02-19-01

This week I will continue with Part 4 of the story about Merrylands Farm written by Billie McCauley. Merrylands Farm was just northwest of Aubrey on the old road to Blackjack in the 1920's and 1930's.

The mantra of the thirties was, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

When mother won a car in a raffle, it was a cause for widespread joy. We enjoyed the Buick for a year, but needed a new well badly. The Buick was sold for $350 (more than we gave for the farm) and a new one hundred feet deep well was dug with sixty feet of standing water that was always there, dry season or not. Daddy built the wellhouse and had me put my handprint in the cement, a custom we followed for years when he had a cement to pour. The wellhouse was built of rocks cleared from the fields and garden area.

We got a nice new windmill and had plenty of water for the strawberries which got better and bigger.

On completion of the well, a line was run into the kitchen and mother had water piped in for the first time. This was a great help in canning. Daddy also ran a line into the bathroom and we had indoor plumbing and no longer had to fill the tub with buckets.

Daddy smoked a pipe at the time and always carried chewing tobacco in his pocket. The chewing tobaccco was for ant bites. The large red ants were not friendly – Uncle Joe said they were mad at us because we kept plowing up their houses.

The standard medical treatment for ant bite was to chew some tobacco and apply it to the ant bite. When that more or less dried, then bluing was applied. Yes, the same kind used in washing clothes to whiten them.

While the snakes didn’t ever bite us, the red ants certainly took up the slack in biting.

My brother carried chewing tobacco for ant bites, but did not care for the taste of it. However, when he was nine, he thought he was almost grown and might like to try a pipe. He had watched Daddy often enough and was certain he could master the process.

He chose a day when he could get on the roof unobserved. This was easy to do in the rear of the house. He figured this way the smoke would dissipate and no one would observe his rite of passage into the adult world of tobacco use. He got the pipe going well, coughed quietly, but inhaled a bit too much for his size. When he got dizzy, he stood up suddenly, passed out and fell noisily off the roof. He was discovered with the evidence of his crime strewn around him, and much worse than being fussed at, he was laughed at.

My brother has been a non-smoker from that day to this.

Daddy had a fair sized blacksmith shop set up where he made all his own harness.

He ground all the roughage raised be feeding it to his cows.

His homemade mill was powered by a Buick automobile engine that he removed from an old Buick car that he bought for $35. He made the front wheels into a trailer, sold it for $20 and sold the back wheels to another farmer for $4.

Neighbors brought their roughage to be ground on a percentage basis.

In his blacksmith shop were fashioned hames of native hickory and oak and other homemade materials. On his anvil he sharpened his dull plow points to save money.

The native stone pulled from the fields was also used to construct a poultry house twelve by eighteen feet and eight feet high. This was originally used as a brooder, but eventually housed on hundred brown leghorns.

The total cost for construction of this building was $27. This bought cement, nails, doors, windows and roofing material. All the rest was made from rocks on the place and other material on the farm.

In 1932 mother sold one thousand, eight hundred seventy-three containers of food from Merrylands farm and it fed us well, also.

She sold special customers in Aubrey, Denton and a few in Fort Worth. Each week whe sold a case of eggs in Aubrey as well as supplying canned goods to merchants in Aubrey and Denton. These bore the homemade labels that she stamped with the Merrylands farm label.

Advertisement was by word of mouth and orders were placed by mail. I still have some of the letters requesting Mrs. McKinney’s good green beans, black eyed peas or strawberry preserves.

After we moved into Denton, mother went to work full time for the Ball Jar company. Daddy went to work for North Texas while he worked on his degree.

We got a rooming and boarding house at 1812 Chestnut next to grandmother and granddad McKinney’s rooming and boarding house for girls. Don’t look for it – it disappeared in 1940 as North Texas grew.

I know we sold Merrylands farm at least twice and the folks could not keep up the payments. I believe it was the third time that was the charm.

Merrylands farm was an important part of our lives and presented a special challenge for mother and daddy during the depression that they rose to.

Bub and I were kids in the depression years, but we considered ourselves quite well off – we had plenty to eat, a warm place to sleep and pets and playmates. Plus a wonderful extended family that is still composed of dear hearts and gentle people.

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