Briar Farm

“ Brick has about forty head of cattle, and several horses; last fall on my arrival there he had about forty pigs, but killed some during my stay, and only intended to winter about twenty-five. He employs a good deal of local labour, and pays for it with food to a very large extent; in fact it is the only way it could be paid for in the country. The hay for wintering the cattle and horses is cut on the plateau about seven miles from the farm. He generally allows his cattle to run out until Christmas, the grass on the meadows being enough for them to feed on it after the early snows have fallen. ”

“ A volunteer program, established in 1976, aids the farmer in tending the large vegetable garden, and the livestock which consists of poultry, hogs, rabbits, goats, sheep, dairy cows and draft horses. Frying Pan Farm cultivates corn, wheat and hay crops and includes a late-19th century farmstead, a frame barn, shed, henhouse, and rabbit hutch and a machine and separator shed. An orchard and additional crop acreage and fencing are planned. Far from being a zoo or a site of isolated craft or mechanical demonstrations, the farm is operated daily as if agriculture were its only aim. ”

“ The stream itself was, on my side, fringed with bulrushes and other aquatic plants; on the opposite bank there were some large alders lifting their branches above great masses of bramble and rose-briar, all together forming as rich and beautiful a tangle as one could find even in the most luxuriant of the wild, unkept hedges round the village. The briars especially flourished wonderfully at this spot, climbing high and dropping their long, slim branches quite down to the surface of the water, and in some places forming an arch above the stream. ”

“ Just north of it, far back from both roads, another farmyard. Behind it—to the north, stretched out, a long windbreak of poplars, with a gap or a vista in its centre. Barn and outbuildings were unpainted, the house white; a not unpleasing group, but something slovenly about it. I saw with my mind’s eye numerous children, rather neglected, uncared for, an overworked, sickly woman, a man who was bossy and harsh.
The road angles here. Bell’s farm consists of three quartersections; the southwest quarter lends its diagonal for the trail. ”

“ Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate—the deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain—but to the child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over the little clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered shell and through the stark skeleton of the barn. The white birches, strange sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leaves as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the wounds of human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had not lived. ”

“ In the structure of the barn, and in its interior accommodation, much will depend upon the branches of agriculture to which the farm is devoted. A farm cultivated in grain chiefly requires but little room for stabling purposes. Storage for grain in the sheaf, and granaries, will require its room; while a stock farm requires a barn with extensive hay storage, and stables for its cattle, horses, and sheep, in all climates which do not admit of such stocks living through the winter in the field, as is the case in the great grazing districts west of the Alleghanies. ”

“ Back of [Pg 93] the barns lay the farm itself—scores of acres, chiefly rocks and huckleberry bushes, with thistles and mullein and sumac. There were dry, warm slopes, where the birches grew; not the queenly paper birch of the North, but the girlish little gray birch with its veil of twinkling leaves and its glimmer of slender stems. There were rugged ledges, deep-shadowed with oak and chestnut; there were hot, open hillsides thick-set with cat-brier and blackberry canes, where one could never go without setting a brown rabbit scampering. ”

“ They said the sap wouldn’t run last night.”
“I guest there don’t nobody know when sap’ll run and when it won’t,” said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.
In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything full—old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things [pg 031] enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its resources.
Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. ”

“ We then built a log barn for our oxen, cow and horse and got pigs, sheep and chickens as fast as a chance offered.
As fast as possible we fenced in the cultivated land, father and uncle splitting out the rails, while a younger brother and myself, by each getting hold of an end of one of them managed to lay up a fence four rails high, all we small men could do. Thus working on, we had a pretty well cultivated farm in the course of two or three years, on which we produced wheat, corn and potatoes, and had an excellent garden. ”

“ Forrest possesses sixty acres of land, fifteen of which are still in bush. The barns are very large and substantial, more so than at home; for no produce can be left out of doors in the winter. There were two hundred and fifty bushels of wheat, the produce of a "thrashing bee," and various other edibles. Oxen, huge and powerful, do all the draught-work on this farm, and their stable looked the very perfection of comfort. ”

“ It was the rural way of life that shaped the county and his demands which needed to be met.
At first glance this farmer's life seems tempered by nature and largely self-contained. The daily routine was established by seasons and sunlight; fortunes were made or lost at the mercy of the wind and rain. A farm was not only the farmer's livelihood and workshop but his home. Thus, unlike the city worker whose occupation was entirely separate from home concerns, country life had a total integration. ”

“ The fruits of the year's labor came not only from the hay fields but from garden and orchard, whose abundance had to be gathered, preserved and stored in the late summer season. Fairfax County had once been a major truck farming section but the onslaught of insects and competition from large commercial orchards (such as those in the Shenandoah Valley) had relegated this produce to the realm of home use. The A. S. Harrison farm included plum, apple, peach and cherry trees and Margaret Mary Lee recalled that cherries, pears and apples grew in her family's orchard. ”

“ Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry farm. ”

“ With the harvest over the farmer would fill the less hectic winter hours with the unending minutia of the farm. Fence and equipment mendings, cutting ice from ponds and rivers, chopping wood, and grubbing up trees all had a part in his busy life. Another burst of activity occurred in early winter when animals were butchered for the year's meat. Most farm families bought their beef in Herndon, but nearly everyone kept hogs for home consumption. ”

“ The barn-yard is often occupied by cattle, and is covered with their manure, which lies there until it is carted on to the land. In the shed are the tools of the farm, consisting of carts, plows—not deep plows, this farmer thinks it best to have roots near the surface of the soil where they can have the benefit of the sun's heat,—a harrow, hoes, rakes, etc. ”

“ I have seen in my day where forty acres of land twenty or twenty-five years ago would produce from twenty to twenty-five bales of cotton each year, and from 800 to 1000 bushels of corn. Now, these forty acres will not produce more than eight or nine bales of cotton and hardly enough corn to feed two horses. In fact, one small family cannot obtain a decent support from the land which twenty years ago supported three families in abundance. This farm is not on the hill-side, neither has it been worn away by erosion. ”

“ The activities of rural men and women were co-equal, not identical. Women rarely worked in the fields except in the press of harvesting when they might drive a horse to pull up the hay fork—"what we've all done, I guess," agreed one group of Floris women. [47] They only occasionally aided the men in the barn. Edith Rogers remembered working with the stock as did Margaret Mary Lee, who helped with milking and also recalled washing the milk storage tank and other equipment. This pleased the local milk inspector who told her, "When women are in the barn, I know the equipment is clean." ”

“ The Flying U range had been kept in the main inviolate from the little, gray vandals, which ate the grass clean to the sod, and trampled with their sharp-pointed hoofs the very roots into lifelessness; which polluted the water-holes and creeks until cattle and horses went thirsty rather than drink; which, in that land of scant rainfall, devastated the range where they fed so that a long-established prairie-dog town was not more barren. What wonder if the men who owned cattle, and those who tended them, hated sheep? So does the farmer dread an invasion of grasshoppers. ”

“ But hay was cheaper than lumber and for that reason a man had to figure on putting up enough hay during the summer, and take into account the waste. It was not till after the Civil war that many barns were built, and then only the rich farmer could afford them. Not till the '70s and '80s did the craze for barn building come, and now nearly every farm of any size, and nearly every farmer of any financial standing, has a good substantial barn, as well as machine sheds, all of which improvements may cost from three thousand to ten thousand dollars. ”

“ All this is of the past, and so also is the
an essex farmhouse
throb of the flail. There are not many labourers now who understand how to wield the flail. The steam thrasher travels from farm to farm and thrashes and winnows, relieving man of the labour. The flail is only employed for the making of "reed," i.e., straw for thatching the rick. What a robust, rubicund, hearty fellow is our old English farmer. The breed is not extinct, thank God! ”

“ Most of the harvest was used right on the farm. Like manure, which was recycled to enrich fields and gardens, the grain and hay crops went to nourish the farm's dairy animals. Little was marketed and little was wasted. "That proved to be the best thing you could do," noted Holden Harrison, "grow as much of your own feed for your cattle as you could. You sold your ... crop production through your milk can." [36]
[Pg 15]
A shock of wheat on the Ellmore farm near Floris. On this particularly successful farm the wheat was sold for seed to help improve the stock on other area farms. ”

“ Then, too, progressive farmers believe it to be economy to provide shelter for animals and [251] crops, manures and implements. The old custom of stacking the hay and grain, of allowing the farm animals to toughen in the winter’s blast in field and barnyard, and the manures to leach and bleach under the eaves of the building has, in part, been abandoned and better methods substituted. These new methods require better, larger, and more commodious farm barns. ”

“ The farm with its checkered fields lies there like a huge apron, reaching up over the smooth sloping thighs on the west and on the east and coming well up on the breast, forming the big rough mountain fields where the sheep and young cattle graze. Those mountain pastures rarely knew the plough, but the broad side-hill fields, four of them, that cover the inside of the western thigh, have been alternately ploughed and grazed since my boyhood and before. They yield good crops of rye, oats, buckwheat, and potatoes, and fair summer grazing. ”

“ The farm barn, next to the farm house, is the most important structure of the farm itself, in the Northern and Middle States; and even at the south and southwest, where less used, they are of more importance in the economy of farm management than is generally supposed. Indeed, to our own eyes, a farm, or a plantation appears incomplete, without a good barn accommodation, as much as without good household appointments—and without them, no agricultural establishment can be complete in all its proper economy. ”

“ In the end, Fairfax County farmers generally effected a compromise: while focusing on one aspect of farming, they retained many of the advantages of the general farmer. Vegetable gardens, poultry houses, orchards, and sometimes sheep all kept their place on the family farm. ”

“ The forest had melted away before the force of their industry, and orchards with their russet fruit, and fields of waving corn, gladdened their hearts and filled their cellars and barns with abundance. The old log house which had been their shelter and their home for many a year had disappeared, or was converted into an out-house for cattle, or a place for keeping implements in during the winter; and now the commodious and well-arranged frame one had taken its place. Large barns for their increasing crops and warm sheds to protect the cattle had grown up out of the rude hovels and stables. ”

“ Ripley was largely in charge, and it was not until early fall—September 29—that the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was organised as a kind of joint stock company, not incorporated.
A seeker after country quiet and beauty might easily be as much attracted to-day by the undulating acres of Brook Farm as were those who sought it sixty years ago as a refuge from social discouragement. The brook still babbles cheerily as it threads its way through the meadows, and there are still pleasant pastures and shady groves on the large estate. ”