Summer on a Newfoundland Farm - Haying

 

Haycock

School's out and Grandad is cutting hay. Those hot summer days are here again. The first job is to get the old iron two-horse mowing machine out from the rear of the wagon shed where it has been gathering dust and rust all winter. A little oil and grease here and there will soon have it in good shape. The long cutting blade is taken down from the rafters where it has been stored in its wooden case. Broken or worn knives are replaced with new ones ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and delivered by the R.F.D. My first job, besides getting in the way, was to turn the old hand grindstone, occasionally adding a drop of water, as Grandad sharpened all the knives to a sharp cutting edge. The mowing machine was painted red with a bright blue trim and was used the twenty years that I was growing up. When Dad was a boy though, all the mowing was done by hand. Even the meadows along Clinton Brook were cut for hay in those days.

While Grandad was alive and farming and even a few years after, everything was still done on our farm and that of the Webbs, the Vreelands, and Uncle Ike's by horse, but the Eckardts switched to tractor before World War II and we bought some of their horse-drawn machinery. The Newark Watershed still cut hay on a lot of their fields with horse patrols until the war or mid-forties. "Fiddler" Van Orden of New City had a beautiful pair of horses and he did all the mowing and heavy team work for the Watershed. I believe we bought his team or at least one of his horses after he suffered a highway accident with them. I remember each week when he came around collecting garbage for the Watershed he would go into the barn to see the horses while the others loaded our garbage. The Watershed collected our garbage then in an open dump truck. Fred Rude drove while Fiddler and a thin-faced fellow tossed the garbage. This was back when the garbage was burned on the Green Pond Road in the old Oil Station Ruins.

Well, having gotten the knives all sharp and the mower in order, Grandad would start to mow in the morning, after the other chores are done and the dew dried. Grandad and my Uncle Mart farmed together and each owned a horse. Prince was Grandad's and Lady was Uncle Mart's. Lady's predecessor, name forgotten now, dropped dead in his harness. Uncle Buck lived here then and, with my brother and me as passengers, was hauling a load of manure up to the gardens by Aunt Bete's when the horse just up and died in his tracks along the road by Art Post's. This was about 1935. I don't remember how we got the wagon back to the barn with only Prince. The Theobald Company was called and came to pick up the dead horse for glue.

Uncle Mart usually drove the team for mowing while Grandad went ahead with a hand scythe and stick to cut around the large rocks that might be hit by the mower. If the mower hit a rock, usually the wooden drive shaft broke or cracked so that it had to be replaced. This shaft was about 2.5 ft in length and made out of a piece of ash. About 1.5 inches square, it was the first thing to break. Sometimes we broke three or four a year. It was a winter job to make a supply of these shafts, splitting them out of an ash log, shaping to the right size in a vise, with a draw knife, and then letting them season for the next year's use.

Usually, a couple of copperheads would be killed during the haying season each year.  They would lie along the stone walls that separated most of the fields. The fields were three to four acres in size and we mowed one field at a time. If the weather was right, the hay dried enough so that we could mow in the morning, rake and cock after dinner, and have most of it in the barn before dark. 

Grandad raked with the horse-drawn rake while Uncle Mart put the hay up in cocks. It was the kids' job to hand rake around the cocks. 

The flatbed wagon would have had its box removed and the hay racks put on. Uncle Mart drove and placed the hay as Grandad pitched it up to him. It was a beautiful sight. My brother and I had our jobs also, as we followed along raking up any fallen or windblown hay. Grandad liked clean, clear fields. Our reward was a ride to the barn on top of the hay load and a glass of Grandma's fresh, cold, lemonade.

At the barn, the hay was pitched off over the cow loft through an outside hay door or else the wagon was driven in through the big double doors and the hay pitched into the loft.  Our job was to pack the hay down in the loft. A hot, dusty, and sweaty job!

We always had more hay than the barn would hold so my uncle in Smith Mills would get two or three truckloads. In bountiful years there was some left to sell or stack outside the barn. Besides the fields of my Grandad's, we cut two fields of Uncle Mart's and the fields around Aunt Bete's house. Some years a field would be plowed in the spring and planted with field corn followed by oats and seeded down for hay again the second year, to improve the hay crop.

Often a late afternoon thundershower would come in over Bearfort Mountain and we would make a mad dash for the barn with our load of hay! The next morning whatever hay got wet in the field would have to be turned over and spread out to dry completely before being recocked and hauled to the barn. If it got we twice or more, it was stacked separately and used for bedding in the horse stalls.

Hay is a slippery item and if not loaded property on the hay rack would sometimes slide when the wagon made a sharp curve coming up the steep hill from the pond. Once off, it was always a problem to reload. I remember one time when we were almost to the barn,  coming along by the gardens with a load of hay topped by a load of kids, when the top third of the load slid off, throwing kids, hay, and all into the potato patch.

The field across the pond, which we called the Long Streak, was usually used for year-round pasture. One year, when I was small, Grandad planted it with corn and raised some of the best melons and pumpkins between the corn ever raised on our farm. That field had a very sandy soil and enjoyed plenty of morning dew from the brook and the pond. 

The old farm road ran from the barn down over the hill along the side of the Center Lot and thru the Little Meadow Lot to the pond dam. It crossed over the dam and followed along the edge of the pond and the Long Streak Lot to the Old House Lot and the Maple Sugar Grove.

Along the pond, in the bank, was a sand pit. Each year Dad would take the dump cart with the team and get us a load of sand to play in all summer. The dump cart was always behind the barn under the Bellflower Apple tree. This cart had two small front wheels and two six-foot rear wheels. Grandad also used the cart to haul gravel to fix the farm roadways every year after any heavy rains.

After Grandad's death in 1944, Uncle Mart, Dad, and we boys carried on the general farming for a few years more. The early fifties saw the tractor and truck replace the horse and wagon and a way of life that had changed very little in five generations came to an end.

The Old House Lot was the lot between the woods and the end of the pond. It was always called the Old House Lot because when Grandad was a boy there was an old house there in ruins. By 1890 only the cellar hole remained. The well had been filled so that the cows would not fall into it. In the cellar hole was a huge black walnut tree, about 30 inches across, where, when I was a lad we gathered a feed bag full of nuts. Grandma made a delicious black walnut cake but it was our job to first crack the nuts on the old 'iron goose." What Grandma called the 'iron goose' was a flat iron about 12 inches long and about 2 inches wide and high. A pressing iron for some special purpose, but the only use I ever saw for it was to crack nuts on.

The old house was supposed to have been Aunt Myra Hopler's house. Her husband, Sam, went west in the gold rush days of '49. He went by schooner, sailing around Cape Horn and all the way up the west coast of South America, instead of across the continent in a covered wagon. Sam was a wheelwright by trade and built the waterwheels for Clinton Furnace. Aunt Myra is supposed to have been Grandad's aunt, but I don't know for certain. Later the Hopler's lived on LaRue Road next to Chillian LaRue, this was just beyond the Cross Road intersection.

The farm is gone now, houses dot the fields where once we gathered hay, the pond remains, thanks to neighbor Paul Ross, a reminder of a better day.

The End

by Leslie L. Post

Sugaring As I Remember It

 

The following is an essay written by Leslie L. Post (edited by Wendy [Post] English), for the North Jersey Highlands Historical Society.  The newspaper clippings following the essay are from the Newark Sunday News, circa 1930-1940.

Sugaring As I Remember It

The end of winter once again brings with it the memories of maple sugaring. Back when the Highlands area was mostly farms and woods rather than housing developments as it is today, the manufacturing of maple sugar products was an excellent source of extra income for the local farmers.

The tapping of the sugar maple was an important lesson learned by our forefathers from the Native Americans, as it provided many Colonial families their only source of sugar. Up until a few years ago, generations of the Post family had been making maple sugar on farms originally acquired by Peter and Abram Post in 1815 in the shadow of Bearfort Mountain. This was an art passed down from father to son unto the present generation. With the break up of the farms into home lots, all that remains are memories and, luckily, some of the equipment used through the years.

Sugaring time begins in February and lasts for two to six weeks, well into March. Weather permitting, Grandad always started tapping on Washington's Birthday. The sugaring season, as we called it, required thawing days and freezing nights to allow the sap to flow. Rain spoiled the sap and wind dried up the tap holes so it was a fair-weather industry. Grandad hand-drilled his tap holes using a No. 8 wood bit, drilling about 1/2 inch deep into the vein of a sugar maple tree. Into this hole, a wood spile would then be tapped and after drilling another, a pail was hung to collect the sap as it steadily dripped from the spile. The wooden spiles were about eight inches in length and three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Ours were made from elderberry as that scrub has a soft center that could be cleaned out to make a tube. Our maple grove was along the brook and the edge of the field about a have mile up from the house. There were approximately 200 sugar maples large enough to tap on Grandad's farm and the scars on the trunks of many of the older trees indicated the number of years they had been supplying sap.

The saphouse was a small, low building built into the ledge along Clinton Brook. Its walls were of stone and, having caught fire at least once, the building, I remember, had a tin roof so only the door was of wood. At the rear against the stone ledge was the fireplace with a dirt hearth across the whole width of the building. A wooden pole above the hearth rested at each end on the low side walls, blackened by age and smoke. From this, on wrought iron pot hooks, hung three large iron kettles and one brass kettle. The roof above the kettles was hinged like two large doors to let the smoke out and keep the rain from coming in. On calm days these doors could be laid completely open, back on the roof. On windy days they could b regulated so that the smoke did not blow back into the saphouse and into the boiling sap. To prevent sparks from going into the hemlock woods, a screen of tin was placed around the rear on the top of the ledge. Clinton Brook flowing by the door not only provided a picturesque setting but was essential for scouring the kettles, strainers and utensils after each boiling.

Twice a day, and some days more often, the sap was collected from each tree and carried up to the saphouse. The kettles were filled and, with a good hot fire beneath, thirty pails of sap would boil down to about eight quarts of syrup in four to five hours. As the sap boiled down and thickened it was removed from the fire and strained and then placed in the brass kettle over a low fire for the last bit of boiling down to syrup. The syrup, as it came from the saphouse, was usually not quite thick enough so it was Grandma's job to boil it a little longer on the back of the old wood-burning kitchen stove. For a thicker cream sugar (we called it "slush") and for sugar cakes, additional boiling and beating were required with all hands taking a turn. The beating cooled the heavy syrup and as it cooled it became granular and almost white. Our reward was the pan to "lick" out and hot syrup poured out on the snow for taffy.

My brothers, sisters, and I, as youngsters, were at the saphouse every chance we got during the sugaring season, playing in the brook and jumping from rock to rock. If you slipped and got wet, the fire was always handy. When we grew older we helped to gather the sap, split wood, and tend the fire. After Grandad's death, I did the whole bit myself for a few years.

I especially remember the late thirties and early forties when the Newark Sunday News would do a picture story on Grandad and the sugaring. This brought out the sightseers and every weekend there would be groups of people around asking questions and taking pictures. Some came back each year and many came to buy the maple sugar products. The more adventurous ones would hike with us to the falls to view the old Clinton Iron Furnace. Many a time we would pack a lunch and stay all day at the saphouse, when school was not in session, and the weather was nice. But usually, it was up the hill to the "big house" with Grandad for dinner and the noonday farm chores; then back to the saphouse till supper time. If it was a season with a good run of sap, Grandad would boil some down at night. That was the best time of all, sitting in the saphouse with the fire for warmth and the old man's stories of long ago to pass the hours.

As much as we sentimentalists may deplore it, the quaint old ways of maple sugaring are fast disappearing from the American scene. Even in Vermont and New York state, the farmer who hand-drills his tap holes, hauls his equipment by horse and sled to the woods each day, hand-empties his wooden or metal buckets, and who laboriously converts this "sweet water" to syrup over a wood fire, is becoming harder and harder to find.

The modern farmer throughout the maple belt, which runs from New England to West Virginia and west to Minnesota, now views a grove of sugar maples on his property as an important source of income. He cannot afford, however, at today's labor prices, to tap his trees and make his syrup the way Grandad did. Today he uses automatic tap hole drilling equipment and observes sanitary practices his father and Grandfather did not realize were necessary to preserve sap quality. He uses plastic tubing instead of buckets to collect the sap and convey it from the trees to roadside collection tanks, or even all the way to the modern saphouse with its oil-fired evaporator. Thus maple sugaring has become a mass-production operation. But for me, when I pour syrup on my pancakes, I still remember Grandad and the old saphouse; the aroma of the wood fire, boiling sap, and the flames dancing around the iron kettles, throwing their shadows on the tin roof, as a story of old unfolds.

"Seems strange that maple trees should know

Just when it's time for sap to flow.

And when a storm is passing by

They feel the east wind in the sky.

They know when it will rain or snow,

And when cold northeast winds blow;

No sap flows then, for maple trees

Need balmy weather, warmer breeze."

Christmas Letters

My Christmas letter this year is just one of memories:

It is just a song at twilight as the lights are turned down low and the shadows (memories) softly come and go...

My childhood recalled with pictures and memories of long ago... memories of summertime:

Laying in bed as a child and listening to the whip-poor-will calling in the oak tree behind the barn on the farm on La Rue Road, Newfoundland.

Sunday afternoon rides up through Sussex County and lower NY state.

Cat fishing with Dad and Granddad Post, Arnold, and I at Hank's Pond. The bamboo poles that were kept on hooks under the eves behind the woodshed they were in the era 1936-1940.

The golden years of childhood.

My childhood ended in July 1944, the day my Grandfather Post died. He had been a part of my daily life for 14 years. I have many pictures of him that bring back memories of that innocent childhood on the farm.

Some years ago, I wrote a story of my summer days on the farm and haying with my grandfather and Uncle Mart.¹ Also, the story of making maple syrup each spring on the farm.¹ The sap house on the Clinton Brook, the sugar maple trees, some of which had been tapped by my great, great grandfather, Peter Post around 1820. Boiling the sweet sap down in 3 iron kettles and one brass kettle. The syrup was finished off in the brass kettle as it was lighter and could be taken off the fire faster. After my grandfather died in 1944, I boiled some syrup a couple of years after school and on weekends. Mostly just making enough syrup for the family.

~~~

Note: The letter ends here. Dad probably got interrupted or fell asleep, and never went back to finish it. It was written in 2010, just before his 80th Christmas.

So why post an unfinished letter? Because memories matter. They define us, teach us, and inspire us. Despite all the millions of pictures posted daily on social media, few are accompanied by a written memoir. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when your memories start to fade it won't serve you well. And it won't speak to your family when you're gone. The written word speaks forever.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

¹Essays coming soon.

Thanksgiving Years Ago

Thanksgiving has always been a special time in the Post family, though I don't remember too much about the early years, the 1930's. We always went next door to Grandma and Granddad's where most of the rest of the Post family were also gathered. Whether it was turkey, chicken, goose or duck, I don't really remember but I do know it was all homemade. Pies, rolls, breads, freshly churned butter, maybe even native cranberries from the bogs around Dunken Pond¹ up in Paradise². Whatever it was, it was good, Grandma, both grandmothers for that matter, were excellent cooks.

As we walked across to Grandma's we kids always sang, "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go," even though it was only a couple hundred feet next door.

In later years, Grandma and Granddad stopped having the big celebrations, as they were getting older and it was too much for them. Also, my cousins were older and often had other plans.

Our family almost always had the traditional dinner - usually a goose and sometimes a duck, too. Grandma and Granddad Buchanan would join us and Aunt Maybelle and Uncle Bill Dongon were usually guests for dinner. Some years after the war and before their move to California, Uncle Buck (Mom's brother) and Aunt Vi, would also come for dinner.

For a few years, we alternated with Uncle Ted and Aunt Sug. We would go to Riverdale one year and sometimes they would come up to Newfoundland. We even went to one of Aunt Sug's sister's a few years.

Needless to say, there was always a lot of family around for Thanksgiving dinner. Even today, those family and friends back in Vermont get together, a dozen or more of them, for the traditional holiday meal.

Note: A lot has changed since Dad wrote this back in November of 2001. The limb of our family tree has lost many of its leaves, where others have new growth. I miss the family and friends who are no longer here to celebrate with us. I miss the gathering.

Despite what or who may be missing, I am extremely grateful for two things: the memories of what has been and the memories yet to be made.

However you are spending your Thanksgiving holiday this year, may you be blessed.

~~~

Essay written by Leslie L. Post, edited by Wendy [Post] English

¹Dad's handwriting wasn't clear. If you know the correct name of the pond he might have been referencing, please let me know!

²I wasn't able to locate a town called Paradise in NJ, NY, or PA. If anyone knows what town or location Dad might have been referring to, please let me know!

Post Family Tree

Posts here certainly have been random. I will try to be better about that this year. The truth is, I haven't had the heart to go through much of dad's things. I'm not likely to feel any differently this year, but the job must be done.

Today I spent an hour going through a random box of papers. The box was in the way and, rather than just relocate it, I decided to deal with it.

I found a wealth of interesting things to share. Beginning with this Post family tree. I don't know who created it, or when but it was sometime after 1992 and before 1999.

It is pictured just as I found it. (You can find document links at the end of the post)

I thought I would include some pictures of the grand lady herself, my grandmother, Lillian Buchanan Post {1903-1999}

This picture was taken at her 80th birthday celebration in 1983.

Here she is with five of her seven children, around the same time frame:

From left to right: Leslie L Post {1930-2015}, Syliva Doiron, Doris {DJ} VanPelt, Wayne "Hap" Post {1934-2013}, Lillian Shoemaker {1943-2002}. Front Center: Lillian Buchanan Post {1903-1999}

And with several of her grandchildren:

From left to right: Wendy {Post} English, Sandy {Kelly} Huntley, Pieter Post, Tara {Shoemaker} Evans, Tracy {Shoemaker} Ison. Front center: Lillian Buchanan Post {1903-1999}

As always, if anyone is interested in any of my dad's research, please contact me using the form at right.

****

Post Family Tree can be viewed here:
Top of Tree
Base of Tree