The Life Story of Wade
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 [our] 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 sixty
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 [farm] down on Kents Ridge, it was acquired in 1919.
And, of course, the [farm] over on Paint Lick, it was acquired in ’49,
‘cause I can go back to the tombstone where my aunt’s husband was buried,
[it’s] there on the tombstone, so I know about the time of that.
These fourteen acres down here, it was back in the ‘50s, I guess, when
they managed to get hold of it…. Maybe
about ’55.
Somewhere along my line we got tied up with some Irish, and
they took the “O” off of “O’Ferrell.”
Daddy’s half-brother, I guess, was the first male child.
His first name was just pure “O,” and they didn’t even give him a
middle name. He said he just liked
names short. So his name was just
pure O’Ferrell. And I heard our
line was Scotch-Irish and Cherokee Indian. And I tell you, that was a crazy bunch. It’s like that old Irish feller said on TV, he said [in
Irish accent] “Me Irish temper got the best of me!” [laughs loudly] Years
ago I heard my aunt and them talking, and people referred to us as “those old
high-tempered Ferrells.” [laughs]
There’s an old book here, I reckon, laying around here about back when
there was forts and fighting with the Indians, the record in that book there,
the courthouse records or something. There’s
some doubt to whether there was any truth about it, I mean, if there was any
truth in the courthouse records, where most of it came from.
Of course, there’s a few little stories in there, you know, different
things, and they never know where [the settlers here] belong.
They came all the way from Big A Mountain, all the way into northern West
Virginia, kept moving around, they didn’t know where they belonged, according
to that book. And [my cousin] Carol
Lee was talking about it, and she said, firstly, after they was fighting around
with the British, a lot of them come down here for the scrappings.
Secondly, the Irish and Scottish come down here because it looked like
their homeland. They liked the
mountains. And then I reckon they
was used to digging coal, so they liked to dig coal.
So, I don’t know, there’s all kinds of stories to be told.
Ten percent of it’s truth, and the rest of it is whatever, somebody’s
imagination, or somebody’s added to it, or whatever.
So, I don’t know.
You know, [this area] just seems like the place to be.
Like Carol Lee said—she’s a schoolteacher—and she read a little
book or two [about it]. We actually
grew roots, you know, our family been here so long it just becomes part of you.
You actually…I told somebody one time, I said, “I think the farm owns
me instead of me owning it.” You
grow up with it, and there’s just certain things you do at certain times, you
don’t think anything about it, and I know a lot of people, it just about blows
their minds, you know, the way we go at it and everything. They think you’re supposed to get out [of work] at a
certain time and then you come back, from four o’clock on you’re supposed to
play or whatever. You know you got
something to do, and you know you got to do it and if you don’t get it done,
then it’s just gonna cost you. Just
like you, if you work at a public job and you didn’t put in but four hours in
an eight-hour day [laughs loudly for a minute] somewhere along the line
you’d come up short on the cash flow. [smiles
broadly]
I was born in 1945, January 23—of course, down at the
Clinch Valley Hospital at that time. I
was 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…down
at the tip end of it, down in the holler there….
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….
It seems like they said I was named after…the postmaster or something
or other like that. Of course, my
middle name was my great-grandfather’s name, Gilbert.
My great- grandfather on my mother’s side, Gilbert.
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, 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, 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, to
control the wheat and the corn. And
the fertilizer come into existence. You
get a little fertilizer and a little lime, and sometimes some grass seed itself.
Yeah, everything like that helps out.
From the time I was big enough to get away from the house, I guess you could say I stayed in their back pocket. Daddy and his two brothers, I was with them most of the time, with the exception of when I was on a pony roaming the hillside, living in a make-believe world, I guess. [smiles] We’d go back there on the back of the place and camp out, build us up a fire and thought we’d be Indians, I reckon, fry some ham and eggs and spend stuff like that through the summer. Had an old dog here, and we’d go out in the night, get skunk all over us. [laughs] That old dog, most of the time, he’s the one that got the skunk on him, and I’d just stay as far back as I could. They called it possum-hunting, but every once in a while you’d run in on a skunk. A boy and a horse and a dog and a gun, I guess that was the deal back in those days. People thought nothing about guns, kids running around here, nine, ten years old with 22 rifles. Nobody ever got hurt. Smacking tin cans, shooting at birds, running all the rabbits, whatever there was. Usually never killed much, just out strolling around, I reckon, running the hills, swimming in the old muddy pond over here with the cows. [laughs] And later on we’d get on the horses, and we’d—all this was farmland through here—and we’d go over across the way here, and we’d go all the way over there on the little river, riding the horses over there and go swimming. Camp out over there a little bit. Get somebody to take us over there and drop us off. And we’d go over there and stay on the river on the weekends.
I just followed the rest of [my family].
I don’t reckon I was ever really told to do anything.
I just did what they did. 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. 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, 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—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 flourmill 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, by the ‘60s at least.
I know Walt 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 gristmills 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 gristmills 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 gristmill.
Been [on this farm] 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? 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, they
were all living here at that time, and my mother’s the only one out of the six
that’s left.
Well, I graduated from high school. That’s as far as I went. When I got out of high school, 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 there 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?” 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.” He was just spitting it out like he was a computer. 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 Rachel’s father Jereial, who was present at one of the interviews] 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.
Mainly I guess [we raise] beef cow—big, little, medium,
and small—about seventy-some head here at the present time.
Probably about twenty or thirty 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 forty-seven 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.
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 them, 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.
Well, [the Kents Ridge farm] was about one hundred and
twenty-five acres, that’s according to old Meade—it could be anything, they
leave a little loophole in it—because it’s more or less.
And it’s just pasture now. Back
in my father’s time, in my grandfather’s time, they had twelve acres of
corn, twelve acres of wheat and, I don’t know, x-number acres of hay.
And, of course, they had sheep, cattle, and hogs.
Back in the, well, I guess it must have been prior to the ‘30s, they
was raising a cane patch there, made for molasses for the family use, I guess,
maybe sold some, I don’t know. It
was so far back they never did elaborate on it too much other than the fact that
they had wheat down there, the big deal was cutting wheat down there, having the
grain binder and the horses, you know. And
it was a continuous fight trying to keep it from growing up. In the fall of the year they was cutting briars and weeds and
brush and all the undesirable plants, flowers, whatever it might be, it’s the
only way they had of keeping it clean, other than the mowing machine—they had
a horse-drawn mowing machine back in those days.
And, of course, I guess about the time World War II was over, everybody
started going into public works; therefore, farm labor became hard to come by,
you know, so people could make more money at other places.
I guess the old farm boys didn’t know there was an outside world until
they got…[laughs] until they was in the army and figured out there was
another world out there, so that’s the way things went.
Of course, my father’s brother-in-law, who would have been my uncle by
marriage, was killed over at the other place.
He had a premonition, I reckon, that he was gonna get killed, so he told
me one of the Ferrell boys had a place during the war they had been able to sell
most anything they could grow and when they had got enough money together they
bought that place over there. We
left the place down on Kents Ridge and come up here because I was school-aged
and they wanted me to be able to get to the schoolhouse, and my uncle when he
was here he went over to Paint Lick. Of
course, that left that place down on Kents Ridge vacant.
Eventually they just turned everything out, and it’s just pasture now,
and a lot of it has went to woodland. They
got over there and they didn’t seem to have any…of course, there was nothing
left to do with no help left to take care of the other place, so that one just
kind of went. That’s where I been
down there today trying to get in one of those state-funded water systems, and
we’ve been messing with that for about two years.
Got to do some fencing, drive in a few posts today before the ground got
wet, if we could. It’s, ah, I
don’t know, we got approximately thirty head of cattle running down there
during the summer. Of course, we
just bring them out here and feed them up here during the winter because it’s
un-accessible to the tractor down there in the wintertime.
We got cattle over there [at the Paint Lick farm], got [pauses] I guess [pauses] I don’t know, about twenty acres of hay we rolled in, and, of course, we keep, oh, twenty-some head of young [animals] there, five or ten cows there or something or other. Of course, we get them sold off when winter comes on. We don’t put our second cutting of grass up for the cattle to graze on, try to feed about fifteen head over during for the winter. About all going on over there.
Well, usually [in the morning] first I just go out and feed
the hogs and let the chickens out and 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, 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 doin’?” [laughs
loudly] She was over there from
Grundy, so she had her own way of talking.
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.
The biggest problem [on a larger farm] 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.
Evidently [my family] put this straw in the barn years ago
for the workhorses up here, I reckon, and that old barn had doors on it, and I
bet they set the straw carrier up in that metal door up there.
Said the dust got so bad the men knocked the boards off the top of the
barn [while thrashing the hay] and stuck their heads out the barn door where
they could get air, trying to spread that stuff out in there, and back down.
See, Archie down there had this old machine, and depending on which
direction they were starting, he had to guess who was his best friend, you know,
and sometimes we’d be lucky enough…. Of course, he ended up stacking the
rest of it out in the field, and letting it dry out a while.
We’d pick that up and then sometimes we’d be lucky enough that we’d
have a couple of people. And
you’d need about two or three people hauling it, otherwise if it was raining
you ain’t got no other choice but to get out there and stack that stuff.
Start one of those twelve-ball of wheat stocks, and start going around
and around and around, and all of a sudden you got the stubble turned out that
way. And down on your hands and
knees around and around and it would get up to, oh, about half the height of
this house, maybe. Or a little bit higher than that. And then, of course, you got to put out, and some people
would get good enough they’d put a pole in, and they’d make two.
Usually back by the time I was big enough to know anything they cut back
on this wheat. They could only grow
about six acres or something or another like that.
And so they were, uh…they put two stacks up where they could pull the
thrash box in-between it, you know. And
this man he’d do it in this way, out that way, in the other, into the old
machine. The thing is, nowadays
nobody got no use for them [thrashers]. Maybe
it was some more up there in that area around Maxwell.
Chett had one; it may still be down there on the river.
And that one old Archie had, and before that Leonard had it, it was down
there where old Cannonball Honaker lived, right down there, near the church.
It was down there for a long time. Before
that I don’t know what he drug out from under it.
And the old Ford tractors…. It
was the first thing that Ford built. Had
iron wheels on it and was built in Ireland in 1936.
I heard Daddy talk about it. Said
they had to start up here with them old thrash boxes with them old iron cleats
on it, and he said if he ever started slipping he’d just bury himself there
and he’d have to go get a team of horses and pull it out.
Of course, I heard Daddy talk about…they used to bring a bowler years
ago, when he was young, to thrash with. And
then Ronnie over there, his dad was telling about the days of the treadmill,
when the horses were running on a treadmill to power it, the old thrashing
machine. Just spin under their
feet, they had a team of horses that run on that thing that rolled under their
feet and caused the wheels to turn. Of
course, the treadmill ya’ll know about it is the one that you try to keep your
body going on at the doctor’s office or to exercise, especially people in
these big towns.
Yeah, we had [a binder].
It’s up there in the ditch line now.
Old canvas is still up there in the granary log….
They pulled this one here in later years, that little Ford tractor.
Put a short tongue in it, used some trucks on it.
We had a little John Deere, 430 crawler here and we pulled it.
We had a little bit better traction, got more of a heel on it, to deal
with. Of course, one time there was
an old reaper here. The first old
binder that came here, as I understood, it came here in a case, the factory man
come here and put it up. I reckon
Granddaddy bought the first binder that was in this area here and old Phil there
where you go up to the airport there, said they hooked the horses to that thing
and would turn straight up that hill and that thing would create the biggest
beating and banging—they’d never seen anything like that.
Said it calmed down by the time they got to the top of the hill and got
used to what was going on. And the
remains of that old binder is setting down there at the old place, the roots of
that big old tree is growing up through it.
Some parts of it, too, are up the holler here.
Seems like the Wylers’ [unclear] had one here, they gave it up
to us, hauled it up here ‘cause they never could use it.
Then in later years, I was, what, I don’t know, about 25 years old or
something when they got hold of a combine.
We give, I guess, about $300 for it or something.
It was basically rusted down, but it was useful.
We used it, and I still got that thing parked in the shed up there.
Of course, I doubt I’ll ever use it.
On that tractor the grain box held about 24 bushels.
We took the pickup back there and shot it out in there.
Of course, I used the four-inch grain that was always used to jerk it out
of the pickup truck from the grain box.
Yeah, we’ve got chickens here. They used to have quite a
bit. What did them old big crates
used to hold, fifteen dozen? Anyhow,
they would take two of them a week over there and they’d write them up some
kind of bill and they’d trade them down in the store, and I guess they’d
bill us for them over the next little while.
Then, no one wanted to buy any country eggs, and that was the end of
that, so we’ve got about twenty running around over on the hillside here.
Uh, we get what we need. And
some nuns came in here about ten years ago, and they live out here, and so they
took up with us, and they still come over here and help around the house and the
garden, whatever they can, and they get whatever they can use out of it.
Of course, we give a few away. Back
in those days we [fed a lot of wheat to the chickens], but now we use corn.
They did feed the wheat to the chickens, and they always did look forward
to that. And they’d all jump into
it like it was going to be the last grain in the world.
Then back when we was down at the lower place, and it was just a few
years after we come up here, they raised turkeys.
The last one, we like to have never got rid of them.
I remember the guy down here, like to get them to Clem before he could
ever get them sold. What was it,
cut them up and hang them by the neck and let them bleed?
I was at school, but I remember [the women in my family] talking about
it. I can imagine what kind of a
job that was….
I remember Charlie taking the tobacco down to Gate
City [Virginia] one time. It’s a
nice little place down there…. And
I don’t know what’s going to come of the tobacco deal.
I believe most people are just hoping they take a buyout and get
completely out of the business. Well,
you know, the fact is around here you try to raise it and you need help.
Chances are whoever you thought you could depend on when it come time to
harvest, there’d be nobody around. ‘Course,
you can hire migrant workers and get them in here, but these old barns here,
they wasn’t built with tobacco in mind. They’re
over a hundred years old. To hang
that barn up there takes about three or four people.
You start putting those away, that tobacco crop and there ain’t no one
around. ‘Course, some of them
hang it down in the fields, and I don’t know whether that’s such a good idea
or not. I reckon someone got by
with it. I seen a lot of that
scaffolding used down there, what, in Saltville, down through there, you know,
over toward Shiloh [unclear]. And
some of that scaffolding, you know, it amazes me how they can even keep it
hanging. It’s all right for a
young person, but for us old timers it’s a little different situation.
It’s [tobacco] always made me feel nauseated.
Get it in when it’s damp and get nicotine poisoning, and you are a sick
boy. You know, they messed around
and messed around with this tobacco, and used to be it wasn’t a bit of trouble
to get a standing plant bed, and you just consider yourself lucky if you get it
in there. It doesn’t matter how
scientific you get with it…. [My
tobacco] sits a little bit. Of
course, Tim can only handle so much—he doesn’t mind reformation.
It’s just a hobby with him, you know.
David over there, he had a waterbed, but I haven’t been around them
much. He decided to get out while
the getting out was good when he thought the buyout was coming and he didn’t
want to be stuck with all that stuff or they’d get nothing out of it.
So, he got out of it, and he started growing his plants the old way
again. The nerves or something was
going bad in his back, and his legs weren’t doing so good, and I don’t know
what the injuries in his back were, got so bad he couldn’t do the job.
There wasn’t no way [I could leave the farm].
Somebody had to be here. It
was an impossible situation. Too
much of it, or too little of it to make any money at to be able to work another
job. There’s hardly anybody in
this area that I can think of…I’m probably the only person whose source of
income doesn’t come from some other source.
If nothing else, their wives work. You
can ask George down there, his wife does home demonstration.
And G.I.’s wife she was a nurse, you know.
About everyone else had another source of income, and some way or another
we’ve managed to survive. And
Clint [unclear] over there, I got to thinking about him when I was
talking to Mary Margaret, and I got to thinking, well, some of his family got to
working on that farm. ‘Course,
they’ve got…when was the Bowens’…they got the original land grant from
the king of England, I believe it’s been in the family that long. And
then, Charlotte…she works with the newspaper over here, the one in Richlands,
and was going through the [town records] one day and found at the Bowens’
there was a secret room in there where they hid people during the war.
Got that room no one could figure how to get into it.
Of course, with the newspaper into it now, they’ve found some way or
the other to get into it. Chopped a
hole into it. The curiosity must
have killed them. And the old breed
of horses there was left during the Civil War, they would take what they wanted
and leave theirs [horses]. It’s a
dun mare, a saddle-bred, Southern type of something or other, it’s
cream-colored, the tail is not reddish and it’s not brown and it’s not
black. They’re a unique horse, a beautiful horse.
Nobody never knew what breed they was or anything, they just left them up
there, that old mare, and this has probably been fifteen or twenty generations
later, and this color of horses is still showing up, no matter what they breed
them to. What in the world they
could have been, I have no idea what they might be besides a type of saddle-bred
horse. They traveled that area over
there when they went to capture the salt mines [in the Civil War], and they had
to recapture it three times, and then they went out there about to where Fred
was, down to Low Gap in the mountain there one time.
His great-grandmother, I remember, she had told her story to [pauses],
gee, what in the world was that stuff? Bill
Combo [unclear]. Said they
spent two weeks in a cave up there, said first came the South, wagon after wagon
after wagon, and they laid all over, camped all over that country out over there
and didn’t want to get out of there. Said
then here come the North. They was
camped all over in there, and they said they stayed over there for two weeks,
afraid to come out, so they got across over there and try to, try to recapture
that salt mine. When the North came
here, over this old dumpster over here, to that old building, they said it’s
full of musket balls, and they tried to hold them off there, but they couldn’t
handle them, so they finally lost and they went on.
It is hard to imagine people coming up from over there in Ohio, coming
from over there on horseback, just to get killed.
Over nothing! Absolutely
nothing! When it comes down to it.
Some people love pain, you just think about old Davy Crockett and all of
them who went all the way to Texas just to get killed, all over there to where I
don’t know, my history gets vague. I
just thought, going all that way from Tennessee, going all the way down there,
all the way down to the Alamo just to get killed.
And usually they didn’t have a chance when they went down there.
They just loved a good fight, I reckon.
You see all this stuff on TV, and, of course, it tells you a little bit
about school. Of course, then
somebody adds a little bit to it, and it gets all scrambled in your brain.
Kind of like what I said about history, it can be most anything.
Well, my parents [have had the most influence on my
farming], and, secondly, the county agent, I mean, they’re put in this area
here to educate us and keep us up-to-date on what goes on, you know.
We started out with James [when I was] a child.
He was always a pleasant person, and, of course, now Mike has stepped
into his shoes. You got all these old chemicals and everything, got to where
you have to be educated every so often and get your license up before you can
buy certain restricted chemicals and stuff.
Due to that, I mean, we got to know one another better, I guess;
otherwise you can only sit through so many hours of that every so often.
We just, uh, just about all the farms is gone around right in this area,
you know, we just kinda here by ourself. Most
of the ones that were farmers either sold out or, you know, are dead.
There’s not hardly any of them left.
The Reeves’ out here, they’re our neighbors, and they, uh, they sold
out, and, of course, he’s, Bill’s stayed, he’s dealing in the real estate,
and he’s got a little bit of land left. He
just throws up a little bit of hay, and I think his son got to keeping a few
cattle now. He was leasing out
some, so he’s back there on the land. We
have…I reckon, ten months he raised tobacco down here. He got a few cattle on the Ralph place, the only place close
to us that got any cattle till we get down on Kents Ridge.
And the Horns they…they’re down there, as good a neighbors as a
person could ever have. And over at
Paint Lick we got a subdivision over there, so we got a little of all [kinds of
people] over there. I don’t know
but that there’s too much stuff to say for that or not.
A lot of people come out over from Grundy over there and bought the
houses, a little five-acre tracks I guess it was they thought they’d maybe
farm or something, I guess. Had
something in them…had to do with the county orders or something or other, the
thing had to be asphalt if it was less than five acres, so they got them a
little track or the other. Other
people that came in there came from way down in Grundy, down in the coalfields,
you know, of course, Father [muffled] said everything was company land.
They just went anywhere they wanted to and did anything they wanted to,
wasn’t nothing but trees, you couldn’t hurt nothing, and they hadn’t quite
adjusted to being over here yet. Of
course, there’s always a trail of beer bottles and [we were] house sitting
over there for a while, don’t know that I did more than four or five little
outfits, had to get in and see what was in there.
We got some tenants over there now, and that may be all right.
Different cultures, you know, of people, and they’re usually whatever
their parents are, what they’ve been taught down through the generations.
Usually I try to take [the products of our farms] to
TriState, over in Abingdon. And
it’s a bigger market, so it attracts more buyers.
A bit of an inconvenience, but, I don’t know, this market up here at
Tazewell is a little unstable. You
can do good one time and then you think, “Well, things will be all right.”
And you go up there, I don’t know, it could be just as bad as it was
good the week before. Ah, I only
travel up the road to [Tazewell] about ten or fifteen mile, I suppose; if you
only take off ten or fifteen mile down that way [to Abingdon], it’s not so bad
after all. And it’s about an
hour, I guess, an hour and twenty minutes or something or the other, depending
on traffic [to Abingdon]. And if
you get your cattle bedded up, of course, you lose if you get drifted there, and
you’re gonna lose if you don’t sell them anyway, so get them up and get them
going, get up about four o’clock in the morning and [laughs and smiles
broadly] stagger out. Get up
and get out there and be there when the scales opens up. Usually there won’t be but three or four in front of you.
If you move right along, you can be back to the house maybe by eight or
ten o’clock [in the morning], but if you do make a mistake and get a late
start, you might be there for four hours. I’ve
seen them over a mile, a string of trucks setting there unloading, with a load
over a mile long.
We sell some hogs individually, occasionally some cattle.
Three or four people come here to get beef, I guess.
And that’s not every year, ‘cause they buy six-hundred pound beef and
put away about three hundred pounds, and sometimes they may be eating on that
for three years before they get that eat up.
[laughs] Most of
them, you know, are older people. The
young ones, they like French fries and hamburgers.
[laughs] They don’t
fool with stuff like that. A lot of
the people, you know, they’re just barely making it anyway.
They got a home to pay for, and a couple of cars to pay on, and all the
utilities and everything, and there’s just not a whole lot left. And it’s hard enough for some of them just to get enough
together to pay for a hog. And
that’s only about two hundred dollars, or something or the other like that,
depending on the size of it.
Seems like the farm people live longer.
I don’t know where I heard it from, but we had a nurse who used to come
here, hang around with us, the doctor thought it was because of the stress, I
don’t know what it was, but we…of course, see, we harvest a lot of food off
the place and eat it, and we wasn’t eating all this, whatever it is, all this
food you get out of the store. Seems
like everybody’s stayed reasonably well, you know, until age caught up with
them and their body just starts wearing out.
Oh, I don’t know, I guess it’ll [small family farms] be a thing of
the past unless it’s just something the family left to them, if you ask me.
Every now and then somebody will get ahead and be able to get a few
acres, but it’s just about got to be a hobby.
A few larger farms are probably staying in the family, over here in Wards
Cove across the mountain from us, right through this area I don’t think…town
just keeps moving in and moving in, most of the younger people they want to sell
it and get the money out of it, do whatever they…whatever their interests are.
Guess you have to grow up with it, and if you do…somebody said it one
time, I heard a bunch of guys talking, wondering why they kept buying these old
tractors and stuff. Said the only
thing he could figure out was that they were addicted to it.
You grow up with it, and I really think that it’s in some people’s
genes just to farm. I mean, Daddy
said that he reckoned he’d do it even if he didn’t make a penny at it, just
to have something to eat, you know. Everybody’s
put here, I guess, for a different purpose.
Everybody’s designed to do something, and, of course, everybody’s not
meant to do the same thing.
Yeah, it would be a help [if the economy supported family
farms more], but I have a feeling it’s going to go the other way.
They passed some legislation, especially in [one region], I reckon,
trying to give people a little rural relief there, trying to save these family
farms. The equipment dealer told
me, he said, “You just wait till these family farms leave, and the big
businesses gets a hold of the land.” He
said, “There’s a TV in every room, and every member [of a family] having one
car or a vehicle will be a thing of the past.”
He said, “The most expensive thing that they’ll be buying is food.”
So, I don’t know whether it’ll be your generation or the next
generation, but somebody is going to bite the bullet. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but these family
farms, people quit producing on these family farms, and they’re producing this
cheap food, uh, for the consumer, and the trouble just starts. These big companies, they don’t, they’ll just shut us
down and control the food, and we’ll only produce so much…it’ll be like
the gas company. We’ll only
produce what we can get a good price for. It’s
business, supply and demand. Hard
thing about it is that this agriculture, the way it’s been in the past, is
that you can’t just throw it in the warehouse till the price goes up on it.
It’s all perishable items.
Time will tell. After twenty years or forty years or fifty years, they will know [if genetically engineered foods are harmful]. Of course, a lot of this food is coming through these stores, I say it is…of course, they tell you every day how long you should cook it. You practically got to cremate it to kill all the bacteria, and it is really bad contaminated. Of course, they’re in the business to make money, and the more food they can produce, the quicker they can produce it, the more they can turn off, the more money they’re gonna make. A lot of people still…we have several people who come here who will only buy hogs here. Said they…they probably say to themselves, “I know what I’m eating.” They don’t even want them off the stock market up here [in Tazewell] because they’ve been fed everything from soy beans to peanuts to garbage to whatever, chicken manure, distillery grain…and everything, anything an animal could eat and turn into protein. I know a few years ago Glenn was talking about. He fed his steer on chicken manure, and, of course, the thing he uses is mud fat. Glenn said, “Whatcha gonna do?” And he said, “Slaughter it and eat it.” And he said, “Well, you can’t eat the meat.” He said, “Ah,” and then later on he found he had to throw every bit of it away. Said that it had such a foul taste to it he couldn’t even eat it. Of course, this is where this mad cow disease come from. These dead chickens and dead cows and everything else they ground up and put right back into the feed and fed it back to them. Of course, that’s what they’re saying now; I don’t know what it’s gonna look like. We grow our own beef and grow our own pork, and we used to grow our own chickens. Of course, we don’t eat any…very little unless someone brings it in here, very little poultry. Of course, my mother, when she was able, had been up to this point, canned a lot of green beans, and, of course, we grow our own sugar corn out here in the field, and we harvest it and froze it up. And grow our own tomatoes, make juice out of it, can the tomatoes and the potatoes here that we grew, and they keep in the winter. And we basically…outside of the junk food we buy and, of course, we did have some cornmeal ground here once, but we got away from that, so…. The flour in the mill comes from the store, all the other things you can’t get from the farm, such as sugar, other little things. The rest of it, we just eat the farm food. Jo and Martha, they got to coming over here, and we got to giving them some to come home [with], and they just got to figuring that their grocery bill wasn’t near as high as it had been, and they learned to like the food, so they help in the garden, and they take whatever they want out of the garden home with them. They talked about eating one day, and one evening—I think they only cooked about one meal since they started working here—said everything that was on the table had come from the farm, and they’ve learned to eat similar to what we eat, if you can compare it.
We’ve got one of those EQIP [Environmental Quality
Incentive Program] 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. 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.
We’re trying to do that old EQIP down there, and I
managed…I thought the ground was drying up and I got down there with a load of
gravel, and I almost didn’t get up the hill.
Hit a wet spot in the hillside down over there, and I got up there where
it took almost half a day to get nine tons around two troughs….
The government thinks of funny stuff, you know, they got to have all the
paperwork on it. I reckon maybe we’ll survive that. One of these days I begin to wonder if them old cows is worth
it. The thing about it they say,
this is only gonna last so long and then after while if there’s anything done
it’s gonna come out of your pocket. And,
of course, this is a 75 percent deal. Somewhere
along the line when things get bad enough…of course, up these hollers they
don’t pay no attention, the cow’s not going to be allowed as close to the
creek. Take the trough out there
and put them 25 feet away from the creek. That’s
what it’s gonna come down to…. I
don’t know what they’re thinking about. They were on our case about this, and, you know, all these
gas companies has moved in, and all this timbering is going on, and when all
that gets into the creek, they’re gonna think that a cow, you know, wasn’t
nothing. People say, “Well, the
cow’s been here ever since there’s been a White man here, what’s the big
deal?” Been going on all these
years, but what happened is they got so now they concentrate the cattle in one
area. ‘Course now you got trucks,
and you didn’t have no way of moving feed years ago, and so people will put
too many of them on the creek bed and they dug their own grave, and the rest of
us have to pay the price for it. And
haul in hundreds and hundreds of round bales, all kinds of grainage here and
chicken manure and distillery grain, and Lord knows what all else and kept them
in an area there, and, of course, if they [the cattle] can get to the creek’s
it’s the first place they want to be. Then,
on the other hand, then there’s these old ponds over the hill over here.
When it’s miserable hot, and the old cows are burning up, they go into
that pond and bring their body temperature down, and, of course, to get the
insects off their heels and legs and off their belly.
And these rivers, people don’t realize what benefit it is to the
livestock. Once all this manure and
stuff has come from these cattle it’s getting in these creek beds, and it has
to quit coming in there to the bottom of the creek bed or the riverbed, and it
has to be enriched so the fish can live, so the quality of the fish won’t
start dropping. ‘Course, then you
got the other side of it, these chemicals and the fertilizers, they get to
washing into it, too, you know, and that hurts things.
The bottom of that riverbed has…I mean, in order for stuff to grow for
the fish to live off of, it’s gonna have to be enriched, and the tons and tons
of cow manure ending up in there, all the way down in there, to whichever dam it
may get in. It’s, uh, probably a
little cycle…. Well, a few of us
got a little enough sense to try it, and, of course, there’s a few nickels
involved. Every once in a while you
get to keep a dime to yourself. It’s probably not worth it.
They give you twenty dollars an hour on the tractor and six dollars an
hour for your labor, if you want to do it yourself, or you can contract it out
and let somebody else do it. If
you’re a good enough trader, sometimes you can come out with a dollar or two.
Of course, I don’t know, as far as that place goes down there on Kents
Ridge, the cattle had to travel so far to water, so it seemed like only a good
idea to get the water on up there so they’d do their grazing up there.
Get about starved for water, and then they get down there and gorge
themselves, and then it’d be half a day before they get back up there where
the grass is again.
We’re pulling [our water] from a spring, or trying to.
And then at this other place we had over there we got on one of these
CREP [Conservation Reserve Enhancement
Program] programs, one guy calls it the “CRAP program” because he had
to plant some trees along the creek. It
was a hundred percent deal. We had
this twelve acres on the back side there. It
wasn’t suitable for hay. Then we,
about mid-summer, and sometimes before that, we run out of water, you know, and
couldn’t use it, and the fencing over there and that old lane goes to pot, and
I told them when we started that, I said, “It’s just a little old pond, if
anything; if water runs off from it I’d be all right.”
I said I’d be satisfied with that, but they had to get into that mess.
That was a ten thousand dollar deal just to get a water trough over there
when they could have got up five hundred dollars and dug up a place, you know,
where the water is. Not much the government ever does makes any sense.
Bill said he never saw nothing the government ever got messed up in that
they didn’t make a mess out of. Took
three or four guys and give them just a little bit of money, they could have
went out here and figured out something, but, no, they got this layer of
paperwork this thick and, you know, everything has to be done, and everybody’s
got to come around and check on everybody else.
They hire one, they hire three to watch him.
We got a paper here just today saying that they was going to have a program up here, and they’re gonna haul that away. We’ve got the farms in the forests, we’re the foresters, we make up forty percent of the county farms with ours. We’re going…anything that goes along, we’re going to catch the heat from it. And, I guess, just trying…at the present time, just trying to get the cattle away from the creeks, you know, especially where it’s along the road where people can see what’s going on. [laughs] It’s all these busybodies who got nothing better to do. [pauses] Well, I don’t know what it’ll turn into, I guess, as long as it works, as the time goes on.
I’ve been up close to them [the Native American paintings on Paint Lick], but I never did go right up to them. Anyhow, it’s up here on this end of the mountain [points off to the side of him]. That acid rain is, I reckon, about to get the best of it [the paintings]. I never did go right up to them where I could see them, but, you know, I was pretty close…. But I reckon they never did figure out whether it was the first- or second-wave of Indians. Of course, all this information is up there at the fort, you know, up there at the museum. We always called it the fort, because there was an old Indian fort up there, to start with, or in make-believing. Daddy said when he was young that they had a little [mock] battle between the Whites and the Indians [laughs] for entertainment, for the Fourth of July everybody would get up there and, I guess, take something to eat. Yeah, that finally turned into a museum after the Higginbothams, I reckon. They passed on…of course, the road out through there [was built] and busted it up. Evidently, I don’t know what it meant to the Indians there, but there was a big burial ground there. They had tents up there, and, of course, you wasn’t old enough to know it, but they dug there for a week. It was, I don’t know, it was like a little town or something that was up there. I reckon people came from everywhere…. Yeah, right up from there where the fort is, up from where the highway is now. See, they can legally…when the highway is coming through, they can legally dig in a place like that without getting into too much trouble. I was about fourteen, fifteen years old and just knowing it had happened, and it really was no interest to me back at that time. Never thought nothing, never really that much about the Indians…. Then, of course, later the family talked about it. We actually crossed paths with them, too, and this area back here it must have been quite infested with Indians on the east and west Town Hollow Branch. Of course, where the place is on east Town Hollow Branch, they said there must have been a campground of Indians. No doubt because there were lots of arrowheads found back there when they worked the fields by hand, found one white flint. Someone said that probably had to have come out of eastern Virginia. And, of course, it was a chestnut forest, basically. And, of course, that was what the squirrels and the turkeys lived off of; therefore, the Indians lived off of that, the food cycle.
It’s just me [that works on the farms].
Well, Tim, he’s got some tobacco up there, and I go up there, and
he’s supposed to do everything for half the value, and I go up there and help
him because he’s by himself now. His boys…I reckon, basically, they finished their education
and married off into the vicious world. [laughs]
Hay season I just get out there and I’ll mow a while, in the morning,
and when the hay is dry, when the hay is…the day before that or
whatever…whatever the occasion is. I got three tractors here and I’ll get off and just leave
it hooked to each basically in the center, and I get off onto the other and I
mow a while, get a little hay raked in and rake up a little bit, and then I’ll
bale a little bit, and then if it don’t look like it’s gonna rain, then
I’ll do it again so I don’t get too far ahead of myself.
Now, a lot of the times here in the past, just get it in the bale as fast
as I can, and, you know, sometimes it’s even fall till I pick up the roll.
This may not be the ideal way to go, but there’s about eighty acres of
cropland here to cover to leave it…. And,
of course, we’ve got a little patch of corn we plant for the hogs to have, you
know, to fatten them up all through the year.
We just turn them in there, and have them eat till they clean it up, and
then hopefully by that time somebody will come along and buy them.
[pauses] ‘Course
the corn’s on a two-year rotation, then we go back to oats and grass, and we
harvest those one year and then the next year, the grass will be coming in.
That way it keeps the hay land or whatever you choose to call it coming
on. Those old established grass
will eventually come on its way out. They
don’t completely quit until the productivity goes down.
And then we got to try to control the fine rosebushes [smiles
slightly, a sarcastic tone in his voice] that old Ladybird Johnson set up
and down the highway that caused all the problems.
Of course, we had our share of them anyway.
And the Canadian thistle and muscat and the curl…Lord knows, what all
those varieties. And the burdocks
that get to them horses’ mane and tail, gets in the cattle and gets in the
sheep’s wool and everything. We try to keep them sprayed down. This pasture here used…sometimes in-between the hay I could
get to it. I used to go over there
about two or three times and spot-spray it with the boom-sprayer off the
tractor, and drive the tractor around kind of like the old commercial on the TV:
“Shoot ‘em dead.” That kills the weeds on a lot of them. Keep that under control.
And there’s just not much else that goes on in the summertime, just,
you know, getting in and out of the rain. Of
course, every now and then the cattle, take one day of the week to go around,
sometimes maybe two days, try to see all the cattle once a week, if possible, to
make sure one of the cows hasn’t got out or somebody hasn’t hauled them off
or something or the other like that. Keep
a check on them, all we do. See if
a tree hasn’t fallen over a fence, or something, or a man climbing over the
dam, keep an eye on the fence so they don’t get away from us.
And then the fall comes, the time to try to get them to the market.
I didn’t mind doing the rest of it, but, I tell you, getting up in the
wee hours of the morning and loading those old cattle and waiting around that
old market over there and standing in line till you get unloaded is kind of a
tiresome deal.