1930 - Annual Convention Report

              S I X T E E N T H A N N U A L C O N V E N T I ON 77
The main livestock buildings, consisting of a barn and three stables, had
been erected at a reasonable distance from the house. The barn was the
usual frame barn of the day with its hewn beams, plates and braces banded
together by mortise and wooden p i n ; w i t h its sheeting of vertical inch boards,
its rafters of spruce, and its home- made shingles of split cedar. In some of
the barns of the district a cow- stable occupied the lower part of one of the
mows, and the cattle were fed from the barn floor, but our cow- stable formed
a lean- to beside the barn, access to the feeding floor of which was by means
of a narrow passage way along the end of the mow. Over the stable was a
loft that was filled with corn- stalks in the fall, and with straw after the
threshing had been accomplished; the cattle stood in a row and were held
by a " bale" that locked by a drop block at the top, this instead of the familiar
tie- chain in use today. The log horse- stable projected from one end of the
barn, while a frame shed and sheep- pen paralleled this stable at the other end
of the barn, the whole forming a d- ouble- L to enclose on three sides the area
known as the barnyard, which was protected on the fourth side by a high
fence. Such in brief was the provision for storing fodder and for sheltering
the livestock, on a plan then followed fairly closely on almost every farm in
the district. Locally the entire unit was spoken of as " the barn," probably
to distinguish it from the house, with its woodshed and other possible out­buildings,
and from the outlaw known as the hog- pen, which always stood in
splendid isolation.
Our hog- pen was somewhat pretentious, as hog- pens go, and was used,
like the woodshed, for more than what its name indicated. Downstairs there
were of course the pens for the swine, each pen having its fragrant trough
and its sleeping place that the pigs seldom frequented. In front of these
pens stood a large brick fire place, called locally an " arch." which held, em­bedded
in the brick, a large kettle that had been once used in the making of
potash, but that now had been promoted to fill three important functions;
boiling pigs feed, heating water to scald the pig carcasses at time of butcher­ing,
and making that infernal brew known as soft soap. This latter perform­ance
was staged in early summer. Beside the hog pen was a v- shaped
" leach," filled with the winter's wood ashes, and into this pails of water were
occasionally thrown, to seep through the ashes and drip out at the bottom
i n the form of lye. This lye, mixed with grease scraps of every sort, was
boiled down into a glutinous compound that would blister a door- knob, but
that was ironically called soft soap.\ To come back to the hog pen, it need only
be further stated that the upper story was really a carriage and implement
shelter, wherein were stored all articles of this type not in use. They were
drawn up a wide incline by means of a rope and windlass, and lowered to
the ground by the same method when they were needed.
i ^ l t would take some stretch of imagination to picture what the fore­going
assortment of buildings would l © ok like if there had been no setting of
trees, shrubs and flowers, to furnish a most important part of the home
steading. Fortunately the people who settled our township brought with
them a taste for such a setting, a taste fostered by custom in the land of their
derivation whether it were England, Scotland, Ireland or the north- eastern
of the United States. It was the concrete result of this tendency that the
home I have been describing, average though it was in equipment of build­ings,
always presented an attractive picture even to the unprejudiced, among
whom of course I cannot be listed.
The farm- house stood upon a modest elevation, scarcely a h i l l , and this
no doubt must have been the result of definite design, whether for comfort
or for . perspective. From the woodshed, which served as a carriage shelter, a
driveway led around past the south end of the house, and curved to descend