age 10

 "As soon as I was old enough that my mother let me out of her sight, which was probably about seven or eight, I would start wandering down and exploring the farm which was about 240 acres we though, although we learned later that it was actually less.  And the house stood on a very high hill.  It had some trees around it but basically the hill was bare except for the yard with trees.  But once you got down the hill on each side of the house there were two little branches, or streams, they were too little to be creeks so we called them branches, and there were trees along them and I would explore those first because obviously I couldn't get lost.  If I followed them downstream all I had to do was turn around and come back.  Once I got to be eight or nine and I had explored everything in sight of the farmhouse I started going further afield, and there was a farm road that went all the way back to the back of the farm so I would follow that and I would pick certain parts that I knew I wanted to explore each Sunday if I had time.  And I would go off a certain distance to make sure I could find my way back and eventually of course I had explored every part of my father's farm and I started going off on other people's property but no one lived back there, it was all just woods, and no one was really sure where the property lines were."

"It is a very, very hard life.  My father, from the time he woke up to whenever dark hit or after, he was always working.  There was always something to be done, always something broken down, always something...you know, maybe it was because I was lazy, but I think also I realized how much I enjoyed doing things like reading, things, being by myself, which of course you could be alone sometimes on the farm.  But when you are lifting bails of hay you don't have much time to think.  I just realized I really did not want to spend, it made him much older...he was a very beaten and broken man, because of the kind of life he lived...of course there were elements of it which I loved...being outdoors, especially during nice weather, being out in the fields...some of the things were hard and heavy and you would get hot and sweaty, but others were not.  They were soothing and relaxing, and there were little times in between when you would be riding on the back of a wagon behind a mule from one field to another when you could just sort of dream and look at the trees and the leaves and the smell of the dirt."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Return to Eleanor's homepage
   

 

 

New Page 1

...