The Great Depression is an era I have touched on briefly in other articles. Yet the unavailability of gas to operate vehicles brings back many memories of that period called The Great Depression when we traveled around by horse and buggy, wagons, and walking. My grandparents did have A-model fords.
Because my parents were very young when I was born, I had a lot of aunts and uncles around my age, some older and a couple younger than I. We lived on a farm in northeast Georgia and my paternal grandparents lived nearby. They owned a lot of acreage dotted by little houses of blacks and whites who worked the farm. I’ve described the large house they lived in that sat atop a hill with the wraparound veranda. I walked to their house every day to catch the school bus.
My maternal grandparents lived in another large house, similar to my other grandparents, whereby they had a big hall down the middle and wraparound veranda. However, their house was much closer in town. Actually, the city limits extended down the center of the hallway. Therefore, one side was in town and the other side in the country. The house stood on a hill, one side overlooking the mill town and the other looking over the farm area. Both sets of grandparents were large land holders.
The house I lived in was not as large as my grandparents’ but a very comfortable older house built during the Civil War. My great grandparents had lived in it and my great grandfather fought in the Civil War. I lived there until my pre-teen years and recall an old Civil War shotgun hanging on a rack above the door to the kitchen. The kitchen was very large with a fireplace and wood cook stove at one end, and a door that led out to the well. Extending beyond was an orchard of apples and peaches, big walnut trees and one pear tree. At the lower edge of the orchard was a fence that surrounded the area of barns, which housed the mules, horses and cows. A creek ran through the center with a spring that bubbled up spring water from its center. Surrounding the spring area were large muscadine vines and wild blackberries gathered for making jellies and jams.
Beyond the fenced in pasture was an area of farmland where my father grew cotton, grains and mostly wheat for making flower and corn for cornmeal. Just beyond the spring was a pit of white mud called “kaolin” my mother used to rub on the hearth around the fireplace.
Kaolin is a clay-like hydrous aluminum silicate. It was first mined in the Chinese mountains, but in recent years an industry mined and shipped to other countries for making fine porcelain. It was a use and function we knew nothing about in the thirties.
Our house also had the breezeway hall down the middle. One large room across the hallway was a guest bedroom, and back then, family members visited and stayed overnight frequently. On my maternal side, several aunts worked in the cotton mills in town and always had money. We loved seeing them come for a visit because they always brought a load of things for us from the city. Things like coffee, sugar, and “store-bought” school clothes.
They’d also bring us yardage material my mother used to make quilts, bed linens and our clothes. Very few things were store bought and most everything was handmade, from clothes to homegrown food. We had a large garden and my mother usually canned around a thousand cans of food for the winter. Beans, tomatoes, soup, apples, juices, corn, and a variety of other foods. Peaches were dried on tins in the sun, then bagged and stored for the winter.
In the late fall, pigs were slaughtered for ham, fat-back and sausage, cured in a smoke house. Beef was usually canned by cooking at a high heat in a large pressure cooker.
In one area of the backyard was a small herb garden where such things were grown like sage for sausage and cornbread dressing, and catnip for making tea when we were sick. When we were sick, which was rare, we did not eat solid foods for several days, but drank catnip tea and blackberry and grape juice.
At the edge of one area of the yard was the wood pile where my father chopped wood to cook on the wood stove and to heat in the fireplaces during the winter.
The yard area around the house did not have grass but was hard red-clay. Brooms made from tree limbs were used to sweep the yards and wild broom straw was used to make brooms to sweep the house. We did not have mops to clean the floors as we have today, but floor mops were made by taking dried corn shucks and a piece of wood with holes in it. The shucks were pulled through the holes and we attached a handle. This was what we used to make a mop to scrub the floors. We were always taught cleanliness was next to Godliness.
My life during the Great Depression will continue in part two . . .
Let Freedom Ring!
JUST ME,
AC
One Comment
Do you remeber a depression meal called a snot sandwich?
I’d like to know what it was made of.
Thanks