Stillwell: Frontier women’s work seemed to never end

My dear ol’ grandmother Noland was born during the 1890s and spent most her life farming the soil of Eastern Jackson County. During my childhood, the folks always raised corn, wheat and alfalfa for the livestock, which consisted of hogs, cattle and chickens. My grandparents always put out a large vegetable garden so that grandma would have plenty of canning to do each summer.

My grandfather never raised flax or cotton though, like his great-grandfather, Francis Marion Noland did. That man had to raise both cotton and flax and had to maintain a good flock of sheep just in order to keep clothes on his back. Francis Marion was one of those first year pioneers of the frontier when Jackson County was opened for American settlement back in 1825, and his experiences have been passed down through the generations. Those were some of the many stories that my grandparents loved to tell me when I was a mere lad growing up on the farm.

Grandma told me that the job of the early pioneer boys and the other men folk of the family was to build up a farm from scratch, by clearing the land, tilling the soil, and raising crops. It was also their job to see that there was plenty of food on the table each night. Hunting for food was probably the most fun and the easiest part of their daily chores, because there was always plenty of wild game, greens, fruits and berries, and wild honey in the woods. There were still lots of Indians passing through back in those early days.

There were also still bear in the woods and many wolves roaming around, not to mention the snakes, so a person had to be on their toes when they were in the woods.

Back in those days the ladies’ daytime hours were filled with household chores. The most important job besides cooking was to make all of the clothing for the family by spinning and weaving cotton, wool and flax to make the yards of linen they needed. The flax was grown on their homestead, and wool yarn from the sheep they sheared, and every year they planted a cotton patch. There were neither carding machines, nor cotton gins in the county back then. The women plucked the seed out of the cotton with their bare fingers, and wool was both carded and spun by hand and woven into cloth; all of this took a lot of time and hard labor.

This being the case, the first thing a young man had on his mind was to get him a wife to fix his supper and make his clothes, because after all, there were no food or clothing stores back in those days. Even when stores did begin to filter into Jackson County, the pioneers had no money to buy anything.

If they couldn’t barter (trading grain or a hog for staples, such as salt and sugar) they simply did without.

All of those new clothes would eventually get filthy dirty, and laundry day was probably the most physically punishing labor of grandma’s entire routine. She tackled it once a week out in the backyard, regardless of the weather, lugging huge kettles of water and building a big fire outdoors to heat the wash water. She had nothing but a scrubbing board and chunks of homemade lye soap. The mountain of farm-filthy wash had to be reduced piece by piece, which meant hours of beating, rinsing and wringing before it fluttered triumphantly from the line. Sometimes the frontier women even stomped on the wash with their bare feet to remove all of that good ol’ Jackson County soil.