As the popular song says, “In summertime the living was easy,” but to survive the winter months in East Texas during the early years of the 20th century required careful planning and elaborate storage techniques. One of my Elderwriters, the late Neilson Rogers, had a record of the way his Neilson grandparents, whom he knew as Papa and Mama, went about preparing for winter in Ladonia from roughly 1890-1930. He made me his literary executor, and this column will be an edited version of his reminiscence.
Both Papa and Mama came from once prosperous families that had migrated to East Texas from North Carolina in the post-Civil War era. As a successful physician, Papa was prosperous enough to support a plantation lifestyle without slaves, through the assistance of his sons and paid workers. He and Mama had a total of twelve children, ten of whom lived to adulthood. Feeding a household of that size required the production of a great deal of food. When it came to laying in stores for winter, the recipe for accomplishing this task had been handed down for centuries. In the 19th century the southern planters had adapted the process to make the plantation a self-sufficient unit.
To feed the animals through the winter, large quantities of hay and corn had to be harvested and stored in the great barn. Making bales of hay was not yet readily available, so pitchforks were used to load the properly cured loose hay on mule-drawn haywagons. Unloading the wagons by tossing the forkfuls of hay up into the hayloft and shaping it into shocks was not an easy task. Similarly, as the ear corn was gathered in the fields, wagonloads were transported to the barn, where corncribs below the loft were filled to the brim by means of a large shovel referred to as a scoop. Harvesting and storing these crops was hard work, and a lot of dust and dirt were stirred up. More dirty work was required to supply the wood lot and coal bin.
Most important, if the family was to survive the winter in good health, enough food must be preserved and stored to last until summer. There was no refrigeration, no grocery stores or meat markets. The principal meat consumed by the ancestors in North Carolina had been pork, and the same was true in East Texas. The frontier farmer would brand his hogs and pigs by cutting notches in their ears. Each farmer had his own brand in the form of a certain combination of notches. His hogs were then turned loose on the open range to sustain themselves on acorns, berries and other food they found in the hills and river bottoms.
A month or six weeks before hog-killing time the farmers would get together with their dogs to round up the hogs, and each farmer would select from his own the hogs he intended to slaughter. The selected hogs, called shoats, were then driven to the farm where they were intensively fed. The frontier people had learned that this additional care and feeding significantly improved the flavor and tenderness of the meat, as well as the quantity of its important byproduct, lard.
Since there was no refrigeration, hog-killing time was determined by the weather. The preservation of the meat required that it occur after the weather turned cold and stayed that way, typically in late November or early December. They had learned to preserve the meat using salt, smoking and canning. The procedures and methods used were exact and complicated, handed down from one generation to the next and carefully followed. In a separate column these fine points of pork processing the old fashioned way will be discussed.
Jerry Lincecum is a retired Austin College professor who now teaches older adults to write their autobiographies and family histories. Email him at jlincecum@me.com.