Numerous tools were used in a farm family’s everyday existence. Tools for woodworking included mauls, axes, mallets, shaving horses, broadaxes, foot adzes, chisels, handsaws, squares, rulers, froes, and go-devils. Everyone used plows, hoes, shovels, rakes, spades, and mattocks in preparing and tending the land. Many of the tools that were so important in everyday life have been featured in previous Foxfire books.
By the early 1900s, the available tools and technology had begun to change. Cars and planes were being seen, on a limited basis, in our community. In 1911 the first power plant was being built here. The way of life was changing in Rabun County and all across the country.
But even with the newer technology, the people here continued to rely on themselves and, when absolutely necessary, their neighbors. As Buck Carver said about his friend and neighbor Bill Lamb, “He wanted t’ be self-sustaining and do his own things as much as he could his own self and not bother the other feller.”
Back in those days, that was possible, but now we rely on others, in one way or another, for almost everything. We are a society of consumers; we acquire goods and services rather than producing those goods or services ourselves. If we make something, it is because we choose to, not because we have to.
The tools featured in this chapter reflect the limited technology available to farm families then. The fireless cooker, hydraulic ram, plumping mill, and fertilizer distributor, while primitive compared to our technology today, greatly improved the quality of life back then. They allowed meals to be kept warm without burning, corn to be ground into meal at home, water to be pumped into the house, and the garden to be fertilized easily. All were labor-or time-savers—something the old-timers appreciated. The final section features Connie Carlton, a craftsman who is trying to carry on the tradition of creating handmade tools. He summarizes his philosophy by saying, “I don’t think you can beat the beauty in simplicity. That’s not with just making things, but that’s in living too.”
—Kaye Carver Collins
THE FIRELESS COOKER
People who don’t live on farms anymore enjoy recalling romanticized memories of growing up or visiting relatives on the farm. Those memories are usually charming pictures of an idyllic and pleasant life—a life of few worries, little stress, and simpler times.
But for the people on those farms, life was anything but simple. Everything they did was necessary for their existence. It was hard work from daylight to dark. They had few, if any, conveniences. That is why, when technology made the fireless cooker and hydraulic ram possible, people truly appreciated the time and labor it saved them.
In the old days, fireless cookers were very popular. People used them instead of stoves because they were safer. The fireless cooker was a box with three openings big enough for pots to sit inside them. The box was insulated with wood pulp. It is called a fireless cooker because it cooked food with hot iron wafers instead of fire. The iron wafers were heated by placing them in the fireplace and then were put in the bottom of each hole of the cooker. There were insulated lids for each opening. Other fireless cookers used soapstone because it held more heat and stayed hot longer than iron did.
PLATES 106, 107 The fireless cooker
The fireless cooker worked like an older version of the Crockpot. Farmers and their families could leave the house for the entire day and come home to a hot meal.
THE HYDRAULIC RAM
George Carpenter recalled, “In 1936 we ordered a ram from Sears-Roebuck and installed it on Backbone Ridge between Cornelia and Demorest. I’d say that a pump at that time would cost probably twenty dollars, and the pipe was probably two or three cents a foot. Many people back then didn’t have money to buy the pump or the pipe. They had to carry water. But it was a real convenience in a time when there wasn’t many conveniences.
“For many people, it wasn’t convenient for them to use rams because the lay of the land and everything was not right for that kind of pump—you had to have gravity. The pump was real reliable. We had a reservoir on top of the ridge where we lived, and we had a continuous flow of water. We never ran out of water with the ram. But many times, in bad weather, extra water would come into the spring, and there would be a little grit, sand, or maybe little sticks in it. It would have to be cleaned out. I was the only one in the family that knew how to work on it and do maintenance. Sometimes you would have to take it completely apart and reassemble it to clean it. But, basically, I’d say every two months is how often that there would have to be maintenance work on it. Once every couple of years you would have to change the diaphragm in it to keep it in operation.
PLATE 108 The hydraulic ram from Murray Collections
“There was eight people in my family, and there was enough water for everybody. There was no electricity then, and we had an outside toilet, so the water was just for cooking and taking a bath in the tub. It pumped a stream about half the size of a pencil continually. Day and night, the ram never stopped pumping. If you had a holding tank sufficient to hold the amount of water it would take to supply a family for twenty-four hours, then you would have enough water.
“Ours pumped for about ten years with maintenance work. It never was replaced, just maintenance parts—that’s all. Then electricity came through, and we had a well then, and a bathroom in the house!
“There was one other ram in our area at that time. It belonged to C. M. Miller. He pumped water from a lake to a holding tank on top of a ridge in his apple orchard. He used it to spray, but it was a real large one. It was a whole lot bigger than ours. I’d say it probably would have pumped enough water to spray over a hundred acres of apple trees once a week. It pumped continually, but it wasn’t pumping all of the water in the stream. Part of it would overflow into the dam.
“There’s a limit to how far it can push the water up. The pump was two hundred and fifty yards from the house, and it was pumping two hundred and fifty feet in elevation from the pump to the house. There was a reservoir built there, graded downhill to the pump itself. The ram was really spring-loaded, like a steel spring, and the water pressure would hit it and knock the spring up. Then the spring would recoil and push the water back through a check valve. What went through the check valve was trapped there. It pushed it on up the hill to the house. It would come up again, and the water would spray out each side. Then the spring would overload the water pressure. The spring would kick again and knock more water back through the check valve. This was a continual process.
“Today some seasonal people that come up in the summertime could rely on a ram. Especially in areas where electricity is not easily accessible, it would be real handy. If we ever had a national disaster, a pump like that would be a real convenience. People could have water where otherwise they would have to carry it or make different arrangements to get it to their house.”
PLATE 109 Hydraulic ram
The water is pumped using two valves and the force of the flowing water to create enough air pressure to push the water up. Out of the column of water that flows into the ram, only a small portion of water is actually pumped. The water that is not pumped is called waste water. The only moving parts are the valves. The first valve to close from the water pressure is the waste valve. When the waste valve closes, water pressure builds inside. This pressure forces water up through the check valve and then into the air chamber, causing the air to compress. When the air has compressed enough to stop the flow of water, the check valve closes and the water is forced out into the delivery pipe. This releases the pressure on the waste valve; then the process starts all over again. This process can happen sixty times a minute. The rate at which the ram “kicks” can be adjusted for variations in the amount of water that comes out. Strangely, the less the ram kicks, the more water it pumps. This is because the less waste water that the ram throws out, the more that goes into the air chamber to be pushed into the delivery pipe.
THE PLUMPING MILL
Mr. and Mrs. Maynard Murray restored the old water mill at Sylvan Lake Falls
off of Wolffork Road in Rabun Gap. They also built a pound mill, or plumping mill, as it is sometimes called. Mr. Murray said, “I thought it would be interesting just to have a real old-fashioned plumping mill going. People that had those just ground enough meal for their own use.”
Although we could not find an old pound mill in our area to authenticate their use here, we did have several local people who told us that they remembered them when they were growing up, and they were able to draw rough sketches of how they worked.
Mr. Murray told us, “I was reading one of Eric Sloane’s books called Vanishing America, and in there, he mentioned that in the southern mountains, many of the people used what they called a plumping mill. They called it that because of the noise it made. It was operated by water running into a box mounted on one end of a beam and a stone or hardwood mallet attached to the other end, with a hollowed-out log under the mallet.
“I thought it would be interesting just to have a real, old-fashioned plumping mill going. It’s just a thing of interest to show people how they used to do it in the old days. It was never expected to grind any more meal than just what one family could use. Each family probably hand-built their own mill. It’s just a simple thing. They weren’t all exactly alike. Some of them used a stone, some used a hardwood mallet, and probably some people used much longer shafts than others. It was just a matter of fitting it to the amount of water they had and where it was available.
“I didn’t find it too difficult to make. I just went by the pencil sketch and the little picture that were in Sloane’s book. I went up on the hills here and found a little locust tree that had a fork in it. Then I cut a groove in a stone and forced that fork around the stone and fastened the fork at the end so it would hold the stone tight, and then I built the box on the end for the water to run into. It took me about a day and a half to make it and get it set up. I put it on some planks so it would be a completely movable unit. I didn’t put any stakes in the ground, but put some rocks on the planks to hold it steady, so it wouldn’t jar around so much. It should last for a long time. There’s not much to wear out on it. There’s just one bolt on it that makes the hinge operate when it swings up and down.
PLATE 110 Diagram of plumping mill built by Maynard Murray
PLATE 111 Plumping mill
“So far, I’ve ground about three five-pound bags and given them to my friends and said, ‘Try it.’ They like it very much. It’s just a little different in consistency from the meal that’s stone-ground. It has more of an appearance of grits than it does cornmeal, because it doesn’t go through the [mill] stones. It’s just really hammered up fine with a stone pounding on it.
“Most of the time, the plumping mill is run day and night. It doesn’t need any oiling or grease or any attention. Just take the meal out and put more corn in it. The water filling that pot [or box or bucket] determines how fast the mill runs. I’ve got a fair stream of water, which comes from up above the dam just piped here, gravity feed. The pot fills up with water and dumps about once every six seconds. As the water spills out, it drops the mallet into the hollowed-out log filled with corn, hammering it into meal.
PLATE 112 The mallet drops into the hollowed-out log filled with corn, hammering it into meal
“You can [pound the corn] with any hard rock that won’t keep peeling off. You wouldn’t want to use sandstone because you’d end up with a lot of sand in the meal. I used a piece of rock that looks like granite. It’s a fairly hard rock. I took a Carborundum stone and just shaped the end of it so it’d fit down in the bowl pretty good and get a face about two inches in diameter. The corn gets ground fine in the bottom of the bowl. The fine meal keeps working up the sides and the coarse keeps falling down in the center. Every individual grain of corn will be ground if you leave it in there for four or five hours. It seems to rotate the corn itself. There’ll be a few coarse pieces of cornmeal in there, but I sift that out and dump the coarse back in with the new corn. I usually put about two or three cups of corn in each morning or afternoon, and I’ll get about two cups of cornmeal each time. I haven’t tried wheat or any other grain in it. I guess you could put wheat in there if you wanted to.”
A FERTILIZER DISTRIBUTOR
Even with newer technology, many of the old-timers continued relying on their own abilities and skills. They enjoyed being as self-sufficient as possible.
Buck Carver tells of his longtime friend Bill Lamb and the hand-operated fertilizer distributor that Bill invented after he sold his horse. Bill passed away in the winter of 1970, and his family gave the machine, which Bill called a knocker, to Buck, as they felt Bill would have wanted him to have it.
Buck explained, “I don’t have the least idea how long it took Bill to make it, but I believe Blanche [Bill’s daughter] told me 1963 was when he made it. The first thing I knowed about him havin’ it was I was down there in the shed one day, and I said, ‘Bill, what in the cat hair is this thing you’ve got here?’
“‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that’s my knocker,’ and he told me what he used it for, you know.
PLATE 113 The fertilizer distributor built by Bill Lamb
“Blanche was talkin’ about that right after he died, and decided she’d give the thing to me. I tried t’ buy it from her, and she said she didn’t know what t’ do about that—that he’d left it in his will, or some of his papers where he’d made his requests, that he wanted Floyd [his son] to look after the disposal of all his personal property. She said, ‘Whatever Floyd wants t’ do about it is all right.’
“I said, ‘Well, now, I’d just be tickled t’ buy that thing from you, and I’ll pay you every dollar I can stand for it.’
“In about six months, I was down there, and she told me they decided they would just give me the thing—that they wanted t’ give it to me.
“As t’ how long it took him t’ make it, I wouldn’t have the least idea, but you can look at it and tell it’s been a pretty time-consuming job. And Bill was gettin’ old. Course his health hadn’t gone so bad on him at that time, and he was still turning off work pretty fast.
“He had to scribe out all these circles on there, you know—them wooden circles. I think he used a keyhole saw on them [the cogs on the round wooden disc mounted on the wheel]. They’re all the same distance apart, you know, and he had to figger out his circumference around there.
“An’ he was particular about everything. It had t’ be just so or it was no good. He was a firm believer that everything he done, it had t’ be done just right, or he wasn’t gonna have it at all. If it wadn’t right the first time, he’d tear it up, start all over. He was awful particular. Nearly all the old-timers was. I know from the time I was big enough t’ foller my daddy around, he’d tell me, Anything that’s worth doing at all is worth doing right.’
PLATE 114 Buck Carver explaining the agitator arm’s action to Stan Echols
PLATE 115 The arrow at left shows the tip of the agitator arm, the other end of which is attached to the bottom of the box. The arrow at right points to one of the twelve cogs on the wheel’s wooden disc.
PLATE 116 The fertilizer distributor
“Bill got his materials for this from Roosevelt Burrell’s sawmill down there—just scrap lumber. The wheel is an old bicycle wheel. The distributor’ll hold about a peck and a half—about a third a bushel, I guess, t’ be about as exact as I could. T’ put it in pounds, I guess it’ll hold around twenty pounds of that ammonia nitrate. It’ll hold that level full—but, now, you can’t fill the thing level full and still operate it ’cause you’ll be shaking too much off a the top. How much fertilizer comes out depends on how you regulate the gate in the rear. The bottom of the box is regulated by a set screw. You can raise or lower it, so it just depends on the opening. It’s a pretty constant flow—mostly when it made that bump, it’d throw a pretty good little wad down. Course there’d be a few grains of it trail off, you know. He stepped ’em out. That was another thing. Bill was really good in mathematics t’ not have no education.
He could figger things out good. He could figger out how far apart them little cogs on the wooden wheel had t’ be t’ space the fertilizer ten ’r twelve inches apart. He wanted it pretty close t’ the stalks of corn and not waste any.
“Bill was good on them things. As far as education’s concerned, I doubt whether he finished second grade or not—I doubt like everything. But he had a head full of common sense, and he put ’em t’ good use.
“Bill didn’t have any plans t’ go by. He just thought it up. He’d been a-studyin’ about it. He’d been a-borrowin’ distributors from other people t’ use, and he just had sold his horse, so he just fell on that idea. He didn’t just hatch it up in a minute. He’d been studying it up for several days before he started it. He was the kinda man that didn’t like t’ devil his neighbors no more than he could help. He knowed they had work of their own t’ do, and Bill was a fella that liked t’ be independent. I didn’t mean that he was hateful or anything of that kind, ’cause he certainly wasn’t. He wanted t’ be self-sustaining and do his own things as much as he could his own self and not bother the other feller.
“So people depended on themselves fer things a that kind.”
HANDMADE FARM TOOLS
John Rice Irwin and his Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, have, time and time again, given Foxfire unlimited access to a wealth of Appalachian culture and skills.
On one trip, Teresia and Warren Thomason and Dewey Smith were fortunate to meet one of those craftsmen, Mr. Connie Carlton. Connie handmakes a wide variety of farm tools such as rakes, pitchforks, and shovels, using only a shaving horse, a drawknife, and a few other primitive tools. Today we think nothing of running out to the local hardware store to pick up a rake or a shovel; but, in pioneer times, life was not so convenient. Connie, with his knowledge and love for his craft, is working hard to preserve and pass on this fading tradition.
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 22