Wednesday, March 8, 2017

English Harvest

This 1938 docu features women, too! They bring tea for their men...


  1. This was a very interesting video.

    My Dad is 88 years old and he remembers the wheat harvest on his Aunt Hulda and Uncle's John's farm, and their close neighbors' farms. It was a lot of work for everyone. People who owned wheat threshing machines would come and many men would be in the fields. My Dad's job (he was just a boy at the time) was to ride the mule out among the men and bring drinking water to them. The farm was rather large. Meanwhile, Aunt Hulda and the other close neighbor women were preparing a huge afternoon meal for all of the men. She was a fantastic cook. She had a hand pump in her kitchen at the sink. And Electric hadn't come to their farm yet to make any chores easier either. It didn't get there until after World War 2. Cooking wasn't easy back then. Everything came from the farm and her hand was involved in almost every aspect of the food that came to the table. She worked hard every day and lived to be almost 100 years old.

    That land, that in my lifetime was family farms, is now nothing but office parks, hospital and medical buildings, and homes. All that remains of the old family farms are a couple of original fence lines and some ancient oak trees, and of course the land, but it's covered over mostly by buildings and concrete. My Dad occasionally drives in that area and checks out what landmarks are still around. So much has changed, yet some landmarks remain.

    A couple of years ago my Dad was in that hospital where the farms once were. As he was laying in the hospital bed, he was looking out the window telling us about how he used to take the mule and haul water to all of the men working in the fields.

  2. This video is pretty nostalgic, isn't it? What I also noticed is that no one in it was overweight...


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