Making Hay

This past weekend at the museum was hay making time, and I volunteered to help with it. I had a general idea of the type of manual labor for which I had enlisted, but since I am fairly active in athletics, I was not too concerned. (If I can hit a stand up triple by crushing a softball over the right fielder's head as her teammates yell for her to get back, I think I can pitch some hay.) My boss, on the other hand, seemed somewhat concerned. There is a lot that can be said about body language, and on that Saturday morning, I was reading quite a bit of doubt in regards to my abilities to pitch hay all day long.

I am a petite woman; I stand all of five foot five and a half inches, just like my German grandmother once was before she shrank in her old age. She weighed 99 pounds after having her third child. My weight tends to fluctuate between 110 and 115 pounds. Scrawniness is just part of my inherited genetics, but one should never judge a book by its cover. Germans and Poles are stubborn folk. :)

The bonnet was borrowed. It was slightly too large for my head, but it protected me from the sun, which is all I wanted.

Since the museum centers around living history, I had borrowed one of the only dresses from our costume shop that fit me. After dressing in all of the appropriate underpinnings, I realized the skirt band was about half an inch to an inch too tight, and the bodice was slightly too long for my torso. It would have to work, though. I even did my hair in an old-fashioned style popular from the 1830s to about the 1850s. At least I was going to look the part!

To be honest, I had never pitched hay in my life before this past weekend. It was going to be a completely new learning experience for me. I knew from last year that the end of June into the beginning of July was when nineteenth century farmers traditionally cut hay. I had watched last year as the men worked the field and pitched the hay up onto the horse-drawn wagon, and then they went to unload in the barn before they started the whole cycle all over again.

Why walk back out to the hay field when you can catch a ride?

For the record, hay is cut grass that has been dried in order to use as livestock feed over winter. Nineteenth century farmers depended on a good crop. In the 1850s in Minnesota, much of the cut hay was wild grasses growing in fields. By the 1880s, farmers were planting tame hay grasses to cut, but alfalfa, often associated with Minnesota, was not popularly planted until the 1910s. (Minnesota Historic Farms Study, 6.255)

For centuries farmers cut hay by hand with scythes, but by the mid-nineteenth century, various types of mowers began to be used instead. Thankfully, the museum's hay was cut by a sickle mower again this year like it was last year. After the field was cut, the hay needed time to dry, and it needed to be flipped over as well so as to dry the other side. Once air-dried, the men folk gathered the hay into small mounds in order to make the hay ready for pitching. Throughout this process, everything needed to be done after the morning dew evaporated, and everyone concerned prayed for no rain lest the hay crop be ruined.

There was no dew on the ground by the time our morning staff meeting was over, so we were able to get started right away on the day we pitched. I sought instruction on technique and then had to decipher for myself as to how I could best replicate the process. The wife of one of my co-workers and a female co-worker also helped with the pitching, which led to many jokes about a story concerning German women working in the fields pitching hay along side the men, much to the dismay some English-American folk in the nineteenth century. Sometimes it was easy to scoop up a large mound, and other times it was difficult. Sometimes only half to a third of the mound caught on the pitch fork. There was definitely a learning curve for me. There was a young boy to help stamp down the hay on the wagon as it was pitched so as to make room for even more hay each load full. Once we had a full wagon-load, the horses hauled it to the barn to be unloaded, pitched inside, and stacked into a hay mound.

Hay was pitched by lifting the mounds onto the wagon.

The men could grab an entire mound in one forkful. I needed a few tries, but I learned do that with smaller mounds.

We have an expert on staff when it comes to building hay mounds. I could probably listen to him spew his knowledge on any subject for hours, so it was entertaining to be instructed by him concerning how to start the mound and how to build up the support wall. He had us newbies walk the mound to feel for ourselves where the weak spots were so he could strengthen that part of the edge. Then, the edge needed to be raked for any loose hay strands, which were tossed back on top of the pile. After all of the hay was stacked, he salted that layer as an extra precaution against any spontaneous combustion later. Then, it was time to water up and head out in the field for another load.

After it was loaded onto the wagon in the field, the hay needed to be unloaded and stacked in the barn for storage.

The work was not too terrible, but it was tough enough that I was visibly perspiring. I learned that I should probably make a better petticoat and starch the heck out of it for future use. I also learned that when you often relegate yourself to the damsel in distress role (because intelligent women know decent men readily jump at the chance to help a lady in need), apparently it leads to an over-concern for one's well-being when hard work is afoot. As appreciative as I was for the fuss by the men folk involved, being asked multiple times in a matter of a few minutes was actually slightly aggravating.

My combative side came out soon after that when one of the men jokingly told me I pitched hay like a girl. Having grown up familiar with the movie The Sandlot, at first I took it as an insult and started rambling off excuses. After a minute or so, I more calmly pointed out that I was a girl. It was a good reminder that of course I am physically incapable of tossing hay mounds of equal size to that of the men, but that does not make the work someone my size is capable of doing any less valid. I may have needed to pitch a few more forkfuls, but eventually I would get the hay to where it needed to go.

Later in the afternoon, we were able to refresh on switchel, made by one of the ladies on staff. Sometimes called haymaker's punch, switchel is a drink concocted of water, vinegar, ginger, and a sweetener of some kind like honey, maple syrup, or molasses. It was the nineteenth century version of Gatorade, and it actually did help reinvigorate the body. Although, I learned the hard way that it is probably not a good idea to guzzle it down while wearing a corset. Oh well, I survived.

A full wagon load heading back to the barn for unloading with our young helper catching a ride atop the hay.

We worked from about 10 a.m. until about 4 p.m. that day, and I only felt my energy start to wain at the very end of the day. Thankfully, it only took one more wagon-load to store the rest of the hay from the field at that point. I was grateful to be done, but I actually had a lot of fun hanging out with the menfolk that day. (I have always felt more comfortable with the male gender than the female gender; it probably has something to do with spending so much time with my older brothers and their friends as a kid since there was no one my age in the neighborhood.) I may have come close to overheating at the tail end after we had finished, but had I a cotton dress instead of a wool dress, that probably would not have been an issue.

It was nice to prove my boss wrong about spindly ladies and manual labor. I was certainly sore the next day, and my injured shoulder from softball is still tender as I type this, but I have been in worse condition from playing in all-day softball and volleyball tournaments than from pitching hay. I guess it helps to be a physically active person. The museum will probably cut hay again close to Labor Day, and I say bring on the challenge. Hard work and honest sweat were valued in the nineteenth century, but having been raised by farm kids, it is something I have been taught to value as well.

(Photos published with consent of the photographer. Copyright © 2014 Lisa Meyers.)

Maple Syruping

"Roses are red and violets are purple. Sugar is sweet and so is maple syrple." - Roger Miller

Last week and this week has been a busy, not to mention cold, kick-off to our programming season at the museum with maple syrup demonstrations. March is usually the time of year when the temperatures are just right for the sap in the maple trees to start flowing, but it was about ten degrees outside when I left home for work on Saturday. Needless to say, the sap was frozen, just like the ground and just like my fingers as I tried to start my wood burning stove in the old schoolhouse. I am pretty sure all of us in Minnesota are ready for winter to be over and are praying we do not get snow in May again like last year.

Nothing says good morning like a negative five windchill in March. The houses at the museum can be pretty cold before
the wood burning stoves start kicking off heat.

Early springtime, though, is usually an ideal season for collecting sap to make maple syrup. Cold overnight temperatures followed by relatively warm daytime temperatures is the ideal weather for harvesting a bumper crop of sap. (I say relatively here because while everyone in Minnesota knows 40 degrees Fahrenheit is perfect sweatshirt sans jacket weather, folks from other parts of the country are usually bundled up and freezing in those temperatures.) There are four tree types commonly used in Minnesota for making maple syrup and sugar: silver maple (Acer Saccharinum), red maple (Acer Rubrum), sugar maple (Acer Saccharum), and box elder (Acer Negundo). Notice how they all come from the same genus group? Something I learned while becoming familiar with the museum's program a few years ago is that you can tap a box elder tree for sap, and get a fairly decent crop, because it is related to the other maple trees. However, most people collect the sugar maple's sap because it produces the best tasting syrup.

As a high school senior so eloquently remarked to me one day, "Who first decided to make maple syrup? I mean, who in the world first decided that stuff coming out of trees would be good for eating?" Ah, teenagers. He posed a good question, though. While we do not know exactly the first person to discover the sugaring process, we do know of many folktales passed down orally by American Indian tribes. Feel free read a few of the American Indian Maple Tree Legends. Our museum shares the Ojibwe story of "Manabozho and the Maple Trees". If you find those stories entertaining, you can delve into other American Indian Legends.

Early written accounts of American Indian life are often how European settlers learned of the maple sugaring process, as can be found in An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith. Long before westward expansion brought fur traders to the Minnesota area, American Indian tribes taught European settlers how to make maple sugar. Settlers, in return, often introduced metal ware to the maple sugaring process.

Kids learn how the Ojibwe tribes would look for signs in nature to let them know it was maple sugaring time. American
Indians made large gashes in the shape of a V in tree trunks to gather the sap. Mukuks, birch bark baskets, were put
below the notches to collect the sap. European traders eventually introduced metal drills, spiels, and buckets.

American Indians poured gathered sap into large wooden troughs. Hot stones, heated by fire, were put into the sap to
make it boil and evaporate the water. Kids get to practice moving "hot" stones with sticks from the fire to the trough.

Many of the early settlers in Minnesota learned quite a bit from local American Indian tribes. Supplies to purchase were not readily available for the first settlers, so people quickly developed the skills and techniques needed for making their own supplies in order to survive. Collecting maple sap to make syrup and sugar is one of those crafts that early Minnesota settlers picked up from the Ojibwe and the Dakota. Many folks carved out a decent life on the frontier of Minnesota and lived comfortably after a little hard work. By modern standards, a 21st century child usually considers this lifestyle to be roughing it, but ease and comfort met different expectations in the 19th century.

Boiling sap down to make syrup.

A pitcher of maple syrup waiting to be turned into maple sugar.

The finished product!

In the 19th century, sugar was packed into sugar molds like this one as it was prepared for storage.

Maple sugar was a godsend to frugal American housewives. Sugar cane was extremely expensive in the 19th century since what was produced in the United States' southern region was not enough to meet demand, which meant most of it was imported and subject to tariff. While there is still a tariff on imported sugar cane in the 21st century, the cost of cane sugar compared to maple sugar has flip-flopped compared to the 19th century. The next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the price of pure maple syrup. I am not talking about the artificially flavored, derived from corn sugar, Mrs. Butterworth or Aunt Jemima syrup. Look at the real stuff. It is not cheap! Now, imagine that is your only option for purchasing a sweetener. Hello, DIY! Had I been living in the frontier of Minnesota in the 1840s, I would have been extremely grateful for the capability of producing my own sugar to use.

Kids get to sample pure maple syrup.

Kids also get to sample pure maple sugar. Teachers just love us. :)

The steps for making maple sugar:

1. Tap the tree.
2. Turn the sap into syrup.
3. Turn the syrup into sugar.
4. Store for later use.

Simple, right? It is a lot of work, though, considering it takes about forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. If you keep cooking your syrup down, one gallon of syrup will yield about one pound of sugar. The clean up is usually messy, not to mention sticky. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a wonderful guide for young naturalists who would like to collect their own sap at home. And while you are making your own syrup, do not forget to sing the old New England folk song Maple Sweet. 

Kids get to enjoy a ride on a trolley pulled by these guys.

Percheron horses are big! I am about 5'6", and I stand at about their nostrils.

As a kid, I remember often putting corn syrup on my pancakes. An old high school friend of mine told me once that was considered poor man's syrup, certainly a 20th century phenomenon if anything. Whether it is poor man's syrup or not, even a bottle of Karo is more natural than the artificially flavored, so-called maple syrups found in stores today. The taste of pure maple syrup is one that cannot be truly replicated. Hopefully, this post is an inspiration to try to include a bottle of real maple syrup in your kitchen pantry. The next time you use some, remember how lucky Americans in the 19th century were to have such a treat at their disposal.

We used a 20th century evaporator to demonstrate for kids how to start the process of turning sap into syrup. The sap
in the evaporator was cooking so long for our school group that it turned into syrup. As the syrup started to boil, it was
not removed from the heat before its combustion temperature was reached. There were flames shooting up from the
syrup before snow was used to extinguish the fire. No children were in danger of getting hurt unless my co-workers are
considered to be children, which is very likely.

A quick chemistry lesson to keep in mind if you plan on making your own maple sugar! Sugar is combustible. As you boil your maple syrup to make maple sugar, the heat is causing chemical reactions to occur at a very fast rate as the water molecules start to evaporate. Removing the syrup from the heat at just the right time allows the reaction process to slow down, but if you forget to remove the syrup from the heat, this process will increase steadily. When this happens, sugar can actually ignite into flames before turning into ash. Author Harold McGee discusses the chemistry of cooking with sugar in his book On Food and Cooking if you would like more reading on the subject. Moral of the story: burnt marshmallows from a campfire are delicious; burnt maple sugar, which has been turned into pure carbon, is not.

My Tenacious Relationship With Farm Animals

Life has certainly been busy. Each fall the museum has to decide what to do with the farm animals over the winter. If you have ever been to Minnesota in the middle of January, you are well aware the weather can be rough on people. Animals dislike the cold as much as humans; they just complain about it a lot less.

The first summer at the museum Will and Fred had to share space with the sheep.

Our Guernsey cattle survived two winters, and they had a reality shock the first winter they stayed with us. They were my favorite animals on site, though. While quite large and intimidating (especially when one is loose in the yard and galloping towards you - yes, that happened to me), these two steers were pretty much equivalent to giant puppy-dogs. Will and Fred had quite the personalities. Will was usually less moody than Fred which made him more approachable, but Fred was usually jealous of all the attention Will received. I think Fred became more laid back as he got older. Named after Wilhem die Erste & Friedrich der Grosse these two boys honored their Prussian namesakes by responding to German commands. I think that is why I liked them so much. I could speak German to them.

Most of their days were spent laying in the grass, preferably in a sunny spot.

The Coolest Job in the World

I gave a tour today to a group of senior citizens. It was a family reunion apparently, and there were people from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Washington. Quite often this particular program is given to a group of students with no absolutely no recollection of life before the Internet. That can be an enjoyable time showing young people how different life used to be and how easy life is now compared to not too long ago. However, giving a tour to people who have actual memories of things on the tour is a whole different experience.

We started in the town hall of our little historical village, which according to a picture caption I saw recently, used to be a one room school. Every person in the group had attended a one room schoolhouse as a child. One gentleman mentioned how there were 11 kids in his school, while another said he was the only 5th grader in his school. Yet another gentleman talked about how there were five kids at the one room school when his family moved to a new town and a woman joked about how the school population doubled after his family started attending it.

I shared with the group that my mother's family attended a two room country school located on the edge of my grandfather's farm. I grew up listening to stories about what school was like for them. My uncle in particular was not the best of students. Their teacher always bent over at the waist to help a child at his or her desk, and she happened to be assisting the student sitting in front of my uncle one day after he sharpened his pencil to a very fine point. Being the focused student that he was, my uncle sat in his desk holding his pencil out just behind the teacher's derriere as she helped his classmate. When the teacher backed up, her backside ran right into the pencil. She told me uncle to get up, but he would not listen. After some frustration, she tried to pull him out of his seat. My uncle was wise enough to grab onto the desk and wrap his legs around the legs of his chair as she tried to force him out of his seat. The one problem the teacher did not consider was that if you tug at a child grasping for dear life onto a desk which is part of a row of desks attached to runner-boards, there is going to be some resistance. Well, she pulled on him hard enough that she tipped the whole row of kids over that day. I do not remember what happened to my uncle after the fact nor what happened when he arrived home from school that day, but I love that story. My group of senior citizens found it just as amusing.

Making jokes about using an outhouse in the middle of winter in the upper Midwest is something that appealed to this group because they lived it for so many years of their lives. At first I described it sarcastically as fond memories for them, but one of the gentlemen corrected me while laughing that there is never a fond memory about an outhouse. Considering my grandmother did not install indoor plumbing in her farmhouse until the mid 1990's, I can certainly agree, but I always cheated at grandma and grandpa's house and used the indoor toilet grandpa had rigged up so as to save myself the walk outside near the end of December.

The familiarity many had with the wood burning cook stoves manufactured in the 1880's in a few of the houses was unique to their generation. A gentleman talked about how the warming ovens were a perfect place to store a pair of mittens, especially wet ones, to warm. Another mentioned the hot water reservoir on the side of the stove in the house he grew up in. One of the ladies in the group talked about how handy it was to take water from the side of the stove on bath night. Using the wet sink, which would pump collected rain water from a cistern into the kitchen, for washing and bathing was not unfamiliar to this group. Bath night was on Saturdays in the nineteenth century just as it was for this group throughout their childhoods, and everyone shared the same bath water. The only thing that differed, it sounded like, was the bath order. In one family, the ladies bathed first. In the nineteenth century oftentimes, it went oldest to youngest. The baby went last, hence the phrase "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water".

The fact that this group could recognize the washing "machine" and the cider press in one of the houses showed they really lived in much of the history we were reliving on the tour. The ladies and gentlemen could tell of how their families' wringer washers were similar or different to that of the laundry items sitting before them. Or the fact that many recognized the antiquated irons displayed the deep memories the ladies had for sad irons with removable wooden handles as well as the early steam irons, used with kerosene in the nineteenth century but with gasoline in the twentieth century when these ladies were younger. As one lady described it, "Very dangerous!" The green Ball canning jars brought smiles of recognition, and the Singer sewing machine led to a few family stories. They played with stereoscopes as children. The root cellar was a place to joke about how when some of the men were in trouble as boys, they had to sit on the top step of the cellar as punishment. In the doctor's office at the end of town, a gentleman laughed when he saw the hearing device which looked identical to one he remembers his great-uncle using.

I joked during a bathroom break that someone should take over the rest of the tour. When it comes to historical knowledge taught at the museum, their hands on, lived through it experience tops anything I can ever read about. I made sure to thank them for sharing their stories with me because I can use it in my interpretation for future groups. Even though they grew up in the early to mid twentieth century, their childhoods resembled more of a nineteenth century life than a twenty-first century life.

There were a few things the group was less familiar with such as nineteenth century clothing styles, ladies' undergarments, the misconceptions about corsets, and the potent effects of late nineteenth century prescription medicine. I get to teach history, but I almost enjoy listening to the stories people have to tell more. Ask any senior citizen who grew up in the rural Midwest what year they got electricity and I guarantee they will have an answer for you. This group did, and being they grew up in Iowa, they even had electricity before both sets of my grandparents did. Ask someone from that generation about a party line and you will see the eyes light up. Now, party lines are a twentieth century thing, but we were reliving their childhoods as we walked to their vehicles at the end of the tour.

The aging generation has many memories to be shared, and if it is not written down, much of that becomes lost to history. I get to retell these memories on a regular basis, and I get to help a little bit of someone live on through a story. This is the reason why my job is the coolest job in the world.

Old Quilts

There are many fascinating things to see at my job. For visitors, it can range from the old buildings which sit on site, to the stuff inside the old buildings, to the farm animals living in some of the old buildings. For staff, it is often the stuff that lurks in the upstairs rooms of the very old buildings. Hopefully, the lurking is of inanimate objects and not living creatures which have become house squatters. Although, that can also be fascinating if you like seeing random mice run across the floor or if you like hearing bats squeak in the back room of a house.

Quilt made from wool fabric scraps

"1943 Roy Johnson" embroidery

One of the most difficult items to preserve for future generations is any kind of textile. The natural fibers of the 19th century tend to deteriorate over time if not properly taken care of. When exposed to heat, sunlight, dust, insects, rodents, etc., the life of the textile can be diminished tremendously. Every once in a while, someone on staff finds an item in an attic which probably should not have been stored there but was put there for some reason at one point in time years ago. It is sort of like a treasure hunt for history nerds when someone has a reason to go upstairs to find something.

Scrap quilt

According to the Textile Museum, fabrics should be stored between 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit with a relative humidity between 50-55%. Attics and basements are not ideal places to store these items since the temperatures in these areas of a house tend to not hold the recommended temperatures. So when a coworker found these quilts upstairs exposed to the elements in the upstairs of a building, it was proof that fabrics cannot last long in an environment such as that.

All of these items were an interesting find, though, not because they were examples of perfectly stitched, every corner shall meet, blue ribbon quilting, but because they were scraps of fabric pieced together in order to serve a purpose quilting. All of the items had embroidery to add decorative flair as well, some more intricate than others. They were neat to examine, but it was saddening to see the wear on the textiles, most likely from lack of proper storage more so than regular use. Hopefully, the items will find a more suitable home now that they have been found.

Detailed embroidery in the center of a pillow cover

For reference on the proper suggested care of textiles, please visit Guidelines for the Care of Textiles developed by The Textile Museum of Washington, D.C.