Memories of Roy Jones #3

I told you a little bit about the town itself.  The town couldn’t survive if it wasn’t for the farmers. The land around Reynolds is above average – some is as good as any in the country.  The Crowell community north of Reynolds about seven or eight miles is where the old Indian reservation was the last to leave.  That land lines runs northeast to southeast. I don’t know how that came about but most of the farmers had about 100 acres of land. Economically they were about the same.  It made for a good community – each one tried to outdo the other.  The land was so good there that it could support the families.  One of the oldest churches is the Crowell Methodist Church.

The average farm would run about 200 acres. A farm without woods was not considered desirable because we used woods for everything.  If you didn’t have woods on your farm it was considered to be a bad thing. Most were worked by two mules – that’s all we had to plow with.  Each mule could work about 30 or 40 acres, which meant you had 80 acres a man.

Cotton was the only thing you could sell in those days.  A few families were big enough to work the land themselves.  The others were done by sharecroppers.  Each farm would have about two tenant houses. You wouldn’t call them shacks.  With a lot of them you were not much worse off than the farm owners. We didn’t have anything to preserve the wood with. Our house was always screened but the screen was so coarse it would let the mosquitoes through it.  The tenant house usually had wood shutters.  When those shutters where closed you lived in darkness.

We didn’t have electricity back then.  We had lamps – rail lamps.  It had shiny brass that would reflect the light better.  A lot used glass lamps.  Most of the water came from open wells.  Since the mules used more water than the people, the wells were generally located as close to the mule lot so that you could just pour water over the fence to the mules.  I’m sure today it would not pass any type of qualifications. There is an art to drawing well water – most had a pulley with a rope or chain that went through the pulley.   There would be a tin bucket on each end. You let the bucket down and fill it with water. As you pulled it up the empty bucket would be going down.   When that bucket would hit the water it would lie on its side.  You had to have the right twitch or else the bucket would jump up and down.  The people that used the wells a lot knew exactly how to pull and to let the top of the bucket go under the water just a little bit – then the bucket would go on and sink.

There were a few exceptions to the small farms.  One was the large plantation that had 18 or 20 mules and six or eight tenant houses.  They could always get sharecroppers because back then people liked to live close together.  The sharecropper would furnish the labor of planting the crops.  The owner would buy the fertilizer and seed.  The sharecropper would pay the owner back with half of his crops.  It came in bad repute but it worked pretty good because it gave a man the incentive to work when all he had to give was labor.  If there wasn’t any trouble by the fall, they would want to sharecrop with you the next year.   I guess some owners would want to cheat them out but most times they were making money for the owner because things were so cheap, particularly in the depression.   Most played fair and square.  Of course, if the sharecropper didn’t like it, he could move off and get another place.  Some liked to move but most stayed in the same place for years.

My daddy had the best reputation as anybody in the world.  I never ever heard him say as much as doggone. He was a mail carrier and started carrying the mail in about 1900.   He carried it in a buggy, then a motorcycle, then in a car.  When he died, I think he was using a 1931 or 1932 model Chevrolet. It’s nothing compared to what we have today.  Back then the mail man just went down the main road and the people who lived off from it would put up boxes.  In a lot of places they would have them mounted on wagon wheels.  The mailman would turn the wheels to get to the six or eight boxes.

A lot of advertising was done by giving out samples in those days.  We didn’t have the media like radio or TV or even newspaper.  Samples from companies were just put in all the mailboxes.  One time I remember – I believe it was Feenamint or Ex-Lax causing trouble.  The samples had been put in all the boxes. Children would get the mail and some thought they were candy or chewing gum.  It was a real problem, especially when there were multiple boxes.  But that’s the way they advertised.

… to be continued.

 Recordings from Roy Jones.  Transcribed by his daughter, Harriet Jones Geesey.