Trifter

Farms in Pennsylvania are so diverse that a discussion of them could take volumes.   I have taken pictures from some of them and pulled together a discussion of them that will give a view of what they were like.   This document is a work in progress and will be changed and added to as time passes. 

I picked some examples of Pennsylvania farms near my home.  Two I concentrate on are within a half mile of my home and are across the street from an apartment complex and a housing development.  Both are active farms, one has two homes.   The one has a large pond which will be featured in another study of ducks and skaters.   For other pictures from this area, click the York Co or Taxville keywords below.

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This stone home is the oldest of the three and is interesting because some of the stone is red, some a brown and some a lighter color.  Most surface stone in this area is brown limestone – it is that color from the iron in soil.  The reddish brown came from a little under the soil while the lighter stone is from deeper, possibly from where ground was dug for a basement or the like, the iron has not colored it.  Deep limestone, dug from quarries from this area is a blue-grey.   There are homes in the area that are built from the blue-grey limestone and some are featured in other studies. 

The home on the farm in Pennsylvania was more than just a place for the farm family to live and I will show it with the construction of this home.  The farm home was also the storeroom for much of what the family needed to live and operate the farm.  The family couldn’t and didn’t have to go out for bread and milk before a snowstorm.  What they needed to live was there.  Sure they would go to the barn to milk the cows and care for the stock, to the well for water if it wasn’t in the house, and to the woodshed for fuel but the farm family could survive for some time without going to the outside world. 

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Many farms had a ‘Spring House’, a building built over a spring, it was used to keep food cool.  Refrigeration didn’t come to most farms till Rural Electrification.  The Adams County Co-op is one of the legacies of this government program that provided low interest loans to build power lines into the rural areas.  In addition to making farm life a little easier it provided low cost energy to operate the farm.  Before rural electric power most farm work was powered by water, wind, then steam and later gasoline.  Early water pumping was done by hydraulic rams that utilize the inertia of moving water to pump a fraction of the water.  Rams were used to pump spring and creek water while wind was used to pump wells.  I have used a hand pump to draw water from a well that was just over 100 feet deep.  It is hard work.  Farmers tried to get the water for the livestock from streams but if it had to be pumped from wells it was real work.  Here is a picture of a hand pump and a short discussion about how it worked.

The canning, storage of food, the things that were needed to sustain the family were done in the home.  Most farm families could have survived for more than a year on the stored food.  The diet may have become boring but they would have survived.  If you look at this home it is easy to see.  The house is large.  It has a full basement with an outside entrance (note the doorway with the light at the front corner of the porch).  This facilitated getting things into and out of the basement.  The family didn’t need an offsite storage unit with twenty four hour access. 

The attic has windows and certainly is habitable space.  The basement and at least a portion of the attic would have been used to store things for the family.  Most of the attics were at least partially finished so someone could live there if the need arose.  Canned and cured meat and potatoes would have been stored in the basement to keep them cool, metal objects that could rust would be taken to the attic.    Flour would also be stored in the attic.  Objects like sausage presses and grinders used for butchering would be in the attic, they were expensive and rust would destroy them.  Most were solidly built and if properly maintained they would outlast a generation.  The press and grinder my parents used was over seventy years old when they bought them and I believe they are still in use by another family sixty odd years later.

Food was “canned” in glass Jars with lids with a rubber seal and a ring to hold the lid on the jar.  The rings were made tight but not overly tight.  These were often called Mason Jars because the company which produced them was the Mason company but there were Kerr Jars and lids too.  A company named Ball produced Ball Dome Lids that were shaped to pop and be visible that they were sealed.  The food was placed in the jar, sealed and the jars placed in a “canner”.  This was a large pot, some round for seven or eight quart jars, some oval that could handle more than twenty.  The canner was then filled with water up to about an inch below the top of the jars and it was cooked I believe two hours.  This sterilized the food and drove the air out of the top of the jar replacing it with steam.  When the food cooled the steam condensed and a vacuum formed.  The food was preserved from spoilage and the lid was held solidly in place without the ring which was removed to be reused.  Most farm families had only a couple dozen rings but canned several hundred jars of food a year.  You only needed enough rings for two or three days of canning.  If this food was stored in a dark and cool place like the basement it could be kept for as much as five years.  Our family lived on a truck farm and grew vegetables.  We routinely canned over 100 jars of tomato juice and about 50 of whole tomatoes every year, the ones I can remember.  We also canned red beets, both regular and pickled, pickled cucumbers, beans of various types, pears, cherries and peaches from a local fruit farm and whatever else would vary the winter diet.  I can remember doing thirty or forty pints of ‘bread and butter pickles’ which were cucumbers and onions in a vinegar dressing.  One of our treats was tomato soup, the Brandt recipe which was made by heating two quarts of tomato juice to boiling, add about a tablespoon of baking soda, stir till the fizz ended and add about a half quart of milk.  The baking soda neutralizes the acid in the tomatoes. 

Most farms grew hogs and beef cattle, some raised goats and sheep as well.  The picture of the stone barn above shows goats in the pasture.  Meat was either canned or cured and smoked, a process of covering it with a quarter inch or more layer of a mixture of consisting mainly of salt, pepper, brown sugar, and saltpeter.  The hams and shoulders were cut and trimmed but the rind (the pig’s skin) was left on it.  This skin was also rubbed with the curing mixture.  The cure covering was kept constant for some weeks (if I remember 6-8) and then it was hung in a smokehouse and smoked, then hung in a dry part of the basement (cellar it was called) and pulled out as needed.  A portion would be cut for a meal and the rind pulled up over the exposed area to keep it clean.   If the farm killed an animal and its hide was useable it was either tanned on the farm or more likely taken to town and sold to someone who did handle the leather.  Food waste from meals and canning was disposed of in the garden.  Many of the vegetable gardens of these farms had topsoil that was both very fertile and well over a foot deep as the result of adding any available vegetable matter.  Even coffee grounds were dumped there.

The farmhouse was a place where food was prepared for workers.  There was little seasonal help on the farms.  For the most part the family did the work.  But then, most of the people in the area around them were farmers who were just as busy.   There was cooperative work during harvest – they would work together to harvest one farm, then the next.   Most farmers of that era grew traditional farm crops, had dairy cattle, hogs and beef cattle, and did some truck farming.  This spread the work some.  Dairy, hogs and beef cattle are year around.  Traditional crops, wheat, rye, oats, corn are skewed heavy on the planting and harvest.  Truck farming is planting later and harvesting a little earlier, in fact this is spread over a the full time from May till September.   

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The home shows the times of its construction.  There are several wide chimneys that were not fireplaces.  They each have two flues so they could have supported two or more stoves each.  It was not unusual for these to extend to the basement and have an opening there to put a stove.  It was most likely heated pot belly stoves and to a lesser degree Franklin stoves which were less efficient, except in the kitchen.  They may have used wood in the early days but later most likely the fuel was coal. 

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I don’t see a coal chute opening but the window into the basement may have served this function. 

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In the kitchen a “cook stove” was used both for cooking and heat.  Most had a water tank on the one end that was kept full of water for kitchen use or washing hands.  In the winter corn was roasted in the oven (with the door open slightly) and then ground for corn meal.   Walnuts that grew in wooded portions of the area were picked up in the late fall, allowed to dry enough that the hulls could be removed and then the walnut was dried the same way, cracked and the meat taken out. 

Most farm homes later had kerosene stoves for cooking in the summer to avoid the heat in the house.  In alternative in many homes was a “summer kitchen” generally an attached room that could be vented or a separate structure “wash house”.  These were used to do cooking, heating water, and canning in the summer to avoid heating the main house.   I do not see one of these with these farms but they may have been taken down.

Keeping the home livable in hot weather included keeping some trees around the home for shade and using the chimney effect to cool the home.  These people used geothermal cooling.  The basement windows were opened as were the ones on the upper floors.  The heat rose, went out the attic and upstairs windows and the air came in the basement windows.  Doors to the stairs were opened and the cooler air was pulled up by the hot air going out.   A large basement with exposed stone walls could produce a significant amount of cooling.  The light color of the stone upper walls tended to reflect some heat.

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I do not find it strange this porch, which was not a part of the original construction, was added because it provides so much benefit to the farm family.  If you doubt this as an addition, look at the vertical mortar joint where the porch connects to the home.  Look down from the edge if the window.  This porch is on southern face of the home, protecting the home from sunlight in summer and also collecting the warmth of the sun in winter, thus keeping that portion of the house wall fronting an area warmer than the outside air.  It provided a buffer against anyone coming in bringing more cold air in with them and it provided a place for coats, hats, gloves and boots.  This was the main entrance to the home for those working on the farm.

Farms in Pennsylvania were very self sufficient and they grew not only grain and cattle; they also had a garden where the family grew the vegetables for their own use.  Excess of these were also used as a cash crop, generally for the money the wife used to purchase the things they could not grow or make.  Some farms were based mainly on the truck farming, i.e. vegetables and fruit that were trucked to the nearest town for markets that were held weekly on a morning.  Carlisle PA had an open market with stands along the street.  In deference to the farmers who participated and because of the live stock market on the north west corner of the town, there was an ordinance that prohibits transportation of livestock on South Hanover Street on a Tuesday morning.  Cattle and hogs on the hoof can literally destroy an open market.  That ordinance still stood a few years ago, at least seventy five years after the open market gave way to the Market house that was on the south east corner of Hanover and High Streets.  That was an old building in the 1950’s and was torn down before I was out of high school in 1961.  I believe it still exists on the books today and if someone officer wanted to enforce it he could at least give a truck driver with livestock some trouble. 

The glassed in area of the porch would have also provided a place in spring for starting seeds to have plants to set out in the spring.  Frosts were common in this area and could devastate tomato, pepper and some vine plants (squash, cucumbers and the like) that needed a long growing season.  The seeds were planted in ‘flats’ and nurtured inside, then planted out only when there was little chance of frost.  A threat of frost would bring the family covering the plants with anything that would protect them.  My family and my mother’s did truck farming and I can remember tenting the plants with newspaper which would save the ones we covered.  The financial return from truck farming depended on being there first.  A bushel of early tomatoes could bring as much money as ten later in the season.  We would generally plant one half of the crop of tomatoes very early and cover them, still risking loosing the plants, and then plant the remainder for later.  This home does not have the open porch that was common to farm homes of this era.   These were also used for social gatherings and a place for the children to play on rainy days.  They were close enough to be supervised and out from under mom’s feet. 

Farming and living on a farm is dangerous.  There are lots of things that can hurt you, machinery, animals, firearms, and cutting implements.  Farm children grow up with these, learn the dangers and factoring in the exposure they are generally very well protected and safe.  Few farm homes did not have a loaded firearm within easy grasp, generally behind the door of mom and dad’s bedroom or in a closet near the front door, and generally both places.  The children got firearms safety training before they were able to pick up a weapon and it didn’t take a nanny government to tell the parents to do it.   With far more firearm exposure there were few accidents.   The rifle was used to kill white tail deer.  One kill could bring more than a hundred pounds of meat for the family as well as a hide that would make fine gloves and other items.  Deerskin gloves even today are among the finest made.   This same rifle was used to kill hogs and sometimes cattle.  Generally one shot to the forehead took down an animal.  Ammunition was not wasted.  I have seen one of my uncles take down five hogs with six .22 short rounds.  He missed the center of the forehead by maybe a half inch with the one shot on one hog and had to fire the second one to take him down.   As steam and gasoline engines came into play the equipment was powered by them.  OHSA would have a field day.  Saws, pulleys, belts had limited guards. 

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Without television the families used the evenings to make clothes, innovation, and bonding.  Many farms used tools and machines that were designed and built there.  Often these were observed by a machinery salesman and later showed up as a product, without the inventor getting one cent for the idea.  

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The home has lightning rods.  These are not ornamental nor is any portion of them only decorative.  The upper rod above the white ball is insulated from the house by the ball.  The ball shape prevented rain water from collecting on the surface of it and providing a conductor to the roof.  The rod above makes contact with the heavy wire that comes down through the tripod legs that support the ball.  The objective was to make the copper wire to ground the easiest path for the lightning.  It will follow the easiest path.  If you look carefully you can see the wire that connects the middle one to both of the sides and then there is a down lead on both ends of the home to ground stakes that are six to eight feet in the ground.  The one can be seen at the chimney below.

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Check back in a week or two – this document will grow as time goes on.

Pennsylvania, York Co, York, Taxville, tractor, vegetables, house, historic, farm, barn, home, brick, nature, digital, photography