When I started pestering mom and dad to write down their memories of childhood it was because I was soon going to be a mother and I wanted my children to feel connected to my parents. In other words, I wanted them to write about what it was like living in the 30s and 40s; what day to day life was like for a child. I feel very blessed because both my parents complied with my wishes to some extent. The following is one of the first things dad wrote after I started bugging him to write his childhood memoirs.-Karen "THE GOOD OL' DAYS?"
by Ward Poag
You say you want to know about the "Good ol' days", of living in the hills and "hollers" in the '30s and '40s! Those "good ol' days" are gone, and I don't know whether to lament their passing, or to celebrate my escape from a life of back-breaking, man-killing toil and trouble, but there is mourning for the passing of a way of life, which made us proud and fiercely independent.
There seems to be some perverse side of human nature which makes us want to remember the past with loving fondness and disregard the down side. Maybe it's an innate desire to return to a simpler, less complex existence. Or,perhaps it's a desire to escape the pressures of today's peripetatic society. Whatever the reason, there is a nostalgic desire in most of us to view antiquity through rose colored glasses.
I'll try to show you the good and bad of my "good ol' days".
IN THE BEGINNING
In 1927, some monumental events took place. Charles Lindberg flew the Atlantic in a non-stop flight from the New York to Paris, Babe Ruth hit his record setting 60 homeruns, and Al Jolson starred in the first talking
movie, the "Jazz Singer".
And, a less momentous event occured on Robert E. Lee's birthday in a
small town nestled in the hills of rural Middle Tennessee. That event was momentous to my family and me, for I was born in Hohenwald, Tennessee on January 19, 1927!
If I could take you back in time to Middle Tennessee farm country of the 1930s, you easily believe we had gone back another 100 years or so.
With few exceptions, people in Lewis and Lawrence Counties of the '30s livedmuch the same as their ancestors in the 1800s. The only twentieth century technology in the 1930s were present primarily in the towns of Hohenwald and Lawrenceburg. These were some paved streets, electricity, some indoor plumbing, a few cars and trucks, with even fewer telephones. Out of town,only the main highways were paved and there were power and telephone poles and wires, although few farms along the way had electricity, and I don't believe any of the farms had phones. I do remember one at a general store a couple of miles down the road from Paw Poag's farm. Otherwise people lived much the same as their ancestors had a century before.
The READERS COMPANION states that, in the 1930s agriculture moved from
the horse age into the machine age, with tractors, combines, milkers, pickers and other modern technology. That might be true for other parts of the country, but not for the Middle Tennessee I knew. Farming in that area was still in the "animal" age, and the land was so worn out, "You would have had a hard time growin' rocks! It was "hardscrabble" land.
For 100 years after the Civil War, the South was the poorest part of the nation, and our part of Middle Tennessee was poorest of all.
To aggrevate the farmer's plight, the post WWI deflation caused the the price of farm products to drop much lower than prices for other goods and services. And, things had been almighty hard for farmers since 1920. The coming of the Great Depression changed very little for the folks with whom I grew up. "Steak was a dime a pound, but nobody had a dime!"
This was the world into which I was born. Hohenwald is "right smack dab" in the middle of the "hills an' hollers" of Middle Tennessee, about 70 miles southeast of Nashville. It originated as a German/Swiss settlement, and its name means "high forest" in German.
I spent most of my pre-school years and most of my summer vacations in one of the following places: Paw Poag's farm in Lewis county; Aunt Delphia's home in Hohenwald; Aunt Lizzie's farm at Center, Tennessee; Pat and Mike Murphy's farm in Center, or with Momma and Daddy Daniel in Franklin, Tennessee.
This living "from pillar to post" in the early days was the result of economics. Both Mom and Dad's families were poor. Daddy Daniel worked for a lumber company and Paw Poag was a bootlegger and farmer. Neither could contribute much to my parent's future, so Mom and Dad "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" and somehow managed to get Teaching Certificates at Middle Tennessee State Teacher's College, now
Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.
While doing that, they couldn't take care of me, so they took advantage of the one thing their families could do for them; take care of me. So, I was sent to live with various parts of both families, until we moved to Nashville in 1931 or '32. Even then, Momma and Daddy both had to work, so I until I was 15 years old I spent my summer vacations from school at one of those places, And, that is how I learned about life on the farm.
LIFE IN THE "BOONDOCKS"
"Boondocks" means backwoods rustic country. And, The places I mentioned
above were mostly, "So far out out in the boondocks, we'd 've had to wait til Tuesday night to git th' Grand Ol' Opry". That is; if we'd 've had a radio! Incidentally, those who didn't like the Opry dubbed it the "Grand Ol' Uproar".
We didn't live in log cabins, although I do remember visiting some of our Poag relatives in Wayne County that lived in log house that had a "dog-trot.
The dog-trot was a breezeway between the two sections of the house. There was a stone chimney on each side of the house. One side of the house was the kitchen and dining area with a Ben Franklin wood-burning range, a fireplace with a big wooden dining table and cane-bottomed chairs.
The other side was the living quarters furnished like other farm houses in which I lived from time to time.
Most farm houses were wood frame with four to five rooms and a tin roof.
There was little or no insulation in the walls or roof, and that old tin roof was hellfire hot in the summer and icy cold in the winter. That old saw about a nervous cat on a hot tin roof is a fable. No cat in his right mind will go anywhere near a hot tin roof.
One good thing about the tin roof was its soporific effect during rainfall. The steady drum of rain drops on a tin roof was better than a sleeping pill.
Floors were wood without benefit of rugs or carpeting. The cooking was done on a cast iron wood-burning Ben Franklin range. It set up off the floor on four iron claws. The cooking surface had four burners covered by an iron lid, which could be removed with a portable iron handle that fit into a slot on the lids. The oven covered the front of the stove, below the burners.
Behind and above the cooking surface was a cowl topped off by two
"warmer" ovens called "biscuit warmers". They were about fifteen inches
wide, ten to twelve inches deep and about eight to ten inches high. They
were for warming or keeping food warm. On one side of the stove was the
firebox, where wood was fed into the fire. Behind the stove was a stove pipe
with a damper to control the burn. You might think that cooking on that
primative apperatus would be quite difficult, but I gotta tell you the food
cooked on those old stoves was a joy to behold. Some of the best food I ever
laid a tongue on, came off those stoves. Maw Poag, Momma Daniel, Aunt
Delphia and Aunt Lizzie were Master Chefs of the Country Cuisine!
With the exception of sugar, flour, salt, pepper and a few other spices,
the food was homegrown in their garden or fields. The country cuisine was
more than just cornbread and beans. There was corn, bacon, ham, eggs,
tomatoes, watermelon, lima beans, potatoes, biscuits, green beans, pinto
beans, navy beans, black-eyed peas, green peas, onions, pancakes, chicken,
wild blackberries, nuts, jams, jellies, preserves and some of the best
cakes, and pies you could ever hope to eat!
In the summer time, the veggies were mostly fresh out the field or garden.
To prepare for the winter season the women canned all kinds of goodies from
green beans to jellies, jams and preserves.
The farm days started at sunrise. The "young'uns" would stoke the fire in
the fireplace and fill the woodbox with kindling for the stove. The fire in
the fireplace was "banked" each night, so the fire wouldn't have to be
started from scratch every day. When you banked a fire, you let it burn down
to some red hot embers, then covered them with a light sprinkling of ashes
to keep the fire from burning out.
The man of the house went out to feed the stock (cows, and hogs) and let the
horses and or mules out to pasture. Some body had to feed the chickens and
collect eggs, while the woman of the house cooked breakfast.
When you sat down in a cane-bottomed chair to eat, there was little or no
conversation. Eating was a mighty serious business. And, you could fill your
plate as full as you liked, but you had to eat everything on your plate.
When breakfast was over, everybody had their chores to do. The man would
head for the fields, while the women cleaned up the breakfast mess and
started cooking dinner. Dinner was the noon time meal. The evening meal was
supper.
The young'uns chopped kindling, worked in the garden, hoed corn or cotton
and whatever else they were assigned to do.
