Life on the Farm

Edna Mae Bradley Gregory tells of life on the farm:

GOING TO THE MILL

 

In the earliest days, grains had to be taken to the mill.  The farmer either could go to Adrian which took four days, or to Tecumseh which took twice as long.  In the 1840s a mill was built in Rollin.  This was a much shorter trip of about six miles, though it was most of one day.

As a small girl in the late 1920s, I and my little brother Jerry (Gerald, Jr.) rode along with our father (Gerald Gilbert Bradley, Sr.) to the mill.  First Dad would load the wagon with wheat and corn, the grains to be ground.  Then hitch the team of black horses to the wagon.  The wheat was cracked for cereal and ground into flour for bread making, baking and cooking.  The corn was cracked for chicken feed. 

Going to the Rollin Mill ended for us on a spring Sunday in 1929.  Much rain had fallen and was still falling when the Mill’s dam located upstream at Addison broke.  The party-line phone rang the emergency ring, calling everyone to come help save the grain and flour still at the mill. Dad went off to the emergency with the neighbor, Joelie Stiverson.  Mother had insisted he change from his stable clothes so he wouldn’t smell of barn.

Later in the day we loaded into the Model T Ford coupe and drove the six miles to see what was going on.  When we arrived, Mom felt really silly about fussing over Dad’s clothes.  She saw him crusted in mud and flour from efforts to rescue the grain and bags of ground flour.  She saw muddy water pushing bags of grain and flour, fallen trees and debris rapidly downstream toward Hudson (Michigan). 

The mill building survived.  The dam wasn’t repaired.  No more milling took place in that mill.  For the next several years we took our grain to Pittsford for milling there.  Around the end of the 1930s small portable mills on trucks came to the farms to grind feed for the livestock.  No one had flour ground any longer because it was easy and cheap to purchase sacks of floor at the store.  Gone were the days of the long trip to the mill.  But the memory of the creaking wheel still lingers.”

 

Butter Making:

When I was ten years of age, Mother gave me (Edna Mae Bradley Gregory) the butter-churning-chore.  After milking the cows, Mother poured the milk into crocks, covered them, and set them on the cellar floor to cool.  As the milk sat the cream rose to the top.  Each day Mother skimmed off the cream and placed it in crocks on the cellar floor.  When she had skimmed enough cream, she placed it in the four gallon barrel shaped churn, glazed brown on top and cream below.  The churn had a wooden lid with a hole for the dasher.  I sat on the bottom step of the basement stairs, churning for hours.  I moved the dasher up and down, up and down.  I read, moving the dasher up and down, up and down, up and down.    Finally, I would notice a sloshing sound.  This meant the cream had turned to globules of butter, floating around in a thin watery looking milk (buttermilk).  At this point Mother and I took the wooden butter paddles, gathered the butter together, put it in large bowls, and worked all the water out while adding salt to the butter.  The salt was important to preserve the butter’s freshness.  We pack the finished butter into one pound crocks and tied cheese cloth coverings over the crocks.  We churned butter once a week.  Mother gave me a big glass of cool buttermilk as a treat for butter-churning.  The cold cellar floor worked as our refrigerator during spring, summer, and fall.

 

A Three-year-old Remembers Bread-Making in an Unusual Way:

One winter day while visiting my grandma, she set pans of yeasty smelling dough to rise on the floor next to the hot air register in her dining room. They were neatly covered with large white dish towels and looked like puffy pillows.  I was only three and the urge to step right in the middle of each loaf overcame me.  I found that loaves almost ready for the oven have a delightful springy feel.  But the loaves don't spring back to being ready for baking.  Those neat little footprints would have to be re-kneaded and set to rise again.  Grandma didn't have time to re-knead, wait for them to rise, and bake the bread before dinner.  In those days, housewives were much too busy for childish adventure and delays in preparations for meals.  They didn't have electric appliances to help them.  Oh my, did Grandma spank.  One small granddaughter learned a valuable lesson that day: "Don't be putting your feet in puffy pans of bread dough or other curious things without asking first."  The moral of the story is ask before doing.

            I wish I had learned that lesson before my second winter.  That winter I had gotten my left index finger badly hurt when I put it into a little hole in the cream separator.  This model was supposed to be child proof.  If my parents had caught me as I began sticking my little finger in the hole, a spanking would have hurt far less than nearly losing my finger.  I have had the scars all my life and the lesson, "Don't go poking your finger into things.” stopped me from sticking my fingers into interesting little holes in all sorts of machinery, including the windmill.