Farming
All of Jim’s farm work was done by
horsepower and manpower, although it changed seasonally. In addition to herding his cattle, tending
young stock, harrowing plowed fields, harvesting crops, stacking hay, storing
grain, and building fences, he was, at the same time, in the blacksmith
business on the side to bring in extra money for his large and growing
family. His work was from dawn to dusk.
As soon as the children were old
enough, he assigned regular chores and taught his six boys how to help with the
livestock and how to seed, grow and harvest grain, as well. Everybody in the family had to lend a hand,
and at times, it is probable that everyone in the family may have helped with
the field work. Eventually, according to
my grandfather, his older brothers mostly ran the farm, while their father
operated his blacksmith shop on the side.
In working his homestead and farm
fields, Jim Cox had to be part blacksmith, part mechanic and part carpenter,
just to name a few of the talents needed to carry out a successful farming
operation. It was also important for him
to be somewhat of a veterinarian so he could tend to the ailments of his
livestock. When we think about all the
animals kept around the farm, the pioneering farmer had to be concerned and as
knowledgeable as possible about their health and diseases.
In the horse and buggy days, James
Cox had to depend on his own remedies to cure the ailments of his horses,
cattle and sheep. Since there were no
veterinarians such as we have today, most farmers, as a rule, practiced all the
old-time cures taught them by their fathers.
Just like most of his neighbors, Jim Cox probably made his own
all-purpose ointments and liniments that contained ingredients such as
turpentine, coal oil and salty meat grease, among other things, widely used for
wounds, cuts, bruises and just about everything.
First and foremost, it was
important to know how to tend a sick horse and restore his health, else plowing
and essential work would not get done.
Of course, Jim also needed to know something about how to tend to all
the other animals around his farm. But,
like most farmers of that era, he was concerned mainly with the care of his
horses, mules and cattle. In that day,
some people also still used oxen for plowing and pulling heavy loads.
Having been a teacher, he would
have realized the importance of studying the economy in planning for his annual
and immediate cash income. As part
economist, he most likely consulted the
Old Farmer’s Almanac, the oldest continuously published periodical in America ,
first published in 1792. He checked it
out to get the most favorable weather information, moon cycle dates, and
planting guides for his crops, as well as for all the latest agricultural
techniques. Most almanacs of the day
supplied astronomy and weather observations.
If Jim Cox used the moon cycles to
plant, as outlined in the almanac, it provided him with a few tips to yield
more and healthier crops, such as:
§
First quarter moon cycle (new moon to half full)
– Plant things
that are leafy,
like lettuce, cabbage and spinach.
§
Second quarter moon cycle (half full to full
moon) – Plant things
that have seeds
inside, like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and beans.
§
Third quarter moon cycle (full moon to half full)
– Plant things that
grow underground
like potatoes, onions and beets; also perennials.
§
Fourth quarter moon cycle (half full to new
moon) – Do not plant
at this
time. Weed, mow and kill pests during
this time.
§
Do not plant anything on the first day of the
full moon or new moon.
With study of this old-time
reference guide, Jim went about making the necessary plans for his farming
operations for the year. It was
important to plan ahead for selling some of his produce and crops in the
nearest market in order to buy his land, farm tools and supplies. He probably wrote down his ideas - dates his
animals were bred and born, the cost of his seed, and other farm plans - in an
old time gray canvass-backed ledger book or perhaps on a calendar. Or, he may have carried a little pocket-sized
canvass-covered book that he kept handy in the pocket of his bib overalls.
He had a number of things to plan for and consider in selecting the
crops for his farm. Generally, he had to
consider the lay of his land, investment requirements, cost of supplies, number
of acres to be planted, and possible profitability. Jim was also concerned about how and where
the crop would be stored before going to market, prices, and where he would
sell all that he did not keep for his family and his livestock.
And of course, as with all farm or
any other business operations, his success depended to a great degree on what
state trends and market conditions prevailed at the time. No doubt he tried to
take all this information into account in making his annual farming plan.
~.~
Gardening
Mary’s
garden, located near the house, had to be cleared of old growth and weeds in
late fall every year, and in spring her sons plowed the garden plot to loosen
the soil and opened up rows for planting. Lettuce was probably planted first in
the “tobacco burn beds” where seedlings were planted, covered with cloth to
hold heat in. It gave the lettuce an early head start. Sometimes lettuce was transplanted to the
ends of tobacco rows. Cabbage planting
came next, along with beets, English peas, onions, greens, carrots and a few
other vegetables that liked cool weather.
Mary and the children weeded and took care of the garden the rest of the
year.
One of the
big jobs - planting potatoes - came early, too, about a month before the last spring
frost. Earlier, the seed potatoes had
been spread out for several weeks until the eyes sprouted and were ready to be
cut up in big pieces. Mary had to teach
her children that were old enough how to handle a knife and cut up the potato
into pieces with eyes. They probably sat
around in a semi-circle, maybe in the kitchen, or if it was warm enough, maybe
out on the back porch or down at the barn, while they helped cut up the
potatoes under the watchful eye of their mother.
It was a time-consuming
job to cut the potatoes in sections, making sure each section had at least one or
two eyes and a large piece of potato.
Having one eye on each planting piece was important since the new potato
grows from the eye. After maybe two or
three tow-sacks of seed potatoes had been cut up, the chunks were spread out in
a sunny place to air, while waiting for the eyes to grow into about one-fourth
inch sprouts. When the potatoes were
well sprouted, the pieces were ready to be planted. Holes or trenches were dug in the freshly
plowed ground, then the children sprinkled each hole with a dipper of water
from a bucket to help start the growth.
Potato pieces were dropped into the dampened holes, about twelve inches
apart, and then they used their hoe to cover the seed potato section with about
three inches of loose soil.
Sometime in May or early June, the
potato hills were ready to be plowed up, dug, and picked up by the children. Harvesting the potato crop took hours of
back-breaking work, bending over and digging out the potatoes buried in the
loosened dirt, and taking them to the barn to a cool, dark place where they
were spread in a layer to dry out.
The Cox family probably ate an
abundance of potatoes, prepared in many ways.
Boiled new potatoes, when cooked with the first garden pickings of Kentucky
Wonder beans, and a pan of freshly baked cornbread, was a meal “fit for a king”
and one the whole family looked forward to!
Just as today, potatoes were a popular dish on the dinner table, whether
it was potato salad, fried potatoes with onions, baked potatoes, mashed, or
creamed. New potatoes were a staple and
most farm families also planted a fall garden with potatoes they buried later
to preserve and carry them through the winter.
Other vegetables cultivated in the
garden were tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, radishes, green beans, butter
beans, peas, carrots, cabbage, pumpkins, turnips, squash, sweet potatoes and
watermelons. They grew just about
everything you could think of and particularly raised a lot of beans, which in
the fall, were dried and threshed to use all winter. Sometimes they raised running beans beside
the cornstalks. Sweet corn as well as
field corn was planted. The family ate
both kinds, and they made a lot of hominy, but mostly, field corn was used for
animal food, with some ground into corn meal at the mill for the family’s use.
The farm also supported a fruit
orchard, consisting of apple, pear, peach, plum and cherry trees, which were
tended and pruned to provide fruit for jelly, jams, preserves, pies and
cobblers in the winter. Fruits from the
orchard were canned, preserved or dried and supplemented wild fruits and
berries, which with honey, molasses and maple syrup, made the Cox farm
practically self-sufficient. Farming
was a year around job.
~.~
Everyday Life for Mary Elizabeth Cox
It’s easy to imagine a day in the
life of Mary Elizabeth (Mitchell) Cox. With five children by the time she was
twenty-six, each coming along about two years apart, Mary Elizabeth had a large
responsibility to keep her household running smoothly. In general, she managed the household and the
outbuildings and grounds around the house, while her husband managed the rest
of the farm, including the stock barns, storage sheds, and fields. Besides tending to her children’s needs, responsibilities
for Mary included cooking, washing, ironing, churning, cleaning, mending, sewing
and raising enough food in the garden to last the family for a year.
All her jobs were important, but
cooking for her large family started her day.
Just as soon as her feet hit the floor in the morning, Mary Elizabeth
headed to the kitchen to build a fire in her big black cast iron, wood-burning
cook stove that dominated the room. They
had no electricity, gas, or running water, so after filling the graniteware tea
kettle from a water bucket, she set the kettle on the stove to get hot for
coffee. When the water boiled, she added
ground coffee to the pot. A tea kettle
was nearly always on the kitchen stove top, full and hot for the needs of the
day, such as washing the dishes or scalding a chicken.
By the time a good fire was going
in the kitchen stove, she had put on her calico apron and prepared large pans
of biscuits, a platter of ham, sausage or bacon, gravy, and scrambled eggs in
cast iron skillets for her large and growing family. On hot summer mornings, enough biscuits were
cooked for both the morning and noon meal.
Having a good cook stove made her life a bit easier than cooking on the
fireplace like her grand- mothers had to do. It was probably around the warmth and heat
from the cook stove in the kitchen on cold winter evenings, where Mary bathed
all her young children in a zinc tub in winter.
The kettle on the stove was handy for refills to keep the water warm.
With her husband working in his
blacksmith shop and her sons working in the fields, substantial meals, cooked
from scratch, were required three times a day.
The minute the men had eaten and left out to work, the kitchen was cleaned
up and what must have seemed like a mountain of dishes were washed, by hand, in
a dishpan. Right away, one or two of her
older daughters started preparing and getting ready for dinnertime. Then, donning their sunbonnets, Mary and some
of the younger children may have gone out to hoe weeds in the garden before the
sun got too hot.
When the garden had been hoed,
weeded, and the potato bugs picked off, Mary went back to the kitchen to check
on how dinner was coming along. (In that day and time, the noon meal was
called “dinner” and not lunch. The
evening meal was called “supper” and was the last meal of the day where they
helped themselves to as many “seconds” as they wanted.) As soon as dinner was over, the same routine
was repeated for supper. And so it went, day in and day out. Cooking, taking care of her children, and
tending to the outside chores took up much of Mary Cox’s day.
The chickens had to be looked after
too. Every so often, the nests had to be cleaned out and new straw put in for
the old setting hens that would be hatching baby chicks. She usually had
several hens setting at one time to provide plenty of young roosters and
pullets to fry for Sunday dinner. Gathering eggs was another chore for the younger
children. It took a dozen or more fresh
eggs for breakfast, not to mention the eggs used for cooking. If she had any eggs left over, she probably
saved and sold them to the nearest neighbors or merchants.
Each evening she sent one of the
children to the chicken yard to shut the chicken house door after the chickens
had gone to roost, else a fox might get in and kill all the chickens before
morning. Several times a year, the
chicken house floor had to be raked out and cleaned. Raising chickens in all kinds of weather was
a year-around job that required daily time and attention.
Morning and evening, the girls fed
and watered the chickens. All the animals around the farm had to have water. Their hand-dug well in the back yard had poles
that supported a pulley, rope and a tin well bucket to draw water. Sometimes buckets and any number of other
objects were accidentally dropped in the well, and it had to be cleaned out
every summer. All the children, boys and
girls, took turns throughout the day carrying water into the kitchen – to wash
dishes, to cook with, for drinking water, and for bathing. Since they didn’t have running water as we do
today, a good well of pure, fresh water was important to the Cox family. Ponds and creeks on the farm watered the horses,
cows and larger farm animals.
Sometime during the day, all the
smut on the glass chimney shades of the coal oil lamps had to be cleaned and
the wicks trimmed before using them again in the evening. Farm people had long, hard work days and most
families went to bed soon after the sun went down. Some folks claimed, “we go
to bed with the chickens,” meaning they retired very early. It saved money – on candles and on coal oil. Besides, they usually got up at first light when
the roosters started crowing from the top of the henhouse every morning.
Washing, a complete hand operation
from start to finish, was one of Mary’s biggest jobs. If there was no spring nearby, all the water
had to be drawn from the well, bucket after bucket, or else water was hauled to
the yard in a barrel. I can imagine that Mary Cox was up early, before most of
the birds were awake, to get the fires blazing under a huge black iron wash pot
– one for washing and boiling sheets first, then clothes – and second and third pots or tubs for
rinsing.
Using homemade lye soap and a poke
stick for stirring the clothes around in the pot, she washed and scrubbed, beat
and pounded, and she may have used a wooden rub-board by that day and
time. Sheets were so large and heavy
that it took two people to rinse, twist and wring out all the water. Afterwards, clothes were hung out on clothes
lines to dry in the sun. If they ran out
of clothes line, the fence made a good place to hang the heavy work clothes -
overalls and work shirts.
Nothing was ever wasted, and at the
end of washday, Mary Elizabeth probably poured her rinse water from the
washtubs on flower beds or perhaps on a row of herbs in her garden. We can be sure that she had all her children
old enough to help her out on washday!
Washing was followed by folding and putting away the clothes, and
ironing. Irons were much different from
what we use today. Made of iron, they
were heavy, and had to be heated on the wood cook stove or set on a trivet in
the fire place. Several irons were
heating at the same time to make the chore go faster. Electricity was unheard of in that day and
time.
In addition to all the work of her
household, she had to take care and maintain the health of her family. She did, however, have her brother-in-law,
Leonard Cox, a pharmacist who later became a medical doctor, to call on when
there was sickness in the family.
Nevertheless, she collected and dried many medicinal plants, just as her
mother and grandmothers had always done before her.
At different seasons, she probably
made lye soap and dozens of molded, tallow candles at a time – enough to last
through the winter. Everything she did –
from making soap to making hominy and sauerkraut, to preserving fruits and
vegetables, to picking the geese to make feather pillows and mattresses, to quilting
and mending – all was done the hard way, the same way as for every other farm
woman. A woman’s work was just taken for
granted. It was simply her job and
something she was supposed to do. Then,
as now, there was no time for idle hands.
Living on a farm, young, and being
the only adult woman in the home, Mary Elizabeth had all the work to do by her
own efforts until the children were old enough to help her. Somehow, with all her other work, while her
husband was gone during the day, she managed to have time to look after several
small children, cook large meals, bring in wood and water, and was responsible
for the garden and for the domain of the farmyard.
No doubt there were mornings when she
woke up at the crack of dawn, faced with the realization of all the work that
lay ahead of her that day. Although she
was young, surely there were times when it seemed overwhelming and unending to
her. But, with so much work to be done,
there was simply no time for complaints, and so she managed the best way she
knew how.
For Mary Cox, the first years of
her married life were probably more difficult than can be imagined and her
workload for home and hearth must have been the work of survival.
~.~
After the children came along and
were growing up, James Cox often instructed his children in their
schooling. My grandfather said they
always had a good number of books in their home. Jim and Mary Cox encouraged their children to
get as much education as was available to them.
Most attended school at various times at Cromwell and Select, and walked
to and from, a distance of at least a mile or more, in all kinds of
weather. My grandmother said that in Ohio County
~.~
In 1878, Mary’s mother, Susannah
Caroline (Acton) Mitchell died at age fifty-two and five months, and was buried
in the McCord Cemetery, located between the communities of Cedar Grove and
Rosine, about three and one-half miles from Rosine on the Hall’s Creek Road. Joseph Thomas Cox, the oldest son of James
and Mary Elizabeth Cox, is also buried at McCord, along with his first wife,
Emily J. (Crume).
Two years later in the 1880 census,
James W. Cox, age 42 and Mary Elizabeth, 36, were living in the Stewartsville
District, and are listed with nine children:
Joseph Thomas, 18; Susan M, 16; Delana Jane, 14; John W., 12; Mary E.,
10; Netter, 8; Emma, 7; Martha, 2; and Orlando C., 4 months old.
~.~
The large Cox family was almost
totally self-sufficient, just like everyone else in Ohio County
Once a month, James and Mary probably
went to Cromwell or maybe over to Beaver Dam, about six miles away, in the
buggy for staples and supplies, and if they took some of the children, they
went to town in the wagon. Each son and
daughter was part of the family team and each contributed something everyday to
help sustain and improve their daily way of life.
~.~
Over a span of twenty-eight years,
Jim and Mary Elizabeth Cox had fourteen children, all of whom married in Ohio County
As recorded in the Bible of James
W. and Mary Elizabeth Cox, the “Births” of the parents and their fourteen
children are recorded as follows:
“James W. Cox was born the 24th
of February 1838.
Mary E. Mitchell was born June 1st
1844.
Joseph T. Cox was born September 8th,
1861.
Susanah M. Cox born July 18th,
1863
Dalana J. Cox born October 2nd,
1866
John W. Cox born May 15th,
1868.
Mary E. Cox born December 6th,
1869
Gabriel N. Cox born Dec. 10th,
1871
Emma C. Cox born Aug. 8th,
1873
Cindrilla Cox born Sept. 2nd,
1875
Martha E. Cox born Aug. 31st,
1877
Orlando C. Cox born Feb. 2nd,
1880
Ira C. Cox born Jan. 20th,
1882
Jasper N. Cox born May 10th,
1884
Bertha B. Cox born Sept. 13th,
1886
Sarah May Cox born July 25th,
1889”
I do not have a copy of the
marriage record pages, but only three deaths were recorded in the Bible, two
children, Bertha B. and John W., plus Rebecca Patterson, the second wife of
James W. Cox:
“Bertha B.
Cox departed this life August 7th, 1903
Rebecca Cox
departed this life September 2nd, 1903
John W. Cox
departed this life February 18, 1906.”
Mary Elizabeth Cox was forty-five
years old when Sarah May, her eighth daughter and last child, was born on July
25, 1889. James was fifty-one. When little Sarah was born, their oldest
child, Joseph Thomas, was twenty-eight.
Three of their children - Susanah, Delana Jane, and John W. - were
already married and had left home to begin families of their own. The next year in 1890, two more children
married, Joseph Thomas and Mary Ellen.
That left at home, four boys and five girls – Netter, Emma, Cinderella,
Evelyn, Orlando, Ira, Newton ,
Bertha and the baby, Sarah May. All of
their children grew to maturity except Bertha, who died when she was not quite
seventeen with typhoid fever.
~.~
Because ninety-nine percent of the1890
census was destroyed by fire in a Washington ,
D.C.
~.~
Sometime in November 1890, when my
grandfather was about six years old, James William Cox and his wife of thirty
years separated and filed for divorce. Mary Elizabeth moved out of her home. At forty-six, other than domestic skills, she
probably had few talents required to make a living for her younger children. After all, she had been married nearly thirty
years, borne fourteen children, and had time for little else besides raising
her family. Thus, the children remained
in the home with their father, age fifty-two, at the Cox homestead, and
continued going to school. The older
daughters still at home, Emma, seventeen, Cinderella, fifteen, and Evelyn,
thirteen, helped with the care of the younger children.
According to family members, only
eight-year old Ira Clinton, who cried and cried, went with his mother. It is
unknown how she supported herself, but somehow she managed. She may have lived
for a while with a brother or sister’s family.
When Mary Elizabeth returned home to visit her children, James would
leave the home to let her have time with them.
No reconciliation was worked out
and their thirty-year partnership came to a formal end, three years after the
first filing, when the court rendered a final decree on November 1, 1893. It must have been a sad day for the children,
young and old. All hearts concerned probably
felt a little heavier that day.
On April 3, 1896, about two and
one-half years after the divorce was final, Mary Elizabeth (Mitchell) Cox
married John Rummel. In 1900 the couple
was living in the magisterial district of Hartford, Ohio County Obion County , Tennessee
NOTE: This article is Part V of several. It was written by Janice Cox Brown, an expert genealogy researcher whose ancestry is from Ohio County. Janice now lives in Texas. We thank her for her work and her desire to share her family research.
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