Georgie’s Memories – Part 7: Groceries Stores, Gardens, and Threshing

Grocery Stores and Gardens

The grocery store had barrels with crackers, coffee beans, cookies and staples.  Flour and sugar came in cloth sacks – also salt.  Peanut butter was sold in bulk.  Farmers brought butter and eggs to the store in exchange for sugar, flour, salt, coffee and spices.  I don’t think there were any paper products sold then, and of course plastics had not been invented yet.

Great Uncle Stace (Eustace) Link’s Store, now Schmitz-Lynk funeral home (2006). And the Family Store by J. Kempker, where William J. Link was born.

At that time farmers produced almost everything they ate.  Everyone had a big garden.  Most people had at least some fruit trees, and berries.  Cows provided milk – chickens the eggs.  In winter hogs were butchered mostly – some beef and mutton by those who kept sheep.  Hams and shoulders and bacon were salted and smoked, beef was canned or dried.  Sausage was made and eaten first while the weather was cold.  Most housewives raised chicken and had fryers in the summer.  Some ducks, turkeys and geese as well as guineas were raised.

Threshing

I remember my mother saying that my dad wouldn’t eat chicken because everybody had spring fryers ready by threshing time and since he owned a steam engine and threshed both in Iowa and North Dakota he got chicken almost every day. 

The meals served to threshers were a matter of pride.  Fried chicken, mashed potatoes made with heavy cream and home churned butter, gravy, green beans with ham, creamed peas, pies, cakes and homemade rolls for example.  Neighbors and relatives came in to help cook.  I remember going to Uncle George and Aunt Veronica (Verona) Wellman’s.  She made the best lemon meringue pie.  We also went to Uncle Ben and Aunt Teresa’s to help – she was a wonderful cook – made angel food cake that melted in your mouth.  In the afternoon we made sandwiches, put them in a clothes basket and covered them with a table cloth and carried lunch out to the field where they were threshing. 

At that time, you threshed in a neighborhood until everyone was finished to avoid moving the engine so far.  Sometimes my dad had to move the engine at night as he might have to a take the long way around a bridge that wasn’t strong enough.  He would hang a couple lanterns on the engine.  He and the crew would start out at daybreak each morning to fire the engine and get steam up.  They were given breakfast at the farmers.  Breakfast was smoked ham or smoked sausage, eggs, homemade bread or pancakes, oatmeal.  Food was plentiful and cooked in large quantities.  Leftovers were scraped into the swill barrel along with extra milk and butter milk and fed to the pigs.