In the rolling hills of upstate New York, farming dominated the culture for centuries. Boys signed up for classes in agriculture in high school. Girls took home economics and learned how to sew and cook.
This summer marks the 100th anniversary of my father’s family – the Hibbards – owning a farm in Steuben County, New York. All of my grandparents lived on dairy farms. They worked the fields using teams of horses until reliable, affordable tractors allowed them to hang up the heavy leather harnesses in the shed to gather dust and the curious looks of subsequent generations.
Whether done with horses or tractors, farming in upstate New York is hard work. Just to prepare a garden we had to shove aside rocks to plant the seeds. As one grandfather said, “You have to plow both sides of the hill to get a decent crop.”
During summers out in the fields, the men and kids worked hard storing up hay, grain and silage for the animals to eat the next winter. Inside the house, the women and girls worked hard preparing, canning or freezing fruits and vegetables for the family to eat.
In the fall, coming home from school to the sight of a slaughtered bovine hanging from the tree meant a family evening spent gathered round the dining room table cutting, wrapping and labeling packages to tuck in the freezer to eat later.
With their parents’ encouragement, few of the farm-reared grandchildren stayed to work the farms. Most sought college, careers and jobs in industry over long days of farming.
The need for the food from the farms, however, did not disappear. That need continues to grow with the nation’s expanding population.
On the plains of mid-America, necessity has advanced farming into the 21st century with massive modern machinery — equipment ill-suited to the steep foothills of the Finger Lake region in up-state New York, but perfect for the horse-drawn equipment of the Amish and conservative Mennonites.
For the plain-clothes folks, the small, farms of upstate New York provided an answer to the encroaching urban life in Lancaster County, Pa.
Each generation of large families of Amish in Lancaster discovered it increasingly more difficult to find farm land. To feed their families, the bearded ones increasingly sought work in factories, little shops or on farms hundreds of miles away.
Today, at least two of the farms I once knew quite well, now accommodate a horse and buggy in the shed and a clothesline beside the house filled with long plain dresses and button-less britches.
The Steuben County I knew has changed. On their way home from work in nearby businesses, my cousins, descendants of the country cooks of yesterday, buy cookies, quilts and freshly made loaves of bread at the Amish-run roadside stands and shops. The old car repair and machine shop which my uncle and his father once owned — and never cleared of the tools from a former age — fits right into the needs of the Amish/Mennonite population.
My cousin makes a living driving the car-less Amish to appointments or the homes of friends in nearby counties. She saves them the day or two it would take to ride there in a horse-drawn buggy. My cousin has a little shop where she keeps a freezer of ice cream handy for Amish children who walk a couple of miles down the road for the cool treat — just as I used to walk down the hill to the little corner shop for a snack.
While my family moved away from farming, another group took up a task that we did not want to do, but which needed to have done.
My grandparents sold their horses to buy a tractor. The current farmers turned their back on tractors and bought a horse. And once again, the kitchens smell of fresh baked bread, wild strawberry jam and the steam of hot water baths for canned vegetables.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)