Frying Pan Farm Part 2

The farm child's close connection to his parents' life and the necessity for performing a variety of ch.o.r.es also acted in some measure as a force for social control: the child who worked with his parents was expected to act in a manner acceptable to them. Furthermore, the close-knit nature of the community reinforced the parents' values when their offspring were away from home. "A farmer was always busy, and his kids didn't run the streets," noted Joseph Beard.[62] Another native of northern Virginia explained the prevalent philosophy in more detail:

Papa was a firm believer that work was a therapy that kept young people out of mischief. It was unthought of for youngsters to get into serious trouble in those days other than smoking corn silk or grapevine, and that was a punishment in itself. All were a.s.signed specific ch.o.r.es and the youngest started out picking up chips and other small pieces of wood from the 'woodpile' for kindling to start the fire in the kitchen range at daylight in the morning....

As we grew a little older bringing in the firewood was added to the list of ch.o.r.es and when you grew big enough to chop and split cordwood, usually around the age of 10-12 years, one found the ch.o.r.es around the home were endless.[63]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rebecca Rice, daughter of C. T. Rice, canning fruit in her home near Oakton, Virginia. Note the ice box and wood burning stove, standard features of the early 20th century kitchen. Photo in H. B. Derr Reports, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Elizabeth Harrison in her room on a farm near Herndon, Virginia. She refurbished the room herself as part of a 4-H project.

Photo in H. B. Derr Reports, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

The round of ch.o.r.es might seem endless, but farm kids had their fun, too. Joseph Beard and Richard Peck both recall swimming in Horse Pen Run and Peck also reminisced about fishing in the local streams.[64]

Margaret Lee was sometimes treated to a baked sweet potato after school; she rode the family mule for recreation.[65] At Halloween, much secret giggling went on as plans were afoot to take an outhouse and sit it on the school porch, or sneak all of the milk cans out of the dairy and set them outside.[66] Skating on the baptismal pond of Frying Pan Baptist Church, and neighborhood events such as picnics, watermelon feasts and oyster suppers also lent excitement to the child's life. Perhaps the most pervasive enjoyment came from the ever-changing delights of the countryside itself. Wrote one resident of the Herndon area: "We could ramble through the woods, finding huckleberries, wild flowers, sa.s.safras roots and stems, chestnuts and lovely mosses."[67]

Although children provided a great deal of supplemental labor on the county's small farms, the "hired hand" was also an important part of the community's work force. One local resident estimated that approximately half of the farms in the Herndon area used hired labor, and this figure is collaborated by the agricultural census of 1940. Other evidence shows that the largest single expense (about 38% of total farm expenditures) for the owner of thirty or more acres was hired help.[68] In Fairfax County, as in most of the South, this hired labor was composed almost entirely of the community's black residents, though occasionally a family would employ a white man. The Ellmore family, who often had a white man as their hired help, was such an exception.[69]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A homemade sled used for hauling manure to the fields.

Note the two young boys who, by driving the sled, shared the family's responsibility for the farm. Photo in Annual Report of County Agent H.

B. Derr, 1925, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

Extra help was engaged in several ways. Larger farms frequently kept one or two men throughout the year, sometimes supplying them with a house and their noon meal as well as a salary.[70] On most farms, however, extra help would be hired at particularly busy seasons by the day or the week. "In the summertime you'd get seasonal help, gather them up here and there, wherever you could," stated Holden Harrison. "If you could carry those men, at least the best ones, over the winter, then you'd have a good force that you could depend on for your summer work, your planting and harvesting."[71] In some cases the hired man would come with his team of horses for which he received additional wages. In another variation groups of workers would organize into crews to perform a specific function (for example, to fill a silo) and travelled from farm to farm accomplishing this special task.[72]

Many of the laborers in the Floris area came from Willard, a community of both whites and blacks, just over the Loudoun County line. About 85% of Fairfax County's black population owned no land in 1934 and supported themselves solely by agricultural labor.[73] Unlike this large landless majority, many of Willard's families owned three to fifteen acres of land. Most of these families grew vegetables on their land and nearly all kept a cow.[74] A few black families tried to support themselves by truck gardening, a difficult task when competing with larger more economical farms. One such farmer, Ernest E. Webb, struggled to maintain his children by selling vegetables in the city market. Biweekly he took his goods by wagon across the low, unstable Chain Bridge and along Ca.n.a.l Road to the markets in Washington, but for this long, exhausting trip his profits were slim: "We made enough to come back home, feed the horses, and feed ourselves a little for another trip."[75] To eke out an existence, most blacks had to supplement any farming income they might have by working as agricultural laborers.

Those laborers who did not have steady employment had to wait for work until they were needed for a specific job. When a farmer wanted extra help, he went to the black community, or sent word by someone else, and detailed the number of men needed and the job to be done. "In the spring my father would go up there [to Willard] or send me up there to see if I could get three or four fellows to help get the spring work going,"

remarked Holden Harrison. "Maybe you could get them and maybe you couldn't."[76] Sometimes there was a labor shortage, but frequently more men wanted work than there were jobs to go around. Several area residents remembered that if word got out that ten men were needed for a job, often fifteen or more would show up.[77] This was especially true during the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s, which hit blacks far worse than the county's white population. The blacks'

landholdings were of inferior quality and generally too small for efficient operation, and this, combined with their meagre operating capital and inadequate reserves, made the black agriculturalist more dependent than ever on work from the large landowner.[78]

The hired man was expected to arrive in time for the early morning milking and work the lengthy fifteen-hour day alongside the farmer. His ch.o.r.es ranged from making hay to cutting wood and building fences. Neal Bailey recalled that he spent his entire first day as a laborer driving fence posts with a 16-pound hammer. The standard salary was $1.00 to $1.50 per day plus all he could eat for lunch. Some farmers paid by the job rather than by the day though they found the latter system preferable. When the help was not so concerned with completing a task rapidly, farmers believed it produced a better quality work.

Occasionally the white farmers shared or traded work with their black counterparts. More frequently, hired hands worked for a share of the fruits of their labor. At butchering time, the hired help might go home with sausage, side meat (bacon) or a pork shoulder for his pay. At berry season they picked a farmer's blackberries or wild cherries for half of the take.[79]

The women and children of the black communities in Fairfax County also worked. Black women took in laundry, picked fruit and sometimes came to the white farmer's houses to help with canning or meat preservation at butchering time. One woman worked as a midwife; according to Margaret Lee, the only one in the area. She delivered Miss Lee's younger sister around 1913.[80] Children as young as nine would thin corn or pluck potato bugs off the dark, leafy plants for 50 a day. Girls used to pick berries and pull field cress when it was going to seed, and some children worked in the farmhouses running errands.[81] The Ellmore family often had a young boy to help do odds and ends, and another Floris resident noted that "there was some twins of about twelve years old and we needed a little help so I took one of them in the house and my brother had the other out to help him with things."[82] Neal Bailey recalled going out to help his father cut corn at a very young age and being told to "keep working--you have no back," even when it felt as if it were breaking.[83]

Within these labor relationships the white employer retained the most control since he set wages and hours, and because he worked with the knowledge that the black families were dependent on him for employment.

Yet the blacks had their influence too, for the larger landowners needed their labor to keep the farms operating smoothly. The farmer's dependence was apparent in instances such as that related by Ray Harrison, who remembered one Christmas night when no help at all showed up. That night he milked fifty-two cows by hand, something he could not afford to do every day.[84] In numerous ways the hired hands exercised some control over their working conditions. For example, seasoned workmen reserved the right to "break in" a field hand new to the neighborhood, thus both initiating him into local work patterns and a.s.suring that his expectations and treatment corresponded to that of the veteran help.[85] In times of intense activity, the labor supply would be short and the workers raised their prices accordingly. One farmer recalled that during an exceptionally busy silo-filling season the help were "jacking up the price ... ten cents an hour about four times in one day.... They were putting pressure on because they thought they had the leverage there." In this case the farmer called their bluff and sent the workers home, but in many instances, the laborers held sway and received higher wages during peak work periods.[86]

The white att.i.tude toward their black workers seems to have been paternalistic, as was the pattern of most racial relations in the post-bellum South. Though area farmers maintain that their hired laborers were liked and respected--"as much a part of the neighborhood as anyone else"--in conversation capable workers were referred to as "boy" or by the old plantation epithets of "Aunt" and "Uncle." A hearty noon meal was part of the hired man's pay, but the help ate outside by themselves, rather than with the family.[87] Moreover, rather than admit his need for the laborers, the white employer sometimes viewed his hiring in an altruistic light. "I remember my brother went over to these colored people that had been working for him at different times, in the middle of the winter, and told them to come over and cut some wood, and he paid them for it so that they would have something, because they were pretty bad off. So he just made work for them," stated one county woman.[88] Undoubtedly, charitable motives were truly meant, but the outcome was a paternalistic att.i.tude which failed to recognize the mutual dependence of land and labor.

This reliable supply of labor eliminated the county's need for migratory workers, and also reduced the amount of tenancy since most farmers found labor enough to manage all of their acreage. Nevertheless, during the period between 1918-1940, about 10-12% of the white farm population and 2% of the black were tenants.[89] Statistical evidence shows over half of the tenants to be cash croppers in 1925 and 40% in 1940. Many historians believe this to be the least beneficial system for the tenant as his obligation was to pay the landlord a fixed rent on the land regardless of the success of his crop.[90] However, Joseph Beard stated that most of the tenants with whom he had contact when he was county agent in the late 1930s were sharecroppers. By this system, the renting farmer supplied his tools and labor, the landlord furnished the land, and the crop was split.

Fairfax County never harbored the kind of perpetual tenancy described by James Agee's _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, in which families lived in squalor and humiliation with little hope of pulling their way out of debt. This occurred more frequently in the one-crop areas of the deep South where exhausted soil and crop dependency made for a high debt risk each year. Beard maintained that the sharecroppers of the late 1930s were respectable people, merely renting land until they could afford to purchase their own. In several instances, they were young local couples who went on to buy their tenured land and to become established members of the community.[91] Still, at best, any tenure system was a demoralizing one for the renter because his profits were consistently skimmed off to the landlord.

PART I--NOTES

_Continuity_

[5] Interview with Joseph Beard by Elizabeth Pryor, Fairfax, Virginia, January 23, 1979; notes from interview with Margaret Mary Lee by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, March 28, 1978. All transcripts and notes from interviews used in this paper are deposited in the Fairfax County Library Virginiana Collection (hereafter cited "Virginiana").

[6] Notes on interview with Elizabeth and Emma Ellmore by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, March 2, 1978.

[7] Interview with Holden Harrison, Ray Harrison and Virginia Presgraves Harrison by Elizabeth Pryor, Chantilly, Virginia, February 5, 1979.

[8] Notes on interview with John and Edna Middleton by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, February 24, 1978.

[9] Interview with Joseph Beard and Holden Harrison by Elizabeth Pryor, Floris, Virginia, March 6, 1979; Wilson Day McNair, "What I Remember,"

unpublished ma.n.u.script, n.d., copy courtesy of Louise McNair Ryder; author's conversation with Rebecca Middleton, Floris, Virginia, April 4, 1979.

[10] John Middleton/Netherton, February 24, 1978; and interview with Joseph Beard by Nan Netherton and Patrick Reed, Fairfax, Virginia, November, 1974.

[11] Ellmore/Middleton/Pryor, March 8, 1979.

[12] "Floris Producers Active," _Herndon News-Observer_, January 22, 1925.

[13] Lottie Dyer Schneider, _Memoirs of Herndon, Virginia_ (Marion, Virginia, 1962), 10 and 30.

[14] Notes on interview with Richard Peck by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, February 23, 1978; notes on interview with Virginia McFarland Greear by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, March 2, 1978; and Schneider, _Memoirs of Herndon, Virginia_, 10.

[15] Elizabeth Rice to author, Wilmington, Delaware, January 30, 1979.

[16] Beard/Netherton/Reed, November, 1974; Peck/Netherton, February 23, 1978; Ellmore/Netherton, March 2, 1978; and Harrison/Pryor, February 5, 1979.

[17] _Agricultural Census, 1925_; and Federal Crop Reporting Service, _Virginia Farm Statistics, 1935-1936_ (Richmond, 1936).

[18] _Ibid._; and Beard/Harrison/Pryor, March 6, 1979.

[19] Lehman Nickell and Cary J. Randolph, _An Economic and Social Survey of Fairfax County_ (Charlottesville, 1924), 29-40; notes on interview with Neal Bailey by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, December 12, 1978; "Fairfax Farmer Threw Away His Plow in 1928 and Amazing Results Have Been Revolutionary," _Richmond Times-Dispatch_, September 17, 1951; and Annual Reports of County Agricultural Extension Agent H. B. Derr, 1928, 1929 and 1932, in Virginiana.

[20] Bailey/Netherton, December 19, 1978.

[21] _Ibid._; and McNair, "What I Remember."

[22] Beard/Harrison/Pryor, March 6, 1979.

[23] Derr Reports, 1928, 1932; McNair, "What I Remember"; and Joseph Beard quoted in Beard/Harrison/Pryor, March 6, 1979.

[24] _Ibid._

[25] Notes on interview with Edith Rogers by Nan Netherton, Herndon, Virginia, n.d. (c. spring, 1978).

[26] Beard/Harrison/Pryor, March 6, 1979.

[27] Bailey/Netherton, December 19, 1978; Rogers/Netherton; Derr Report, 1926, 9.