Genealogy Makes History - Library: Lifestyles |
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Receive new library accessions by e-mail free. Click here. ContentsHome cooking in rural America's heartland Wells and cisterns in Amy Utter's time Space Heating in the Heartland -- 78 years laterat told to Fred Edwards by Mary LeybaIn 1930 when Amy Utter was living with her pa and ma, Amy would gather firewood for the wood-burning stove when she was strong enough. Although folks in the towns and on the farms of the heartland still burn firewood, today they are in the minority.Mary Leyba of the Missouri Rehabilitation Center's Historical Preservation Committee has provided information about a new way to burn wood in the heartland (and perhaps elsewhere). The following is her explanation. "I built a new home nearly two years ago and as part of my efforts to be energy efficient and eco friendly, I had a pellet fireplace installed. Imagine my surprise when I awoke to fire alarms and a smoke filled house Feb 18th (2008). The pellet stove had malfunctioned and the burning pellets had backed up into the storage hopper causing the remaining pellets to catch fire. My security system also malfunctioned, so the fire department was not notified. All worked out though, I threw the electrical breaker to the stove, opened all the doors and windows, and threw water into the maw of the beast. I set a large box fan in a window and pulled the smoke out of the house as best as I could. The fire did flame up a couple more times but a neighbor came over and we managed to keep all under control. Fortunately for me there was nothing but smoke damage and of course the damaged pellet stove. My insurance will cover all cleaning and replacement of items. The security system company has corrected their problem and will pay my insurance deductible. All in all, I'm a very lucky person as this could have cooked my goose! "A pellet stove is similar to a wood stove or fireplace insert. It is designed to burn wood pellets which are made up of compressed sawdust, rather than wood. The compressed sawdust is a byproduct of the lumber industry. No tax is usually charged on the 40-pound bags of pellets since pellets are an energy efficient product that the government encourages people to use as an alternate heat source. Many companies make a unit that will also burn corn so the owner has a choice of which product might be the cheapest. "My stove looked exactly like a fireplace insert with an etched glass/brass door against a black finish. All pellet stoves have an upper storage bin for the pellets/corn to be poured into. At the bottom of the bin is a small auger. The pellets are fed into the burning area of the stove by the auger which also controls the speed and number of pellets that are allowed to drop. The pellets fall into what's called the "fire pot" which is a container that holds the pellets as they burn. My stove had an igniter on it that would ignite the pellets. Once the pellets had burnt for a few minutes, a fan would automatically come on. This fan would circulate the air from the heated stove into the room, allowing for additional warmth in only a specific area of the house. This allowed me to have extra heat in the living/kitchen area of my house but to keep my bedrooms a bit cooler, which I prefer. The flames from the stove were quite attractive and last winter my electric/water bill for a 2700 sq ft house was never more than $150. Running the pellet stove really made a huge difference in the electrical expense. Unfortunately, for some reason my stove wasn't burning the pellets cleanly which caused them to back up until they actually caught on fire in the bottom of the storage bin. I had no way of knowing this, otherwise I'd never have filled the bin with another 40 pounds of pellets. Even though I'd shut the stove down, that only put out the fire in the fire pot, not in the storage bin. Fortunately for me, I never left the stove burning when I was gone, had I been away when it caught fire I could have lost my home and my pet. I consider myself very lucky although a bit inconvenienced. Home Cooking in Rural America's Heartland in 1930by Fred EdwardsIn January of 1930, sharecropping farmers like Leander Scott and Mary Emmaline Witt Utter generally grew their own foods. Such fare was sparse at Scott and Mary Utter's place because they, along with their daughters, Amy, Ruby and Ruth, had just moved from Missouri into a relative's abandoned farm house in Oklahoma. They didn't go hungry, though, because family members helped them through the winter. In addition, they collected eggs from the chickens that Scott's son and daughter-in-law, Charley and Thelma, had given them. And they drank fresh milk from the old cow Charley had loaned them. (See Amy Utter's Journeys -- TB and Other Tragedies in Rural America's Heartland.)As soon as they moved to the new house -- which Amy called a mansion -- they set to work becoming self sufficient. Soon their garden teemed with tomatoes, corn, peas, green beans, lima beans, carrots, beets, onions, radishes, rhubarb, lettuce and turnips, along with squash and watermelon in the fall. The habit of keeping a vegetable garden never left the family. When I met Amy's "kid brother," Durward Belmont Curtis Utter, in 1951, he was living in Ames, Iowa, on a double-sized city lot in order to maintain his family garden. On the day he died in 2006 a vegetable garden that covered a full eighth of an acre was flourishing next to his home in Purdy, Mo. Ma Utter and the three girls still living at home also gathered wild blueberries, blackberries and strawberries in season. And, as mentioned in Amy Utter's Journeys, wild walnuts abounded in the trees dotting the fertile farmlands of northeastern Oklahoma. In addition, relatives with orchards of apples and peaches often shared their extras. For staples like salt, pepper, sugar and flour, Scott traded eggs, milk and home-made butter to the proprietor of the little store in Bernice. Meat came from their chickens and hogs. Amy Utter's Journeys also reveals that her Ma prepared goat meat for the family's use during the move to the mansion. Ma reserved one day a week as bake day for pies, cobblers and cookies. Another half-day or so went for family baths (see book), and another full day was laundry day. The family had no refrigeration, so edibles had to be preserved by canning them in Mason jars, which added more days to the workload. Throw in house cleaning, sewing and mending, and Ma found that all of her days were spent on household chores. In addition, she prepared three meals daily. She would set out a big breakfast shortly after dawn, when Pa had finished the morning milking. Her rich farmhouse breakfasts could include bacon, breakfast ham, eggs, biscuits with gravy or blackberry or strawberry jam, corn mush, and latherings of butter and melted lard. Ma would set the table for the noon meal anywhere from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., depending upon Pa's schedule. The family called it "dinner," probably because it was the heaviest meal of the day. (Even today many of Scott and Mary's descendants still call it "dinner," even though they might be referring to a Big Mac from MacDonald's.) Menu items in 1930 might be pork chops or pork roast, spare ribs, boiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, string beans, corn, peas, beets, squash, lima beans, onions, radishes, rhubarb, cabbage, turnip tops with hot bacon grease, tomatoes, carrots, plus cobblers and pies made from peaches, apples, blackberries or rhubarb. Any of these that would be kept refrigerated or frozen today had to be eaten while fresh, otherwise it would have been canned. The family called the final meal "supper" because that's just what they did; they supped on leftovers, and just before bedtime pieced on cookies or perhaps fried bacon rinds. Sunday dinners generally were special productions, often featuring a platter of fried chicken alongside a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy, and servings of vegetables. All of this, cooked on a wood-burning stove. Wells and cisterns in Amy Utter's timeby Fred EdwardsEarly settlers in the Ozarks region often received their water from springs and spring-fed streams that issued from thick bedrock aquifers. Not so in southern and western Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma, where many streams disappear in dry weather. So early residents built wells and cisterns for their water, using picks and shovels.This meant the holes had to be big enough to work in. So most wells and cisterns measured from three to six feet in diameter, although they often were enlarged at the bottom. The well-digger lined the hole with brick, field stones, concrete, or even plaster, and capped the top with a concrete slab or wooden cover. The depth varied. A digger who encountered ample water at a shallow depth needed to dig no farther. Thus some wells reached no more than 10 feet while others extended down to 30 feet or farther. A good well could produce less than three gallons of water per minute, but that was enough to meet household and livestock demands. If a well produced no ground water after weeks of digging, the laborer might compensate for his time by finishing the project as a cistern. Ideally, he could fill it by rooftop runoff caught by gutters and channeled through downspouts to the cistern. That is possibly how the plumbing was arranged at both the shack and later the "mansion" in Delaware County, Okla., where Amy's parents lived in 1930. During dry weather, her father, Leander Scott, might have had to refill the cistern by hauling water in from other sources. Often even a well would go dry in the summer. The book, Amy Utter's Journeys: TV and Other Tragedies in Rural America's Heartland, explains that Amy's great nephew, Gabby Gibbons, would refill the family well in summer from the community well at a downtown crossroads in Purdy, Mo. During an interview with Amy's younger sister, Ruth Helen Utter Mires, she related that the Utter cistern in Oklahoma also served as a cooler in the summer for the family's home-made dairy products. Ruth explained that her father, Scott, had fashioned a wooden platform suspended by a rope which she could lower below the ground surface where the temperature was cooler. Only when Amy Utter got to the Missouri State Sanatorium was she able to turn a faucet and have gravity-fed water pour out like magic! The content of Genealogy Makes History may be copied or retransmitted for information purposes, but may not be used for any commercial purpose without my written permission. I retain all copyright and proprietary rights. Please include this notice and credit the source as Genealogy Makes History by Fred Edwards. |
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