These are excerpts from the first interview with Wade:
[Note: During the first interview with Wade, his mother, Mary Bell, was present in the room along with my father, Jereial.]
Rachel: Would you mind describing your farm a little bit for me, and everything you do?
Wade: You mean, ah, what we raise here?
R: Yes.
W: Well, mainly I guess it’s beef cow—big, little, medium, and small—about 70some head here at the present time. Probably about 20 or 30 head more when I was a child. And we got a small herd of sheep, what the coyotes will allow us to have. We had problems here a few years ago, I think it was back in the fall, losing about 47 head. And, of course, we got about four brood sow here at the present time. We have kept hogs here in the past. People say, well, when the fall comes, “I want a 400-pound hog,” or something or other like that. Of course, hell, most of them are older timers, and they say, “If I’m a-living, then I’ll want it, and if I’m not living, then I won’t need it.” You know, the way that goes. I don’t know, we sold, what, 21 last year, didn’t we, Mommy?
Mary Bell: Yeah.
W: So, 21 for $200 a head. We got a set of scales up there, but they ain’t too dependable, so we just have to guess-ti-mate on it, about 400 pounds. And we got about twelve head of horses here. Riding horses, quarter horses, gated horses, walking horses. We sell a few colts occasionally. People come around here and buy ‘em, you know. So that’s just about the extent of it. With the exception of the tobacco, that’s about the extent of the income.
R: Um, how long has your family worked on this farm?
W: As far as I know, I seen one of the deeds up there at the courthouse a few years ago, and it was dating back to 1877 when they first acquired the land. Of course, it was just a portion of it my grandfather had deeded to his son. Well, what my great-grandfather had deeded to his son is what I’m trying to say. Then, this 60 acres right in this area here I don’t know exactly what year it was deeded. I never did bother to look. It was in the vicinity of that time. I know that one down on Kents Ridge, it was acquired in 1919. And, of course, the one over on Paint Lick, it was acquired in ’49, ‘cause I can go back to the tombstone where my aunt’s husband was buried, there on the tombstone, so I know about the time of that. These 14 acres down here, it was back in the ‘50s, I guess, when they managed to get hold of it, wasn’t it, Mommy?
MB: I imagine.
W: Maybe about ’55. So that pretty well takes care of it.
R: Have you always lived here?
W: Yeah. Well, the first, what, five years of my life we lived down on the other farm down there?
MB: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
W: And we moved up here when I was school-aged so I could get out to the school, so I didn’t have to walk so far.
R: Can you describe a typical workday on your farm?
W: Well, usually first I just go out and feed the hogs and let the chickens out and, you know, feed the sheep and pour out some grain for the cattle and stuff like that. In the wintertime, of course, I have to get some wood, because we still burn wood, and coal. So, I have to get in a little bit of that, you know. And I get that rounded up since Mommy, you know, she can’t even get out of the house. Then I go out back there and put out some hay while the tractor warms up. Go up there, you know, and see if everybody’s all right. That’s what she [unclear who he is talking about here] used to say about the animals. Says, “How’s everybody doing?” [laughs loudly] She was over there from Grundy, so she had her own way of talking. Then usually, uh, then sometimes I get back up there before lunch, sometimes after lunch, whatever you can think of that needs to be done. Sometimes you need to patch up some stuff, make a run to the grocery store, whatever you can think of. Dark usually drives me in. ‘Course in the wintertime, lots of time you have to fasten the old sheep up for the night. The chickens, they have to be fastened up. The days are short, so you don’t accomplish a whole lot.
R: Do you do different things, um, when the days are longer?
W: Yeah, uh, I’m trying to do that right now. Tore down an old shed, I’ve been trying to do that a little bit at a time. I think I started that project about three years ago. [laughs] I have to tear down, you know, and move everything around. And then, of course, we’ve got this, uh, one of those, uh…. Shoot, I can’t think. [pauses] One of those CREP [Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program] programs, no, one of those EQIP [Environmental Quality Incentive Program]…got one of those EQIP projects going on at the other place. There’s not been a waking moment for two years, I don’t think, every time you get a chance to go down there and dig on the pipeline or do whatever you can do, you know, they make preparations. The government likes for the cattle to stay away from the creek, so you got to deal with that thing. You know, as if we had some spare time. And, of course, you got all the equipment, it has to be greased, all of that be sanded. Everything here is something somebody else threw away. We bought some of it used, some of it’s practically give to us, you know. Just any way, you know, to get by. It’s what the lady at the coal yard down there said, “They cut back till there wasn’t nothing to cut back and they’d find something else to cut back.” [laughs] That’s the way it goes, you know. Seems like there’s more going out than there is coming back in, but some way or another we’ve managed to survive somehow.
R: How has your experience of farming changed over the years?
W: Well, when I was a child, of course, it was the sled and the horses and horse wagon. The first part I can remember, you know. Five years old, you know, long about that time…. I guess I must have been about five years old we got the first Ford tractor. Probably twenty years later the trawler come into existence and, of course, the hay baler. Somewhere prior to that they bought us a side-delivery rake, they called it. Twenty years later, probably, you know, then the round baler come into existence. Of course, I don’t know, I guess it was in the ‘50s the herbicides come into use, come to the rescue from the back end of the horse and the hoe, you know, to control the wheat and the corn. And the fertilizer come into existence. You get a little fertilizer and a little lime, and, you know, sometimes some grass seed itself. Yeah, everything like that help out.
R: Where and when were you born?
W: I was born in 1945, January 23—of course, down at the Clinch Valley Hospital at that time. I was a war, a war baby. We lived down on Kents Ridge, down at the old place, as we always referred to it. It’s right at the lower end of this airport up here—I don’t know if you all have ever been out there—down at the tip end of it, down in the holler there.
R: Um, what is your full name, and were you named after anybody?
W: Uh, it seems like they said I was named after Wade [last name unclear]. He was the postmaster or something or other like that, huh, Mommy?
MB: Yeah.
W: Of course, my middle name was my great-grandfather’s name, Gilbert. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Gilbert Linton. My middle name, of course, is Gilbert, you know. Of course, I guess that’s about the extent of it.
R: Can you tell me about your education?
W: Well, I graduated from high school. That’s as far as I went. When I got out of high school, of course, the Vietnam War was going on about that time, and you couldn’t really plan anything, you didn’t know what was going to happen. I had some type of beard claw. They didn’t want me to bring those funguses over there in the jungle. Of course, my two uncles, they were getting in pretty bad shape, and, of course, there wasn’t nobody here to do anything. Several years ago, I guess it was actually World War II public works started picking up. Most all of the farm help left. They found out they was a world out there besides farming, you know. Of course, that left people with no help. Somebody had to be here. Things were changing, I mean, they were going over to machine power. It was a different world for them. I had a friend, we could go to him when we had problems. He had about a photographic memory and he was probably as skilled a mechanic as you could find just about anywhere. The only problem was he had no get-up. He had the knowledge, but he didn’t want to do anything. So you’d go to him, and we’d talk to him [smiles broadly] and he’d say, “Well, what’s the symptoms?” You know, and usually he’d find whatever was happening to it, you know. He’d light him up a cigarette and go over there and sit down like a dog somewhere, like he was in a trance, he wouldn’t say nothing for ten minutes. And then he’d say, “Well, this is the way it’s supposed to operate.” And then he said, “This is what it’s doing, this is why it’s doing it, and this is what you need to do to correct it.” I mean, he was just spitting it out like he was a computer, you know. It was just amazing to watch his mind work. So that’s the way we was getting stuff repaired. We was coming in to something that we didn’t know anything about, just like your dad there [gesturing to Jereial] coming in to computers when all this electronic age started [smiles]. It was something different, you know, we had to learn it as we went along.
R: Can you tell me about your childhood on the farm, what your duties were?
W: Well, you know, I just followed the rest of ‘em, you know. I don’t reckon I was ever really told to do anything. I just did what they did, you know. Monkey see, monkey do, you know. And, of course, Mommy took me up to the barn and tried to get me interested in milking. Sometimes I’d do all right and sometimes I wouldn’t. And she tried to get me to help in the garden, but it seemed like it was so much better to be out there following the rest of them around, the rest of the men around, you know. When we got out of school, it was just…at first it was tobacco. Every day it rained you were usually out there on your hands and knees taking out tobacco, you know, wet as dogs and mud so thick on the bottom of your feet, you couldn’t hardly carry your feet. So, when we got that over with, of course, they would have been in the cornfield prior to that—of course, I would have been in school, so I would have missed most of that. Then it was time to get in the cornfield and start plowing the corn and hoeing the weeds out. Pretty soon I figured out how to hold the plow. That was faster than hoeing, so I did the plow and they did the hoeing. Then it wasn’t long before, nearly always on the Fourth of July you just figure on having to cut wheat. Get on the bindery, cutting the wheat right on the holidays. You have to figure on that’s when it’s gonna happen. Of course, as soon as that was over with, it was hay, hay, hay until it snowed. [smiles broadly] Of course, sometime in the time of all of that here come the old thrash machine making its rounds, from one grain field to the other, with fifteen men up on it. Great old big bar, ropes on the side—they’d take it over on these hillsides. Usually sometimes if you were lucky enough and it didn’t get in too bad a shape you could thrash it out of the shop, but a lot of the time you got to the point where you had to get it all up and make a big old stack. You know, get on your hands and knees and stack that old stuff. Supposedly in a level place where they could get the machine, you know, you could get somebody else’s help and level that old machine up. Get up that great old big long belt and get the tractor up about forty or fifty feet away from you. Got that thing rolling and pretty soon the dust is flying and you couldn’t hardly see who one another was within ten feet of one, within ten feet of one another, maybe throwing a bale again. Occasionally somebody’s old straw hat might go through the machine and get tore all to pieces. First they had to rig the straw there, put five or six people right on the dust end, have the awfulest rig you’ve ever seen there. Almost like a house trailer. And then later on, of course, the hay baler come in and you would have everybody on the stack. Kept one man busy measuring the grains that went through, kept about four people busy hauling it to the grain boxes and put it in sacks. A lot of times you went to your neighbors and get to borrow sacks from them, maybe two or three neighbors, borrowed every feed sack you could find. The women they ended up having to sew some of them up, and all that stuff—burlap back in those days. Got that old grain in the grain box. Later on in the season you take it down to the flour mill like you’re depositing money in the bank. You get a statement on the pounds you had. Of course, you can go on over there and get you some flour when you needed it, just like writing a check. And, of course, there was a wheat man who’d get the husk off of it. You’d bring that back and feed it to your animals. I guess that all played out probably, what, Mommy, by the ‘60s at least, didn’t it?
MB: Yeah, I believe so.
W: I know Walt Taylor said he didn’t know but two wheat crops left in the country. Maxwell Mill was the last mill to go out of business, making flour. Of course, you know, we grew white corn. As far as the corn goes, you grew white corn, you shell that and take it up to the mill where they grind it into cornmeal. Long before that they had these little old grist mills around. Nearly every family had to grow their own corn, and that was the child’s job on the weekends, to go down and get a two-bushel sack, hang it across the horses, and go down to the grist mill and they took a peck out of every bushel for grinding. Of course, they had that meal they could sell, you know. That could get one sizable family through from one week to the next. I remember the people who lived over the hill over here, they were talking about going over to the old grist mills down here right above where the Quick Stop is, down the bank there where the old rock quarry is. Of course, that was long before my time. That was the story that was told to me, the part about the grist mill.
R: So, you’ve always lived here?
W: Been here ever since, with the exception of when I was married I just lived in the house down here across the road. We built that house—I believe it took us five years to build on Saturdays. It took us that long to finish it. We started that when I was about fifteen years old, I guess. I was married about twenty-two, wasn’t that right, Mommy?
MB: Yeah, I think so.
W: I was about twenty-two years old, I guess, and that lasted about ten years, and I didn’t make that mistake again. [laughs long and loudly] No, I’ve been here ever since, of course, it was Daddy, Daddy and his two brothers, of course they were all living here at that time, and my mother’s the only one out of the six that’s left.
R: How do you think your farming experience would differ if you were on a much larger farm?
W: Well, the biggest problem would be trying to get skilled people, you know, to operate it. ‘Cause you can, I mean, in five minutes of raking it can cost you more money than you can make in a year’s time. This old equipment, you know, especially them tractors you have to give them a little respect. A lot of people, I don’t know how you can survive the cattle farming by yourself. And the only help they’ve been able to get, as far as I know, is just schoolboys or somebody who’s unfit for any other job. I don’t think it’s possible to earn enough money on a farm to pay for the quality help that you would need. I don’t know how they survive. Some way or the other they get by.