The Farmer's Wife

One of the best things about living in Caroline County, Virginia is our award winning Agricultural Fair.  In a time when rural America is changing and other fairs have gone by the wayside, a love of the earth and what it can provide is alive and well  in our community.  In 2009, a hardworking group known as the Caroline County Agricultural Fair Committee, found a permanent home on a family farm in Western Caroline due to the generosity of the Tate family. Today, where there were once just green fields and tents to house exhibits and animals, there are multiple buildings amid an amazing setting.  Even if its hot, we always know theres a breeze on "Tate Hill".

The earliest Fair in Caroline dates to 1918 and since then descendants of those early families who first set out to preserve and celebrate a way of life, carry on the tradition.  Over the years they have been joined by other like minded folks and people like me who no longer live on farms, but who know the importance of a legacy worth preserving.

Today I look forward all year long to my Fair Committee duties which are really a labor of love.  I collect and assemble "The Kitchen of Yesteryear" a part of the Home Goods and Heritage Area of the Fair housed presently inside the L.J. Moyer Building. Just before the Fair opens, I make the farm wife's kitchen of an earlier day appear with wood stove, ice box and much more.  I love putting out the home maker's tools of another time, many of which continue in use today.  I know I still keep my old fashioned egg beater handy.  You know if it aint broke don't fix it.  I try to do a little something different every year and add to the collection.  Last year, the colorful 50s kitchen was a big hit enabling us to show the years 1900-1955.  In 2013, we featured Rural Electrification and added things like the "Farm Radio", one of the first electric refrigerators and expanded our sewing area with treadle machines and memorabilia. I also collect publications like the one above with particular interest in those that show what life was really like through the eyes of the very real people who lived in rural America. Letters to the editor and columns written by farm wives have been invaluable. By the way, donations are accepted and preserved and treated as artifacts for our kitchen and Heritage Area. Caroline County Agricultural Fair donations are tax deductible.

      


I am a "townie" now but my roots lie deep in the land.  When I was a child my grandfather grew his garden and his peach and apple trees in the big lot behind our house in town.  We planted in the Spring and harvested in the Fall and there was a rhythm to life depending on the seasons akin to where he had grown up on his family farm on the "reservation" or what locals know today as Ft. AP. Hill.  The Fall would bring my grandmother to his closet to wash his long quilted underwear and his hunting gear would appear in the garage along with two very excited Chesapeake Bay Retrievers. I learned early a deep respect for the land and the bounty it provided. Sitting with him on a frosty morning in his boat in a duck blind he built on the Potomac River, I heard about conservation before it was politically correct.  The deference we showed to the animals ensured their continued presence in our world. We ate everything he killed all winter and so I learned early how to pluck a goose and how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner and how wonderful pear preserves smell on pancakes on a cold winter morning.

Brothers (and "Broaddus Avenue Corner"neighbors)Roland and Robert Eagar and my grandfather, Fitzhugh Thornton with his dog, "Brownie" in the basement of the Thornton home in Bowling Green.

   When I married my first husband in 1978, we moved to his family farm a few miles from this Bowling Green home and there I learned at least in part, what real farm living was like. They say the only thing sure about this life is change but looking back nearly 25 years, with all the bumps in my road, I see with my work at the Fair, I'm still doing what I love.  During those years I was a feature writer on an off for the local newspaper.  The article below was entitled Poplar Grove Farm Continues To Give Up Its Secrets.

I came to

realize that this way of life 
 must somehow not be lost, but must be preserved.

 

"In the early spring of 1982,1 began to get a good idea of what old fashioned

farm life was really like. My first chickens arrived in the traditional

respectful manner at G&G Farm Service, where generations of Caroline farmers and "Would Be" farmers before me had picked up chickens.  They were day old balls of yellow fluff called Sex-Links, and guaranteed to be the best egg layers

in the entire world. Knowing no better, I put them in the chicken house.

They looked awfully small in there, I thought, as I threw them some corn

and shut the door, but after all they were “chickens” and this was a

“Chicken House.” Two hours later, I was horrified to find five of the chicks

had died. It was time for some good advice from some old time, bonafide,

Caroline County chicken experts. After a phone call to Mrs. Carrie

Schools and our Extension Agent, Dan Moody, the chicks ended up in a

cardboard box in the bathroom under a brand new brooding light. They were eating something called “Start-To Grow” and lived happily ever after, or almost.

 

Five months later, I awoke to the cock-a-doodle-do of my very own rooster. I should say roosters. I discovered that 11 of the surviving 20 chickens were males. Naturally, I thought that being good brothers, they would get along just fine. Of course, I woke up to mayhem in the chicken house one fall morning and nine of the rowdy and hormone filled  brothers had to be dispersed among my neighbors. By the following year,I had ducks and geese, and had joined the Virginia Poultry Breeders Association.  There I found wonderful folks with the knowledge I needed and also an interest in the endangered breeds of fowl which had disappeared over the years from Virginia and American farms. I began to breed my favorites and learned to tell a Dominique from a barred rock and the delight of baking with fresh eggs.  And of course there was the garden..............  

Grannie Campbell's roses bloomed the first year I came to the farm.  Ella Camp Campbell was my husband’s grandmother. She came to the farm as a bride in 1912. I don’t know if she planted the old roses that intertwined with an equally old lilac bush,or if they were just her favorite flower,but they were always called "Grannie’s Roses." They were one of the few pretty ornamental left alive before I planted “pretties” of my own. The were pale yellow miniature cabbage roses. I would wait for them to bloom so I could arrange them on my table and would think of Grannie Campbell. I thought of her when I reached my hand under the warm soft belly of a hen and brought forth my very first brown egg. When I grew my first garden, I thought of her, and although I still didn’t know their names, I thought of all the other women who presided over the farm before me and I felt a bond and a kinship. I would never know what it was like to have to work like they did,

to have to spin cloth for clothes, churn butter and have each meal dependent on the bounty of my garden,but I did know I was experiencing something that very few people are able to experience in this day and time. I felt privileged and I came to

realize that this must somehow not be lost, but must be preserved.