More from Sybil Stoudenmire - Farm Life
Scroll down to read the “extended cut” of Sybil’s idyllic life, growing up on a farm in a community that worked together to support each other through tough times. Click here to see part 1.
And now, the WHOLE story in Sybil’s own words:
This picture is a little history, taken during World War II in the 1940’s. From left to right, mother's sister who was married to a sailor, her younger brother who was in the Army, mother, and her older brother who was also in the Navy. Daddy was exempt from service because farming was considered an essential occupation for the war effort.
I grew up in a little community in Bullock County, Alabama named Thompson Station, which was comprised of a cotton gin, a railroad depot, a general store which included a post office, and three homes. My parents moved there when daddy and his brother were hired to build the cotton gin. After they finished building the gin, daddy bought some land to raise cotton and beef cattle, and then built our house.
I was an only child, and the neighbors’ children were much older than I was. The closest neighbor with children about my age was 2 miles away, so I grew up learning to mostly entertain myself. I was born in 1942, so entertainment didn’t originally include television, although we did have a radio. And, most most importantly, books.
From the time I can remember, I spent most of my time outdoors. I climbed trees, caught bumblebees and ‘lighting bugs’ in jars, watched the busy big red ants at the base of our front yard oak tree, climbed trees, walked on the railroad tracks and climbed on the box cars when the train stopped at the store, made toy cars (without wheels..just 2 different sizes of scrap wood nailed on top of each other) and drove them on ‘roads’ I made in the dirt, built little towns out of cardboard boxes from the store (and burned the towns when I got tired of playing with them). I rode my horse, shot my BB gun (under strict orders not to shoot at a living thing), learned to ride my bike on a gravel road, taught myself how to catch a baseball by throwing the ball up and catching it, and learned how to use a tennis racquet by bouncing a ball off the brick wall of the store.
Sybil throughout the years: as a baby, a reluctant drum major, and in her college sorority photo in 1962.
I tagged along with my daddy to the fields and pasture, learned to drive a tractor and a truck. (To my mother’s dismay, I really wasn’t interested in cooking, ironing, sewing, washing clothes by hand and hanging them on the lines to dry, picking and preparing vegetables from the garden for canning, and definitely not cleaning house.)
In our back yard there was a chicken house, a brooder house where the baby chickens (which we got in cardboard boxes by mail from Sears and Roebuck) lived in cages until they were old enough to go into the chicken house with the adult chickens, and a smokehouse for curing hams and bacon. (Even though I went barefoot most everywhere in the summer, the chicken house to pick up eggs was a definite no-go zone without shoes.) The milk cow was kept in the pasture behind our house, along with my horse. A garage and barn were beside the house, and the garden was planted on a large lot next to the house.
In those days a farm family was self-sufficient. Our food came from the land…vegetables from the garden, meat and eggs from the beef cattle and chickens on our farm, milk and butter from our dairy cow, fish from the ponds in the pastures, pork from hogs which we traded for beef with our neighbors, wild game…doves, quail, and turkey…from the woods on our property, and sweets from the blackberries, plums, figs, and scuppernong grapes that grew wild. The only things we really needed from a store were sugar, salt, tea, flour, yeast and cornmeal (no southern meal is complete without sweet tea, biscuits or rolls, and cornbread.)
Everybody on a farm works, even the dogs and cats, who definitely don’t live in the house with people! The dogs hunted and were security guards, the cats kept the mice out of the barn. They ate leftover food from our meals, which I took out and dumped into the back part of the yard for them.
To say that we were self-sufficient doesn’t mean that we were isolated. Neighbors helped neighbors. We saw them in church every Sunday morning. Mother coordinated the group of ladies who made and delivered food to families after a death in the family. When the church needed renovations and a new addition, daddy was put in charge of the building committee and mother worked on the financing committee.
Women would help each other with preparing the garden foods for canning. I remember them gathering in chairs in the back yard, with wash tubs of beans or peas in front of them, shelling them into pans in their laps, and catching up on all the community news (and gossip.) I tried to make myself scare during all that. Except when we got a batch of Chilton County peaches. An assembly line of wash tubs was formed. Skin-on peaches, peeled peaches, peach halves, peach slices. I stationed myself at the end of the line, and probably ate more than I sliced.
When tomatoes were ripe, somebody would always bring over an extra basket to share…or some jelly or jam they had made from figs or blackberries. If someone in a family was old or sick, casseroles and vegetables and roasts and desserts showed up non-stop.
If a farmer needed help with baling hay, repairing fences, loading cows to take to the stock yard, or most anything else, his neighbors were there for him. As daddy got older, the young farmers would ask him to go with him to their cotton fields, or pastures, or to buy new farm equipment, to get his advice. One of daddy’s barns, which contained all the hay he had stored to feed the cows during the winter, burned after being struck by lightning. By the next morning neighboring farmers started showing up with pickup trucks loaded with bales of hay, to the point where there was no more room to store it in his other barns. This was hay that they had stored for their own needs, but they were willing to share it, because they knew that their neighbors would do the same for them.
We had five families of sharecroppers who lived on our land. The men helped daddy with planting the cotton, harvesting the hay, and taking care of the pastures and the cattle. The women worked as maids or cooks. The whole families hoed and chopped the cotton, then picked it. Every year daddy gave each of them a cash bonus to buy Christmas presents for their children. When, Anna, our cook (and my nanny), got diabetes, daddy paid for her medical bills and insulin.
When one of our neighbors came to the house after daddy died, he told me that when he was just starting out as a farmer, daddy loaned him the money to buy the cows he needed to get started….and told him to repay whenever he was able to afford it.
After daddy died, mother lived alone. (And refused to live with me in Orlando because ‘she didn’t know anybody there, I worked all the time, and all her friends and relatives lived in Alabama’. She could probably have dealt with all that, but on a previous visit, my two little dogs had decided to join her when she was taking a nap on the sofa.) Several years later my daughter and her family convinced her to live with them in Fairhope and built a new home with a ‘grandma’ suite for her.
Shown above: Sybil with her children, Sterling & Paula in the 80’s. The whole family in Fairhope, with Sybil and her mother in center, son and family on left, daughter and family on right. All the grandchildren are now college graduates, and Sybil’s granddaughter Katie is in the first year of her Pediatric residency.
When mother was still living at home, I spent several weeks with her after she had to be hospitalized for a mild stroke. As I was interviewing home health aides to stay with her (which she told me with no uncertainty that she didn’t need), a man I didn’t know knocked on the back door. He asked me about mother and told me that he had put the new roof on their home. I asked if she owed him any money for the job.
Oh no, he said. Mr Sib and Miss Addie had loaned him money to help him out when he had done another job for them years ago. He didn’t get paid for the work he did for other people until the job was finished so he had to pay for the materials he needed upfront. Over the years mother and daddy loaned him what he needed (with no interest, of course) and he paid them back when he got paid.
Many years later, after the county tax assessor mistakenly split our land tax bills into two parts and sent one to the wrong address, we got a call from a woman who worked in the assessor’s office who told us what had happened, since she knew that ‘we didn’t want lose Mr Sib and Miss Addie’s land.’ We thanked her, and asked how she knew who the land originally belonged to, since it had been put in our names after mother and daddy died. She was the granddaughter of one of the sharecroppers who worked for our neighbor. ‘When I was a little girl, Miss Addie was the storekeeper at the store where we got off the school bus. Every day she would give us a snack and a Coke, then sit with us on the front porch and read us a Bible story.
My children spent every summer with mother and daddy on the farm. I think that they are the loving, kind, and hard-working people they are today because of that experience. (And we are all still attached to the ‘home place’. When the old house burned after a lightening strike many years later, we replaced it with a weekend cabin. We rent the farmland and pastures to neighboring young farmers and charge them just enough to pay our taxes on the land.)
So, with family and neighbors like these as role models, how could we go wrong?
So very true! Thanks to Coffee Loft community member, Sybil Stoudenmire, for sharing her wonderful story with us.