Chapter 9

THE FARM AT WOODSTOCK OHIO

It was dark and still snowing when they arrived at the Woodstock Railroad Station. MH was there to meet them and they walked to the rental house on Bennett Street. Their new farm would be available in March. MH had been there long enough to unpack the furniture and have food for them. The next morning, Sunday, the boys from the hills went out to see the flatland town where they were to live.

The Woodstock Railroad Station 1915

The New Town

Woodstock was three times the size of Calais plus eight new Warners. After the December Sunday exploration, the excited boys reported that they saw a new high school under construction! And there were two banks, two barber shops, two blacksmith shops, two general stores, two grain and coal dealers, a grocery store, a harness shop, a hotel, a meat market, a shoe repair shop, a hardware store, a drugstore, a church, a restaurant and pool room, a canning factory, a telephone company, and there were no tobacco houses!

And there were lights on the streets at night! They had moved to a town with electricity! and automobiles! Woodstock, was a modern town when compared to the town they referred to as back in the hills. .

Downtown Woodstock Ohio 1915 (note the dirt street and dust)

MH and Louisa had visited this town on one of those trips when they went to the Ohio State Fair. They had seen a clean town. The houses were well-kept and farm land was for sale. They had made arrangements for the rental house until the farm they bought would become available.

The New Farm (125 acres $12,500)

The Warner Home 1915 - 1936. Ethel Warner near flagpole.

In the summer of 1916, Grandma Nancy Gilmore came for a visit. A picture was taken in front of the new home, to remember the occasion.

This is the oldest picture of the MH Warner family and was found in Uncle Hubert s

collection. My best guess of who is who--starting left: Thurman, MH, Nancy Gilmore

holding a baby, Hubert, Louisa Belle, Hildred, Roger and Rodney one of them holding Ethel

Joy May (Warner) Campbell remembers, The house was attractive and modern. The kitchen was located in the front as was the living room, a bedroom and also the stairway. While working in the kitchen one could survey the large front yard. The kitchen table rolled into the countertop in the same fashion as a roll top desk. There was a bathroom off a small hall from the kitchen to the back of the house. During the winter months there were often dominoes on the dining room table. Our Grandparents had a continuing game in progress. Quilting frames were in a corner of the dining room since our grandmother made her own quilts. There was always something to do.

Each day began with one of the boys building a fire in the stove. Breakfast was usually the biggest meal of the day with oatmeal, cream of wheat or Ralston. Sometimes there was fried mush, ham, bacon, sausage or potatoes and always homemade bread, biscuits, real butter, honey, or apple butter. Louisa used her oven twice a week to bake bread. She had two pans that would hold four loaves and other pans for single loaves. She made a yeast starter the night before each baking day. Bread was stored in a stone jar in the dining room.

For each meal the boys or Louisa Belle would build a fire on the left side of the stove. The levers on the left side were to shake the ashes out of the firebox and adjust the amount of air and the temperature. The hottest burners were over the fire box. The large door on the lower right was the baking oven. The lower door was for the daily removal of ashes depending on how much fuel was burned. There was a special coal bucket also used to carry coal in and ashes out. The firebox was attached to a chimney and the upper area served as a warming oven.

The boys did much of their homework while waiting for breakfast. Sometimes when sheep or other animals were on nearby rented land, they were tended to before breakfast. They always sat down and ate breakfast together. The same was true for supper. They all worked and they all came in to sit together to eat.

After several years improvements were made on the house. First was the coming of electricity. A pump and the plumbing lines were installed for running water for both the

house and barn. Inside plumbing would soon supplement the outhouse. Ethel tells of her joy and excitement with having lights. (Her mother said she nearly wore out the steps running up to turn the light on and down to turn it off.)

There was a fifty-foot grape arbor and a 160-foot row of rhubarb with some horseradish at one end. This planting of so much rhubarb caused a rumor that those hillicans were making rhubarb wine. They also maintained a twenty by forty-foot strawberry patch for several years.

Louisa Belle made jams, jellies and canned many jars of what was produced in their gardens. The coolest place for storing things like butter and milk was near the well in the basement, which meant many trips up and down for each meal. Aunt Ethel said she never liked to go down around the steps into the room where the well was.

There was a difference between chores and work. The daily routine of caring for the livestock and garden were chores. Work was building, planting, harvesting and cleaning the abundance of manure from the barns, hog and chicken houses. Both the level of chores and of work changed as the boys grew older and stronger. A big change came when Roger and Rodney left for The Ohio State University. They were only home to help on weekends. There was more to be done by those still at home.

MH, the builder, continued to build in Woodstock even though World War I caused a considerable increase in the price of lumber. With the help of a professional mover and his boys, he moved, raised, rebuilt and connected two old one-story barns. MH did the framing while Roger and Rodney did most of the erection. The new lower level had a concrete

foundation and provided 9600 square feet for work horses, box stalls for stallions and areas for colts, cattle and sheep.

The reason for having such a large barn was to fill the lower level with livestock to breed, feed and sell for profit. The upper level of the barn was filled with the hay and straw, used for feed and bedding, as it was harvested from the fields. The twins and MH did

most of the barn construction. The farm about 1920-21

Thurman and Hubert did most

of the feeding and field chores except during planting and harvest when work on the barn was stopped. The farmhouse is seen in the distance on the left.

Ethel was two and one-half years old when the family moved to Woodstock. She attended the first grade in 1920 the year Roger and Rodney were getting married. Years later Ethel wrote, My brother Thurman had one question he never failed to ask me when we were in a group together. What s that dirty spot on your hose? My hose were alright, it was the brown birthmark on the inside of my left leg. Mother said when she saw it, it looked like a freckle about the size of a pin head. Now it is about x inches. It has never bothered me.

Thurman and Ethel shortly after the Depending on supply and demand the

move to Woodstock annual routine was to have a horse sale in

February, to shear and sell some of the sheep and lambs in April and May, and to sell the yearling cattle in June. Gardens and field crops were planted in April and May. The field harvest was gathered and stored in the barn and silos as preparation for the next winter feeding. Sometimes shocks of corn or oats were left in the field and had to be broken loose from frozen ground when they were needed.

MH continued in his quest for recognition in horse breeding with entries in the Ohio State Fair. The summer Thurman was sixteen he was trusted to get MH s three prized Percheron stallions to the Ohio State Fair. Thurman rode to Columbus in the railroad car with the horses and then rode one, leading the others from the rail yard. When a kind policeman learned that he did not know how to get to the Ohio State Fairgrounds he took one horse and led them all the way to the horse barn. Those horses won the Best of Class and sold for a good price. Ole Bill was a special horse because he would respond to voice commands, whoa, giddyup, and gee or haw, to turn right or left, and could be trusted to work in the big garden without stepping on plants. JH wrote that his dad hired Mose Davis, a former slave, to work the garden their first year and after that most of the hoeing was done by the three younger boys. MH usually plowed the half-acre garden and the one-acre truck patch. Then the soil was worked

An undated photo of Thurman. down with a disc and then a harrow. The gardens

Could this be his favorite horse were laid out with forty-two inch rows to allow Ole Bill? room for a horse to pull the five-shovel cultivator

Every kind of vegetable was planted both for immediate use and for canning. The truck patch was planted with popcorn, sweet corn for canning, potatoes for winter storage, cabbage for kraut, lima beans, and tomatoes.

It is hard for us to today to realize that going anywhere meant getting the harnesses on the horses and hooking them up to a wagon or a buggy. MH was proud of the matching pair shown here. This was his method of transportation until he got his first automobile. Horses required shelter in the barn. They had to have water and food everyday. Like all animals they made their share of manure. People in town kept horses and people accepted the ever present smell as the way life had to be. Manure was spread on fields and gardens as a source of fertilizer.

MH going shopping

The MH Warner barn was featured in a news article in the Urbana newspaper when a new state of the art silo was purchased.

Barn on Woodstock Farm about 1925

During the next few years the demand for work horses like those pictured here declined rapidly due to the production and sale of autos and tractors. Hildred was doing more of the outside work and less to help Louisa. He took over the hand pumping of water for the livestock and eventually the milking. Hubert commented about HH having big strong hands for the job.

MH increased the size of his herds to raise more money to pay off the debts. To do this he increased the mortgage on the farm to buy more animal feed. Hubert recorded that during his senior year they fed 150 lambs, 200 chickens, 500 aged wethers (castrated sheep kept for wool), 80 steers, 140 hogs, 3 stallions, 10 milk cows, 7 work horses and about a dozen colts. In addition there were shipments of sheep and cattle that were unloaded, driven to a pasture and reloaded when sold and shipped to a buyer.

Ethel was becoming her mother s helper. Hubert found that he had many more chores even though extra men were hired. Hard times hit after the war when prices came down and hog cholera swept across the hog country. MH lost two hundred 250-pound hogs that died and had to be burned. Also in 1920 the stock market crashed, and though it recovered some until 1929, it was continue to buy, borrow, feed and sell.

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