January of 1936 was notable for its heavy snow-fall, Again
the town plow broke down just as it was most needed, When grain-delivery time
came I couldn't get out with the car and had to ask a neighbor to bring mine up
with his. Most of us bought thru a co-operative which shipped in farm supplies
monthly by rail. I went along down and helped unload from the freight-car on
the siding. Toward the end of the month the weather became so bad that for a
time there, was no school. During this period I enjoyed well enough being
indoors, studying seed catalogs and writing while the wind roared in the
chimneys.
At last there came a few nice days, and we invited some friends
from the village to come and have a dinner cooked in the brick oven in the
chimney-.place. We had tried this only tentatively, and it was to be the first
meal done in the old style. On the previous evening I made up a good hard-wood
fire in the large vaulted oven and continued it next morning until there was a
great pile of glowing embers; toward noon I raked them out and shoveled them
into the pit underneath, Into the oven Isabel slid a ham and a pot of beans,
and we closed it up - and waited. Rather to our amazement (and relief) our
ancestors knew what they were about! when the six o'clock dinner hour arrived
the things were done perfectly and were delicious. With the main items we had
fresh warm gingerbread , (which we, preferred to brown bread) and cucumber
relish and, for desert, lemon pie, and of course coffee. After this, we
occasionally tried baking different things; it was practical enough but more
time consuming than 'we could afford. Yet it was nice to know we could do it.
By the advent of March it was thawing. The snow was too
soggy even to use snow•-shoes and the roads were terrible. To our puzzlement,
one day the snow had turned brown, it was caused by dust from the western
plains carried all this way by the winds. We could hardly believe this but it
was verified, It never has happened again. (But there frequently is an
infestation of tiny flies (?) peppering late snow-banks.)
Then flood conditions developed, The brooks and rivers
overflowed and many bridges and roads were under water. The snow had
disappeared and the ground was thawing, For several days there was no mail
delivery, which is an unheard-of situation; the mail may sometimes be late but
it gets thru. - There was almost a foot of water in our cellar; and it was warm
enough so that when the children splashed out to the brook-side they found pussy-willows,
No sugaring was possible.
After such a warm spell it would have been normal if there
had been more freezing weather, but it turned out to be an early spring. When
trout-fishing opened on the first of May grass was greened and starred with
dandelions, contrasting with other years
when there still may be snow along the brooks. So we had some early-bird
friends up and went fishing. It was fun but not very productive. The brooks still
were full and rapid.
The warm weather permitted an early start on the gardens.
Also I was determined to improve the quality of the hay so seeded down a
good-sized piece in the mowing with an oats-hayseed mix, The time had come when
I needed all the hay I could raise. In addition to reading up on the subject, I
consulted the County Farm Agent (representing the Department of Agriculture)
and got some good advice. This resulted in a program of top-dressing and
re-seeding, which I carried out over a number of years. The objective was a
three-ton yield per acre; by the most optimistic estimate I came close to it on
a number of acres but the average was probably not over, two tons per acre, and
less on parts of the mowing. Over the
years, plowing had turned so much topsoil down-hill that ledgy outcroppings wee
close to the surface, and whereas loam is deep along the bottom wall the
up-side (west) wall is exposed below its foundations and much has fallen over.
However, my efforts resulted in some improvement, especially on some acres
given to birds foot trefoil which is a fair substitute for alfalfa and can
better be grown under our conditions of soil, which lacks a limestone base, 1
also experimented with millet that year, but found it about the most difficult
crop to cure. Poor judgment was only partly responsible: I mowed it in
anticipation of a frost but it rained instead. We had, quite a time with that
millet. It was dense and heavy, rather green, and very wet. A neighbor took one
wagonload to feed out to his cows.
Then I spent considerable time building a summer
chicken-coop,- really a small house. Located between First and Second brooks
for the purpose of saving fencing, it proved very useful, Twelve feet square,
it was a good size to brood about 100 baby chicks. They were started under a
canopy warmed by a small oil heater, during the spring, and soon learned to
push their way under the hangings to reach the feeders or if they got warm. As they grew larger and the weather warmed up, they
were permitted
to go out of the house into a small fenced enclosure; and
soon this was removed and they could roam at will, protected by the brooks on two 'sides and fence on the other two, We
were fortunate not to be bothered by. four-legged depredators, but occasionally
a hawk or owl took-tribute. In late summer I installed nests and the pullets
wore laying when the time came to move them to the shed next the barn for the
winter, Cockerels meantime, after being confined in a fattening pen, had been either
eaten or marketed, with a few in special quarters to provide Sunday dinners.
The ones sold, at 30c a pound, need a nice profit.
The Dust Bowl: How surprising it must have been for the
Tiemann family to wake up to find brown snow. Further, it may have seemed
unbelievable that the cause of it could have been from the Great Plain, the
150,000-square-mile area, encompassing the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and
neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico
Intense cultivation of this area in previous decades
was one of the causes of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Native prairie grasses
have deep roots that keep soil in place. When these plants were tilled up,
shallow-rooted plants like wheat and corn couldn’t stop erosion. The
drought from 1934 to 1937 along with the lack of a stronger root system of
grass to act as an anchor, the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and
swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” One such storm,
created a 2 mile high storm, which hit the east coast on May 11, 1934. For five hours, a fog of prairie
dirt enshrouded landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol,
inside which lawmakers were debating a soil conservation bill.
The Dust Bowl remains the largest migration in
American history in that short a time period. Approximately 15 percent of the
population of Oklahoma alone left the state. Conservation programs initiated by
the Soil Conservation Service, as well as farming practices like terracing and
contour plowing, helped stop erosion and end the Dust Bowl.
While many areas of the country were suffering
considerable hardship from both the Dust Bowl and Depression, economics were
improving in Cavendish. The number of people receiving help from the town began
to go down.
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