Age does have compensations. . . . . . .

I grew up in a little village in the North Carolina mountains.  My parents
and I lived in a conventional house with a conventional yard on main street
near the court house.  My grandmother and most of the older folks lived on
the other street known as the Summit.  From the front, the Summit houses and
lots were as conventional as those on main street.  But . . . . .

The lots of homes on the Summit were deep, running down to a stream in a
small valley.  I would estimate that the lots were three or four acres each.

My Grandmother lived on the Summit.  She had a large barn with storage areas,
a loft filled with hay, and stalls beneath where four or five cows lived when
they weren't outside grazing; a family of guinea hens lived on the back slope
of the lot; the hen house and yard contained twenty-five or more chickens
with their biddies; another pen was home to twenty or so grey geese; the hog
pen (well away from the house and sheltered by an apple tree for the pleasure
of the hogs) held a few mature hogs and several litters each year.

Old bridles hanging on the wall in the barn's store room and a couple of old
wagon wheels  testified that horses had once been part of this town lot.  My
Grandmother no longer cultivated her land, except for a small kitchen garden
with its neat rows.  Many people who lived on the Summit grew corn and had
large vegetable gardens.  Some town dwellers also had large tracts of land in
the countryside where they grew tobacco, the mainstay of our county's
economy.  Dick Reynolds in Winston-Salem bought up all of the tobacco these
red hills could produce.

Behind my Grandmother's house stood an old well, a smoke house where a small
fire sometimes burned to smoke hams hung from the beams; the cows were milked
and the milk boiled on the old wood stove, cream skimmed off when it cooled,
and butter churned; children went berry picking and the grown people made the
best blackberry jelly one would ever want to taste; sometimes I helped
collect eggs from the nests underneath the hen's soft down; laundry was
'boiled' in an iron kettle over a backyard fire; a similar iron kettle
sufficed for making sausage in the fall; on a summer afternoon neighbor
ladies would rock and chat on front porches while they prepared string beans
for a family meal.   And, yes, there was an out house though by the time I
was born, the houses had running water and electricity; and a telephone
hanging on the wall in the hall. . . . .

If I couldn't find my Mother or my Grandmother, I could stand on a chair at
the telephone to turn the crank.  The town operator would answer and could
almost always tell me where they were.  Sometimes she would sit me on her lap
and let me pull the lines and plug it into the right hole to connect the
caller to the right household.

After reading Craig's excellent response comparing livestock holdings with
the amount of land owned in the 1786 Huntingdon County PA tax list, it
occurred to me to agree with him  -  one cannot determine the size of a p
erson's landed estate based on the inventory of his or her personal estate.

It also occurred to me that except for running water, electricity, crank
telephones, and Model-T Fords, I grew up in circumstances very similar to the
culture of a couple of centuries ago

Joyce Browning
Fairfax County, Virginia

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