During the last years of WW II, Uncle Will Allman and his family became our neighbors and farmed the land that formerly belonged to Cousin Claude and Cousin Florence Smith. It was the land that had been left to Claude by his father Elias Leroy “Lee” Smith who was one of the brothers of Isaac Emanuel Smith. Two of Claude’s sisters, Pauline and Della, continued to live in their father’s house which sat on the adjoining property and faced the Enochville-Concordia Road—or as we called it, “The Big Road.” Any time we had a medical emergency at our house, one of us had to run up to the “Big Road” to the home of Della and Pauline to use their telephone. No one else within several miles of our house had a phone. We called our family doctor, Doctor Black, who had an office in Landis. He made house calls.
Uncle Will was my Grandmother’s brother. He had several children. Maggie married Howard Rumple, and Scott was killed in a shooting accident when he was about twelve. Emma married Leroy Wilcox. Another daughter, Bertie, lived with her parents until their deaths. I don’t know whether she ever married. Uncle Will’s two sons who were left after Scott’s death, Jim and Dan, helped their Dad do farm work. Dan was unmarried and, like Bertie, lived with his parents.
I remember Jim and Dan coming with their father to cut firewood for us. My Dad and my older brothers cut poles and stacked them above the barn under the horse apple tree in preparation for the visit of Uncle Will and his cut-off saw. It was a circular saw mounted on the back of an old truck which I believe was a T-Model Ford. As I recall, the saw was powered by a one- cylinder engine. Dan loved to tinker with machinery, and this rig was probably one of his inventions. He was in his thirties when the Allmans lived near us.
Dan drove an H Farmall tractor on his father’s farm and also did work for other farmers in the vicinity. One of these jobs was with the combine. My guess is that the name “combine” came from the fact that the machine both cut the wheat stalks and threshed the kernel from the stalk. It was a two-man operation: Dan driving the tractor and another person riding on the combine. On one occasion I worked on the combine. But in most of those years Dallas Campbell did that work.
The duties on the combine behind the tractor were mainly attaching empty burlap sacks to the box where the newly husked grain poured out, tying sacks with a short piece of twine as they were filled with grain, and sliding filled sacks down the chute to the ground where they lay until picked up by others driving trucks or tractor-drawn wagons.
It was hard, dusty work that included two other important demands. The person tying sacks had to be careful not to dump filled sacks of grain on turns where the tractor might run over and burst them on the next round. He also had to tie the sacks securely to keep them from opening and spilling when they hit the ground.
Dan Allman and Uncle Clyde became fast friends in those days. They created interesting projects, all for the purpose of having fun. For instance, they decided to build a recreation hall in a bank overlooking Buffalo Creek in Uncle Clyde’s pasture. That bank was across the creek from a spring which Uncle Clyde called, in his fanciful way, “Honeymooners’ Spring.” The building was going to be a place for the several families and their friends to have cookouts and to make music. Dan used his Farmall tractor with a front-end loader to dig out the hillside.
On an occasion before that, Dan and Uncle Clyde held a nighttime festival at the creek in Uncle Will Allman’s pasture. It was a kind of outdoor masquerade party. Ray, Kenneth, and I rose to the challenge by trying to dress up like pirates. Bertie was always enthusiastic about such festivities, and she and the Campbell girls came dressed as pioneer women.
The party was held in the late afternoon and lasted well into the evening. Dan and Uncle Clyde hung coca-cola bottles filled with kerosene to light up the area. A rag wick was stuffed down the necks of the bottles into the kerosene; then the bottles were suspended from wires strung up ten feet overhead between trees. We had a grand old time running about, hiding in the pine trees, jumping out to scare each other, and playing all sorts of games.
Dan and Uncle Clyde also organized a cookout at Ritchie’s Creek where it flowed past a wagon crossing down behind Uncle Clyde’s barn. Some of the Outen children came; and Joyce, Shirley, and Donald were there. We roasted hotdogs and marshmallows. Throughout the evening we could hear the frogs along the creek bottoms toward Ritchie’s farm and the crickets all around us as we gazed into the blazing coals and watched the juices drip out of the wieners we held over the fire, spitted on sharpened hickory sticks.
Tags: Claude Smith, Clyde Smith, Della Smith, Doctor Black, Family remembrance, farm life, Pauline Smith, relatives, rural recreation, story telling
