Molasses in January, No...June!

 As a child I was raised on a big dairy farm on a hillside in a small town in central Vermont. It was truly an idyllic time as I look back.  Even at the time it seemed really good to me.  We had lots of land to roam over, fresh air, lots of farm kid responsibilities/work such as feeding calves and cleaning out the barn.  As we got older we moved into more  heavy work like haying and stacking bales.

Our father was a rather innovative man.  He had been raised on a dairy farm and went to the Vermont School of Agriculture to get a modern education.  He had only finished one year when his own father died.  He came home to run the family farm.  Eventually he married our mother and began to acquire more land and more cows.  Mostly the cows were Jersey cows but later on he had some Holsteins which increase the quantity of milk we shipped every other day.

In about 1954 he built two new 100-foot barns.  One was a free-stall barn which had a manger down the center and stanchions on both sides  with corridors behind the cows for cleaning/scraping out with a Farmall Cub tractor.  There was a concrete floor in the feeding shed just described and across a barn yard was a second 100-foot barn which was a loafing shed and had a dirt floor where the cows would go after eating in the winter.  They were under cover and happy there.  In summer they were turned out into the fields where they were a pretty picture.

The first driving any of us kids did was on the Farmall Cub!  The boys got to clean out the feeding shed with scraper attached.  I only drove the tractor around in the barnyard for fun. I did not get much time on it, as I recall.

Above the mangers in the feeding shed was a row of square openings about 3 feet square, big enough to throw a bale down.  Under the opening was a slot where flat doors were placed so they could slide open and shut.  There was a little more than 3 feet between the holes so when the doors were slid into place there was a ceiling above the manger.  In the summer time the doors were left open for air-y-ness.  In the winter the doors were closed all the time except when the hay that was stored in the haymow above the manger was thrown down the holes to feed the cows.

Always concerned about the cow's health, our father, for a period of time, obtained blackstrap molasses in 55-gallon drums and poured it over the hay in the manger.  The cows loved it! The drums were stored upright in a section of the barn but when it was time to draw off the molasses into a pail to pour over the hay, the barrel was placed on a scaffold-sort of thing...more or less of a triangular cradle. There were two holes in the tops of the barrel that you slid open with your fingers.  When the barrel was lying horizontally in the cradle the small "hole" was at the bottom and was turned open so the molasses would drip out into the pail placed beneath the opening.  The larger hole was to allow some air into the barrel so the molasses was able to flow more smoothly.  

You will all have heard the expression: "slower than molasses in January".  Well, when molasses is cold, as it would be in January in Vermont, is is very viscous and does not flow well.

In June it is another story altogether!

One day in the summer when I was probably around 10 or 11 years old I was in the milking parlor where my mother was helping my father with the milking.  My father sent the hired man  out to the feeding shed to get the buckets of molasses ready to spread onto the hay.  I wanted to go watch so my mother and I went out to the feeding shed to watch the process.  

LW got the pail and placed it under the small hole and turned the "knob".  Nothing happened.  I remember clearly  him turning to look at me with a big smile on his face. I must have asked him what the problem was.  I was leaning down more or less over his shoulder watching.  Well, that son of a gun probably knew what was about to happen.  He opened the "bung hole" on the top then opened the air vent. Out flew a huge flood of molasses!  Straight at me!  I was drenched with that black gook.  My mother immediately took me into the milking parlor and sprayed me off with the sprayers my father had created for each stanchion so he could easily wash off the udders of the cows before milking them.

The milking parlor hose only did a little job so Mother took me outside, stripped me down, and used a garden hose at the end of the barn to get more of the molasses off then sent me to the house to take a bath and completely remove the molasses from my body and hair.

To this day I cannot abide stickiness.  Of any kind, not just molasses!

Also, I recall not being impressed by having to run naked or at least nearly naked from the barn to the house, a not insignificant distance when you are a modest child.  Maybe that killed some of my modesty, now that I think of it...

The Iron Pot

 The Story of the Big Iron Pot

The Royalton (Vermont) Raid took place on 18 October 1780.  The previous link gives an overview of the Raid.  Zadock Steele, a young man living in Randolph, became one of the prisoners.  He, in his later years, wrote the story of the Burning of Royalton which he entitled "The Indian Captive".  As a child in the sixth grade where we studied local history with Mrs. Bird, we read the story that Zadock Steele wrote. This was such an exciting story, one we kids always loved to hear.

Several times during my growing up years, there was a pageant on the high school ball field where the Burning of Royalton was dramatized.  To this day I can hear the screams of the women and see the painted faces of the Indians.  Very memorable... 

Where our family comes into the picture is that in the early 1800's members of our family came into possession of the property which was the second place the Indians entered that early morning in October 1780, the home of Robert Havens across the river from the Hutchinsons.  Quite a few years ago I was researching the deeds of property of that parcel in the Town Clerk's office.  I traced it back to 1830 before I had to leave for the day and never got back to go all the way to Robert Havens.  Sad.  There were several different families, all connected to us, though not our surname, who owned the property.

So finally we get to the pot.  There was a forty-acre field behind the house on Route 110 where my father was born and raised, and which, in fact, he also died in after many year on Jigger Hill where he had a large dairy farm.  One year when he was plowing that field in preparation for planting corn for silage for the cows he uncovered an iron pot right at the spot where the Havens house had been.  At some point a new house was built on the small plateau above the field which was subject to flooding in tempestuous springs.  Even so, it was "known" where the Robert Havens house was.  

Having told that rendition of our family history, it strikes me that it was not plowing the field which unearthed the pot (actually there were two pots our father found, this one and a black one without legs) but when he was digging in the field for a small gravel pit.  I will need to clarify with my sister.  Either story is okay with me.  This just goes to show that we need to write down family stories when there is still an older generation to clear up any misconceptions...!  (To do this, I suggest everyone starts a family tree on FamilySearch.org which it totally free and which has the option of sharing Memories which can be photos, documents, even audio recordings. I LOVE that site! Plus you can research your own family as you build your tree. And yes, I have added memories of a variety of types to our family tree.  You can put my father's name in, if you know it, and see some things.)

The story that has come to be known about that pot, at least which we choose to believe was the actual pot, was that when the Indians were crossing the First Branch, Mrs. Havens saw them crossing the field and put her two very young children under the pot, thereby saving them from the Indians who soon entered their home.

The pot was near the wood stove in our home growing up.  Somehow I managed to become the caretaker of that pot many years ago.  We had it beside our wood stove and put firewood in it during the winter.  It was a great place for wood chunks because often in the winter the wood came into the house covered with ice and snow.  To avoid the snow melting all over the pine plank floor we put the wood into the pot.

This is a closer-up picture that shows the heavy handle.  This would have been the laundry pot that hung over the fire filled with water to heat the water or perhaps even for soap-making/rendering fat to make soap.  It is VERY heavy and has three legs on the bottom.

When we moved to South Carolina about the only treasure from my side of the family that made the cut to come south was that pot.  It now sits in our garage where it is the repository of several garden tools, a ham radio antenna which is waiting for permission to be installed (HOA's have rules, don't you know...), and two folded-up chairs that we take when we go to meetings in the neighborhood where there is no seating.  I love this pot and will one day give it to our daughter.