Growing up we put out fifteen acres of corn, three acres of cane and two acres of garden, my Dad was convinced none of it would make if it wasn’t hoed twice. While smaller I was a master with the hoe but when I got older I became a master with the horse and cultivator. We traded out work with some of the neighbors so we were in the fields from the time school was out until it took back up and were allowed to miss school when it came time to make molasses which took the biggest part of a week. I remember so many of my team mates hated to see Football Practice start but I was actually glad as it got me out of the fields. We never killed Black Snakes but caught them and released them into rat holes or the corn crib, they’re much better ratters than cats. We had several dogs that were a quarter fiest and three quarter chihuahua, they would run and tree anything I wanted to hunt especially squirrels. Time has a way of softening memories about how hard we worked but I know we were lucky to have half of the Little Tennessee River running between our fields and an island where we summered cattle, chickens and hogs. Not to mention we could take a plunge into the river when we got to hot.
—Bill Burnett
I hope you enjoyed Bill’s memories as much as I do.
Time does soften the edges of hard work. I tease the girls over how they used to complain about having to help in Pap’s big garden in the heat of summer. They always smile and say those days in the garden by the creek are among their favorite memories.
Last night’s video: How I Save Seeds in the Appalachian Mountains.
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My grandad lived a similar life in CNY. At 9 yrs old he was responsible for the farming operations during the week. His father was fortunate enough to work on a dredging barge in the Barge Canal in Little Falls, NY. This is currently an hour away from our farm, by car. Don’t know how long it took to drive a Model A there, but that is what my grandad would do at 9 yrs old. He would drive his father to the canal site on Monday and go pick him up by himself on Friday. All week he was the ‘man of the house’. The other siblings later would complain that he was the “favorite son’, but I can only imagine how grateful my great grandmother was to have him. The canal job & the farm helped them weather the Great Depression. He missed a lot of school & didn’t get to graduate after being told not to return after recovering from appendicitis. The math teacher told him he was ‘too dumb’ to catch up on the work he missed, so he might as well just drop out. Some teacher, huh? Well he could not have been too dumb, because he went on to be a generator repair/operator in the Galapagos Isl. during WWII & then a lineman with the power company. He earned his high school diploma while in the service. The bachelor son held on to the farm and was exempted from the service. He never married and a lonely life took a toll on him. Farming is no joke, and often requires so much sacrifice that one often wonders if it is worth it. I think you are called by God to be a farmer.
Thanks to Tipper and to all of you for your comments on Mr. Bill’s great post.
Did Bill write any books that may contain similar stories or articles? I am sorry for making so many comments. The Walton’s tv show was one my favorite shows.The one about taking their family’s land away to build the Blue Ridge Parkway or maybe a park sticks in my mind. Either one is beautiful but was it worth the cost to the people that lost their land?
Randy-he didn’t write any books. He was a long time Blind Pig reader and always wrote wonderful comments 🙂
Aint Genie always said “hard work never kilt anybody”. She was right. Hard work is what made the Greatest Generation great. It helped us have an attitude of gratitude and appreciate God’s gifts.
Growing up in the country was a blessing that we didn’t realize until much later. It seemed hard but it wasn’t really. The story reminded me of a cousin who was one of 11 siblings. He did not finish school because of missing so many days to work the farm. He went to work in the cotton mill and worked there almost 50 years. We get together when possible and reminisce. He said that there was never a day in the cotton mill that was near as hard as a day on the farm. I also heard that when northern mills moved south to get away from the unions, they were happy to get unskilled farmers because they knew how to work hard and could think even though most were not high school grads.
All that hard work in Bill’s youth helped turn him into a wonderful man. He is missed!
There is one important thing Bill failed to mention in his paragraph. Every few years, just as the crops were reaching maturity, the floods would come, the river would overbank and all those efforts would wash off down the river to become silt at the bottom of Fontana Lake. Bill’s family farm was on some of the best bottom land in Swain County. But, land deposited by a river is subject to the whelms of same. The river is going to flood, you just don’t know when. They were going to lose everything, they just didn’t know which year. So they planted their fields and hoped and prayed for the best.
Bill’s father also drove the mail for decades. When Bill got big enough a lot of the farming operation fell on his shoulders. The family moved into town when Bill was a teenager. He tried to maintain the farm for a while by himself but school and football forced him to stop.
The house and land Bill talks about wasn’t actually owned by the Burnett family. It and many other farms along the river had been condemned by the government and bought by the power company in anticipation of building Needmore Damn and flooding the land. The power company in turn leased the land back to the original owners or other interested parties with the stipulation that they remove themselves and their property as the lake rose.
Bill’s family paid the yearly lease and kept the house unoccupied until sometime in (I think) the mid 1970s when vandals broke in, stole what they could carry then burned the house, its remaining contents and its history to the ground. The family gave up the lease and the farm was allowed to return to its wild state, for the most part.
Needmore Damn was never built. The government and the power company disrupted the lives of so many people then just walked away. That was not unique to Needmore. Most of Swain County was similarly ravaged and left to die. The people of the County have been forced to move away from their homeland or live in servitude to wealthy outsiders.
I am aware of the proper spelling of dam but this governmental boondoggle has been a thorn in my side for as long as I can remember. I’m sure that if he were here Bill would have my back on this point. If you were lucky to have known Bill and he had your back, you had little to worry about.
Great post Tipper.
I thank you for sharing Mr. Bills memories. I’ve been hoeing all my life. While not liking it when I was young, I have grown to enjoy it now. I find it relaxing and brings a feeling of accomplishment when I look over my weed and grass free garden.
Good story
Donna, I started working at the Greenville, SC Michelin tire plant on Feb.2, 1976 and worked there for 38 years all of it on blue collar production jobs..I was a few weeks shy on being 22.and had already been working other full time jobs since I was 18. At 16 , I started driving a school bus., Besides working at home, at 12 years old I would work doing anything I could to make a buckle. Things such as helping a farmer get up square bales of hay or digging post holes with hand held post hole diggers that paid 10 cents a hole. Other boys would work either second or third shift jobs after school when they turned 16 in cotton mills. Along about 1979 we were told the average age of the production work force at my Michelin plant was 25 years old. I am not writing this to bring glory to myself. There are many good young people out there today, the problem is they were never taught or had to work for things they wanted. It was just handed out to them. My son now works at the same Michelin, many times over the last year they have had to shut some of the machines or production lines down because of not having manpower to run the jobs. My son son tells me they will bring 20 new hires in on Monday and if 5 are still there on Friday it has been a good week.
Thanks to Bill for a great post. I think hard work growing up is one of the best things we can teach the youngsters. It is great exercise, and it is such a blessing as high prices loom. It never occurs to me to hire somebody to wash my car or do anything I can manage, and I suppose I will have a garden as long as I can walk, scoot, or crawl. As I watch your family, Tipper, it is easy somebody taught you how to enjoy work.
It’s sad that Bill’s final chapter came before his first. Bill condensed a lot into that short passage. I encouraged him to expand and recount his memories to the rest of the world but he doubted his writing skills. So, we are stuck with a few little nuggets from a treasure trove of knowledge that was revealed for a brief moment then hidden again.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t have a question that only he could answer.
William Gilbert Burnett –
28 Mar 1949 – 28 Jul 2020
Starting some seeds today….gotta start more….thanks for Blind Pig today.
Daddy was too tired from working in the coal mines to spend much time in the garden after he got the plowing done. He had a metal bed spring that was attached to the back of a horse that was used to drag the garden long before tillers were available. Mom and her three daughters could be found working in the garden from spring to fall.
The words describing the dog painted a clear picture for sure and I never heard of people catching snakes to release into a rat hole but it sounds obviously effective. I’m glad to learn this and love knowing how ‘things use to be done’. This blog is as enlightening as actual travel – thank you Tipper.
good one
I sure do miss Bill. He was a fountain of Swain County genealogical knowledge and a splendid example of a son of the mountain soil. He grew up in the general area of Swain County known as Needmore, an expressive place name of the sort I always find intriguing.
I was too young to help in my grandfather’s fields when they had their farm, but I remember us traveling up to Vermont so my parents could pitch in. I also remember my mother and all the aunts, helping grandma preserve in the kitchen. I have memories of the shelves of jars in the basement and bushel baskets, as well as of the stories we would hear from the past, that would make everyone laugh and forget how tired they were, for example Grandpa Carpenter making root beer one time and the bottles bursting and making one heck of a mess to be cleaned up.
Personal stories I always see the best. Heard a bunch of them as a kid retold many a time! I don’t get to tell my stories much but it seems few if any compare to my grandmother’s.
My grandfather died when I was about 2 so I only got a few second-hand. A dirt farmer that grew up in Oklahoma in a dirt/sod house. Apparently most snakes there were poisonous so they were killed. While not a tall man at adulthood, the German descendant did fight & kill his ‘dragons’ that were nearly twice as tall as he.
I suppose that one line ” time has a way of softening memories of how hard we worked” brings back memories for a lot of us. When we had our house built in 1980 our Boys helped their daddy cut trees and drag limbs to clear a spot to build on. It was hot work that lasted for weeks during the summer. The boys hated the work then but now they laugh and tell their own kids and grandkids about the summer they worked with “Marcel Ledbetter”, one of Jerry Clowers stories , this is what they called their daddy, clear land for their childhood home. Funny now !
I helped build the house I was born in!
My parents were too poor to have another kid so the neighbors had to have me!
My current garden is about a third the size of the one my mom kept while we were growing up. We hated pulling weeds as kids, although it wasn’t too bad once the corn got tall enough to give us some shade. Mom also made a chore list for us for every day of the week and it went up on the refrigerator as soon as we got off the bus on the last day of school. Our reward for getting everything done was to pack up a lunch and go to the lake to swim for the afternoon.
Dense fog here this morning. I think it is the third this month and the densest yet.
Wow, hoeing 20 acres twice is certainly a lot of work, also known as ‘sweat equity in the crops. I recall one year when the 10-acres of corn didn’t get cultivated before the corn got too high to do it and we hoed the weeds out. Those rows seemed endless, almost as if they were getting longer ahead of us. Our Grandma asked us two boys if we were going to shout when we finished the whole job. We didn’t have a river but we had Indian Creek along the back boundary. We used to take a bath in the creek before we went home.
If one has ever done that kind of work, it is not hard to understand why folks didn’t want to spend a lifetime doing it. It was a different era and was on its way out even then. But we learned not to.be afraid of dirt, sweat and hard physical work. To this day to my mind ‘real work’ has to be physical.
I agree with what you said about true work being being physical. My older family doctor told me this, it concerns exercising . He said that a person working on a physical demanding job has no need of going to a gym to exercise. They have already done plenty of it and he went on to say a lot of the younger generation has never done physical labor, they go to school, college then sit behind a desk. Nothing wrong with that because today is a different era. Last time I heard, at @ 90 years old, this doctor still has a small beef cattle farm. Thanks Ron and I think Gloria for your reply’s from yesterday.
We would have big fields of corn grew fro feed the animals. We didn’t hoe it but would plant it in deep furrows. After the fist plowing with a cultivator , it would be plowed with a half shovel plow. Go up one side and back down on the other, this would roll dirt back into the furrow By the time soda (33% nitrogen, hopefully Bulldog brand)) had been put around it and laid by, it would look like the had been planted on a hill or bed. This method would cover up a lot of grass and also cause the corn Stalks to grow a lot of roots. I also remember being with grandaddy and thinking of myself as helping when he would be pulling fodder or shocking some of the stalks. The garden was also plowed but also hoed . It almost seemed like by the time child could walk they would be helping out in the garden. I can also remember how hard mother and grandmother worked to preserve any and every thing they could for food. When you grew almost all your food everyone had to pitch in and help. Very little was bough in a store. The plowing I mention was done with a mule. My father in law said he begin to plow a mule when he was 8 years old and his hands would be closed in a fist.when he woke up in the mornings. His mother would massage his hinds to get them open up. We often forget how good we have it today or at least I do. Hope you can read this, my eye is bothering me this morning,
Thank you, Bill for sharing your memories. It sure was a different life back then! Those chihuahua/fiest dogs must have been aggressive little beasts! LOL!
Life back then involved a lot more physical labor than most folks do now.
Miss Cindy, if a chihuahua dog could grow to be a 75lb dog , pit bulls would run and hide. A lot of other animals would too.
Oh I laughed at hoed twice ,Daddy probably said that. I agree with Kathy, that is some good reading there for sure . Scrolled down and enjoyed the Christmas green post too!
That’s good reading right there!
Hard work builds strong character. I think when we look back on tasks we have done in our lives, we realize the memories attached to doing them involves a lot more than the sweat we spent getting them done. Typically we were with family members who have passed on, or were in a place we loved being at that no longer exists. Corie asked the wonderful question on The Pressley Girls you tube channel last week or so – if you could, would you go backwards or forwards in a time machine. Unsurprisingly, the majority answered backwards. And for most people it wasn’t really to change anything, but to take the time to cherish longer what we don’t have anymore – people, places, things, health. I love reading the memories your commenters write about. Thank you for a great post this morning!
Donna. : )