In ag class about 1959 one of my classmates made the statement, “If you want to walk through Daddy’s corn patch at noon you’d have to tote a lantern.”
—Don Byers 2024
I was reminded of Don’s memory when I read a passage From My Highest Hill Carolina Mountain Folks written by Olive Tilford Dargan.
“The corn gets so onhandy big an’ shady in Hawk Wing Cove you can see the lightnin’ bugs in thar by daylight.”
I’d love to have seen both of those cornfields!
I think a patch of corn is an amazing place. I love the sound of bees working the tassels. I love the bright green corn leaves against blue sky. I love the morning glory blooms winding their way up the cornstalks and along the rows. And of course I love the delicious ears of corn.
Tipper
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Oooh whee, I sure love me some fresh wonderful sweet corn, any time I can find it. I’ve never grown any. My husband has, only once, we got any yield of it, small, but those early spring and summer thunderstorms in south Mississippi seems to have got to it first, so we ended up with the fruit stand version of picking corn. LOL. Still pretty good. That one small crop we had, I froze up and we had it for Thanksgiving dinner that year. It was so delicious. I bragged on my husband during that entire meal. Hope y’all have a wonderful day today and may God bless each and every one of you today, tomorrow and always. With all my love too. J
Hi Tipper and Acorns. I grew many a field of corn and tobacco. The first was in 1977. My father-in-law, Andy Dyson, said he never had such good crops to harvest. He said it was because I was pregnant in the fields. I have a photo of us in the tobacco field somewhere. If I find it I will email it to you. They were good people.
Made your squash casserole recipe last night, so good! Thanks for sharin!
Oops, in the last paragraph o my earlier post I put Morley it should have been Dargan. I don’t have much truck with Morley’s writings: Old time jurist Felix Alley, who wrote the wonderful “Ballad of Kidder Cole,” castigated Morley as a writer who distorted the ways of mountain folks “to sell books to Yankee readers.” Thankfully folks like you are a grand counterbalance to the too prevalent stereotypes attached to the people of Southern Appalachia.l
That’s a new phrase for me …”onhandy big”
I love it
Dark cornfields gain an eerie reputation after sunset. I ventured a few feet into the cornfield planted by a tenant farmer, and soon became afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out. Nowadays, many farmers have gotten creative, profiting from the season by setting up haunted mazes that offer a spine-tingling adventure for $10 during October, leaving most of the corn intact for harvesting.
My daddy was a cotton farmer. In that day the cotton would be over waist high. We all went to the field ,mama. me ,my brother , (riding a how and pretending to plow! )Daddy would hire pickers from the neighborhood .mamma would make a route to pick them up and back home. Sun up to sun down . I remember laying on daddy’s cotton sack as he picked rows and looking up through the tall cotton at the clouds and thinking of their shapes as animals and faces!
Carolyn, your comment brings back memories of my mother and grandmother picking cotton for area cotton farmers. The pickers would all take a dinner/lunch break and spread a large burlap cotton sheet on the ground under a large shade tree. One other memory, before I was 6 years old and had started school mother would take me with her. She had made me a small cotton sack and would tell me to pick some cotton and make me some money. She had been fussing at me pretty hard for playing and not picking cotton. I came across a rock, put it in my sack and covered it up with cotton. At weigh up time my sack was weighed right up along with everyone else and then emptied out on the cotton sheet, there went the rock rolling out on the sheet. Mother reached behind us, pulled up a dry cotton stalk and preceded to wear my rear end out to fare thee well. This happen over 65 years ago but I still remember it every time I pass the field where it happen The farmer they were picking for was the grandfather of the girl that would become my wife. BTW, I think these pickers were paid 3 cents a pound and I think 100 lbs or a little more was the average amount for a days work for a lot of the pickers, I have heard of some that could pick more. You were walking in tall cotton when you you didn’t have to bend down or crawl on you knees to pick the cotton.
Should be mother and grandfather, grandmother stayed home and watched my baby sister
When I was as high,
as a grasshoppers thigh,
I played in the shadowing corn.
Was the corn that tall,
or was I so small,
that I could play neath the towering corn?
Nothing better than fresh corn! When I was a teenager we would “put up” a pickup truck bed full. It would take all day but well worth it!
Never heard that saying about corn fields being dark before, but I’m sure to a child running in a huge cornfield it might seem dark if the corn stalks are very tall. I just watched Fields of Dreams the other day since I hadn’t seen it in years, so my first thought after reading the post title Dark Cornfields, was about cornfields being haunted. Maybe by old baseball players? LOL…just kidding 😉
We live with fields on three sides. Every other year, corn is planted and this is the year of corn. We watch as the corn grows and now it is like having high walls on 3 sides. I measured the corn and it is ove 12′ tall. This was the first year that the farmer used drones to spray fungicide on the field. It was amazing to see the large “bumble bees” flying over and stop at the edge, turn around and fly back the other way.
I have gone in several rows and it is very dark inside. The corn is planted so close together that you have to bend the stalks to go through a row. On my morning walks with the cat, he likes to walk the corn rows for the shade from the sun and easier walking. I think he feels safer from the hawks and eagles as well.
I agree, a cornfield is so amazing! The corn stalks are reaching up to heaven! I love on a slightly windy day you can hear the stalks rustling and swaying ever so gently. There is a big corn field across from our church and many times I have sit and admired it’s beauty. It is sad to see it be cut for harvest, but I know I will see it again.
Corn is rather amazing as a field crop. Like sorghum cane, it can grow and produce when very dense. That’s because they are grass-like plants, as also is rivercane. I planted some heirloom Bantam corn this year and was amazed that the planting instructions said to plant 6″ apart in rows 18″ apart. And I see farm fields around much more dense than they. I always think they are being grown for silage but do ot know that. I recall you posting once you liked the corn patch as a child to, a child-scale, secret green world, like ivy and laurel thickets. As you grew up, you added taller bigger gee worlds, like Joyce Kilmer. I did pretty much the same thing.
I have the most beautiful several hundred acres of corn surrounding me. I’ve planted sunflowers on my side of the fence here on the south side of my yard. The bright, cheerful yellow blossoms against the deep, rich green is simply magnificent and my view from my recliner when I pop a squat! Now, onto a more serious note and one I feel had a happy ending due to Tipper and you prayer warriors. Tipper has kept my 3 adult grandkids on her prayer list(along with myself) and yesterday I believe your prayers & my angels(family in heaven ♡) saved my grandson from possible harm. He just bought/moved into his cute little starter home on July 16th and has been working so hard to get & keep everything just right(as a 24 yr old young man can lol) A friend and I stopped by yesterday so she could see his new digs. We were met by the smell of gas. I immediately looked at the stove since I knew it was gas. He’s had zero experience with gas appliances his entire life. I saw a knob slightly turned and immediately turned it off. Got everyone out of the house and called the power company. A tech arrived quickly and checked everything out and cleared his home. We’re guessing his dog had bumped it the evening before because he had smelled the same smell when he got home from his friend’s house. I try not to think about how differently this could have turned out but to focus on the fact that we were guided there for a quick visit and the situation was taken care of without any incident except a good scare and learning experience. If you’ve read this far, thank you and thank you all who have been sending prayers and blessings our way. Know I’m returning the favor as I check in here daily to keep tabs on how everyone is doing.
Glad you have been reading Dargan’s grand book, “From My Highest Hill.” It’s set squarely in my highland homeland of Swain County (Almond area) and unlike near contemporary writers such as Margaret Morley and Horace Kephart, she takes mountain folks at face value and readily recognizes that in vast areas of daily life she needs to heed their accumulated wisdom. She does just that and was good to and loved by the folks in the Round Top area where she owned a farm. That’s particularly interesting since she was, for all pratical purposes, a communist in outlook. She even wrote books, under a synonym, on the deadly Gastonia, NC mill strikes. On the other hand, she regularly had treats for the local kids, often took them to town in Bryson City, and treated her tenants very well.
A couple of humorous stories about her is worth sharing. Once she offered to take a woman I knew, the late Mary Ellen Maxwell, to town with her. Mary Ellen was just a child of 8 to 10 years old at the time. She pulled her mother into another room and begged not to go. When her mother asked why the child said: “She’s got her dress on backwards” (which she did). Another time, while walking across the Everett Street spanning the Tuckasegee River, apparently the elastic or whatever was holding her petticoat in place (I’m no authority on vintage or modern ladies’ lingerie so don’t know the precise nature of the wardrobe malfunction) failed and the slip fell to the ground. Without so much as breaking stride, she stepped out of it and continued walking. No wonder mountain folks took to her. She was just the kind of “quare” we appreciation.
If you wonder why I’m so wound up on Morley, it’s because she forms the subject matter for one of 36 chapters in a book of mine now in press with the University of Tennessee Press, “Profiles in Mountain Character.” She’s an example of the kind of outlander who added positive element’s to the world of the high country in yesteryear.
Cornfields are a beautiful sight to behold & it’s hard to beat a fresh ear of corn just picked & cooked.
Daddy’s cornfields were really tall to. He would back his old pickup truck down in the garden and we all including the grandkids had to go in the field and pick that corn. Nearly always one of us would get stung by a Pack Saddle. I hated those things. We all had a 5 gallon bucket to put our picked corn in. Once we filled our buckets we dumped them in the truck and when back to our row to fill up again. When we were done, daddy would back that filled truck up our steep hill and close to the back porch. Here we sat and shucked the corn into galvanized tubs. We would talk, tell stories. sing and have Bible trivia. Momma would be in the kitchen fixing us a good dinner with a big pot of steaming corn. Just once I wish I could go back to that table with all 50 of us telling tall tales on each other and laughing our heads off. When your parents are gone, it is true that you can never go home again. More and more I realize how blessed I was to live in and be part of that family. I never deserved that family but thank God everyday for it. Hope everyone is well and blessed.
I always enjoyed eating our corn in the summers growing up. We have too many squirrels and deer to even think about planting corn now. I did not enjoy weeding the corn. Dad would leave us kids instructions to get so many rows weeded before he came home from work. It always made me itchy. I love working in the garden now, but with all the wild animals it is harder and harder to grow one. Our porch plants are doing great. The grandkids will be here tomorrow and will be excited that there are four or five cucumbers ready to pick and eat.
I never heard anyone say anything about a cornfield being dark but have heard it said that tall corn was planted on the wrong sign of the moon. It may have been “full moon” and you would have to use a step ladder to pick it
That made me laugh Randy I had a Aunt that told of planting corn and Grandma told her she didn’t plant it in the right sign my Aunt said no she planted it in the ground well Auntie said that was the prettiest patch of corn she’d ever had said you’d had to have a ladder to reach the top and it didn’t have the first ear of corn on it. she had to laugh…. Grandma knew what she was talking about….
My grandmother always said.. when we went to pick corn “let’s go wondering through golden corridors of corn”