Part five of a series
Three boys were arguing whose dad was the best. “My dad can take a scrap of paper, jot down a few notes, call it a poem and get $50.” Second boy: “My dad can jot down a few notes, call it a song and gets $100.” Third boy: “My dad jots down a few words, calls it a sermon, and it takes EIGHT people to collect all the money!”
Sister Agnes Hafner included many jokes when publishing memories from her 1930s childhood on a Houston County farm – without electricity.
Cooking required burning wood, or sometimes corn cobs, in the kitchen stove, called the range, which had a hot water reservoir and warming closet but no thermostat or heat gauge. It required sticks of wood every day. It was the children’s chore to get wood from the shed and fill up the kitchen woodbox. More wood in the oven would produce a larger flame and more heat. For less heat, put fewer wood sticks into the stove.
On one end of the kitchen sink was a hand pump with a pail and large dipper. “Just help yourself to a drink of fresh well water anytime,” fondly recalled Sister Agnes.
There was no processed foods on the farm. Most food was grown in the garden and then canned. A hand eggbeater and a food grinder were invaluable. Potatoes were stored in a bin in the cellar. Pickles in brine and also sauerkraut were stored in 20-gallon crocks. Bread, rolls, noodles, cakes and candy were all made from scratch. There was no toaster. Toast was made in the oven or with a fork over an open flame in the stove. There was no electric refrigerator, but there was an icebox that regularly needed fresh ice, which was generally stored in sawdust in an icehouse.
If peaches or pears were purchased during canning season, they came individually wrapped. The wrappers were folded flat because they were softer than Sears catalog pages in the outhouse.
Beet juice was used for food coloring and also for a base for jelly when strawberry or red raspberry jello was added for flavor.
“Recipes were quite general at times,”noted Agnes. “Add a pinch of this and little more that.” The recipe for cake batter included stirring 25 or 50 times with that hand-turned egg-beater. While cake was in the oven, there were two things to avoid. Heavy walking on the floor and peeking into the oven during the baking would each cause the cake to flop, leaving only a hard crust, which even the chickens rejected. When Agnes was 11 years old, she was making a birthday cake for her sister when temptation was too persistent- she peeked.
Cooking and baking took considerable time. But with no additives, preservatives or herbicides, every meal was nourishing. There was great satisfaction for those who planted and tended a garden or chopped or piled a load of wood. “Add a daily nap,” Agnes quipped, “and you have a recipe for a healthy, satisfying lifestyle!”
The pot belly stove in the living room needed larger chunks of wood than did the kitchen stove. At night, the fire was “banked” to keep it burning slowly during cold winter nights when temperatures might drop to minus 60 degrees. It might still have required stoking during the night. Many families had no furnace, only kitchen and living room stoves. Either a stove pipe or a floor grate allowed heat to rise into bedrooms on the second floor.
After a day of exertion in the field or the kitchen, folks climbed the stairs to sleep on a cornhusk mattress, a featherbed cover and maybe a down (duck feather) pillow. Homemade quilts were also common. Fortunate were those sleeping upstairs directly above the living room with the pot belly stove pipe going through your bedroom. Especially on windy ridges, folks would place a heated iron wrapped in a Turkish towel in the bed to warm their feet. On the other end of the bed, wearing a stocking cap would help.
The indispensable wood supply came only from hard work. Trees had to be felled, sawed and chopped into stove-sized pieces before being carried into the woodshed and then piled in rows.
Not only did cake batter, butter and homemade ice cream require hand power, but so did some music. The Victrola or phonograph with a large horn needed to be cranked to play the records. There were families that owned an organ that was pumped by foot power while being played by hand. Also in the living room, the Singer sewing machine was powered by foot on a treadle.
Even the most modern family transportation required some hand power. About 1920, Agnes’ father Lorens Hafner was one of the first seven in the La Crescent-Hokah area to own an automobile, a Model T Ford. “Crank the car to start it. Snap on leather side curtains if it rains,” she informed. “Go 25, or the breakneck speed of 30, and all passengers went silent and prayed.” Slightly more than decade later, she learned to drive on that vehicle.
Young Agnes only traveled by train when she visited her maternal grandparents. There were trolley cars in La Crosse, available for workers and shoppers. Mail order catalogs from Sears and Wards were preferred for shopping during autumn and winter weather. Shopping in La Crosse was an all-day venture and did not occur often. Downtown destinations included Woolworth’s, Safe way, A & P Grocery, Coast-to-Coast, Tausche Hardware, Hoeschler’s Drug, Arenz Shoes and Doerflinger’s.
Since most clothes were homemade, window shopping in La Crosse was for new dress patterns to duplicate at home. Agnes had her only store-bought dress in ninth grade, a dusty pink confirmation dress with a large white bow.
Another chuckle from Agnes: After church, a young boy told the new pastor, “When I grow up, I’m going to give you some money.” The pastor asked why. “Because my dad said you’re the poorest preacher we ever had.”
Sources: A series of guest columns published in the Houston County News, (La Crescent, Minn.) were later published in a book, “Life on the Farm in the 1930s,” by Sister Agnes Hafner, FSPA, 2004. The cartoons by Bob Artley were originally published in the Worthington (MN) Daily Globe, and later in his book, “Memoirs of a Former Kid,” 1978, and again in 2004 in Sister Hafner’s book.
Cartoon by Bob Artley
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