I still remember when we first moved to Tennessee and Dad was very loving, caring and playful with me. Even during the time we built our new set of buildings. There was peace in the church at that time. A couple of years prior to this, when I was just three or four years old before I was old enough to go to school, especially in the winter and in the fall of the year, I spent most of my time in the house with my mother. I was always really excited when Dad and my two older brothers came in for supper. After supper, Dad always sat in the living room in his old hickory rocker while Mom and my sisters did the dishes. Dad would fire up his old smoke pipe and talk about what he did that day, and what he was going to do the following day. I was a very energetic child. I would often get so excited that I just couldn't talk fast enough, and a lot of time I stuttered.
At first, Dad told me to slow down, take my time and not talk so fast. Eventually, it must have appeared to him that I just didn't listen, and he believed it was his duty to break me of that. One evening, I snuggled up tight against his rocking chair and tried to speak, but my words just wouldn't come out right. Dad told me to just shut up, that he had talked to a man and that man advised him that he had a son that used to stutter. The man said he had put his son's big toe underneath the runner of the rocker while he sat in the rocker and slowly rocked over his son's toe. The man said his son never stuttered again. Dad said, "Son, I'm going to cure your stuttering if it's the last thing I ever do." He leaned back in his rocking chair and told me to put my big toe under the runner of the rocker. I was just sitting there staring at my foot, terrified. But I had no choice in the matter. Dad slowly started to lean forward, and as he rocked over my toe everything else went blank. I don't remember if I cried or screamed, but I do recall watching the blood squirt from underneath my toenail. My Dad was right about one thing. It was a sure cure for stuttering. But the memories remain.
By the fall of 1965 we were in our new home. Dad rented the other farm that we had. We just got the other place cleaned up, but Dad saw an opportunity to make a dollar. This farm needed a lot of attention. We all had to change schools now. At that time our closest Amish neighbors were five miles from us. If we took a short cut across country, it was three miles. We had to walk three and a half miles to go to school every morning and evening. My Dad and my oldest brother Pete cut a path through the woods, after getting permission from all the English farmers. It was a long walk for us children at first, but we got used to it. Every once in a while Dad would let us have a horse and buggy to drive to school, if it was raining too badly.
In our spare time in the winter we cleaned off five acres of woodland by hand. The spring of 1966 we put out five acres of peppers, all planted by hand. We also planted three acres of cucumbers, five acres of soybeans, ten acres of corn, and about ten acres of oats. We helped our neighbor plant two acres of tobacco. Again we were working out just like we were on the other farm. Our barn was so small we couldn't put all our hay up loose, so Dad was looking around for an old hay bailer. He finally found one, but we had never seen one like it, it was a stationary and manually operated bailer. It had a big chute in the back, and in the back of the chute were long arms and a plunger. The whole bailer was about twelve feet long. In the rear where the chute was it was about four feet wide. The rest of the bailer wasn't over three feet wide. On the other end there was box, with a ten-foot pole connected to it. You hooked a horse to the end of that pole, and one of us kids had to ride the horse around in circles to operate the bailer. We had four wooden blocks with grooves in them that we had to throw in the back of the chute. Two of us had to be kneeling down beside it, shoving bailing wire through the wooden block and tying it by hand as the hay came through the bailer. We also did some custom bailing for other people.
Dad also bought an antique cultivator the same summer. We had a special seat built on the tongue of the cultivator so one of us children could sit on the tongue to drive. The cultivator had two handles on the back of it. The person who operated the cultivator had to walk behind it, with one handle in each hand. One handle was connected to the shanks of the cultivator. We also did some cultivating such as cotton fields and tobacco patches. We had a twelve-foot dump rake. When Dad bought this second farm, he'd sold most of our new machinery and got some antique machinery to save money. He also sold our hay loader, which meant we had to put all our hay up by hand. We would cut down a couple of acres of hay, and rake it up with our old dump rake. When the hay was nice and dry, we hitched up our nice team of Belgium horses to the wagon. This was a big job, and most of the time three of the girls had to help three of us boys and Dad. One time, we only had two more loads of hay to put up. That morning Dad told all seven of us children to go to the cotton field and hoe cotton, and that he and mom would put the two loads of hay up. Mom was stacking the hay on the wagon as Dad was pitching it on the wagon by hand. Dad had a pitchfork full of hay above his head, and started walking toward the wagon when he heard a weird sound above his head. Just then a six-foot rattlesnake fell on the ground just in front of his feet. Dad took off running one way, and the snake took off in the other direction. Suddenly Dad stopped and turned around, ran after the rattlesnake and killed it. This was a new experience for my Dad, and one he always said he didn't care to repeat.
By the spring of 1967 there was another Amish man that bought a farm close to where we lived. My Dad and the other Amish man got together and bought a thrashing machine. A couple of English neighbors asked us if we would thrash their oats for them, because their combine had broken down, and they didn't have any money to buy another one, or get it fixed. Dad said, we would take our grain binder over, cut their oats, and help shuck and thrash it. He said that if our neighbor helped us we would help them also. It was nice working with the English neighbors like that. A lot of evenings around seven or eight o'clock those neighbors came over to see how my father was doing. A couple of times a month during the summer, Dad let us kids take off in the evening and go fishing. We did get to play every once in a while. Soon we quit raising cotton all together, because it was too far to haul it to Lawrenceburg, which was about twelve miles.
In the fall of the year, we stripped tobacco for our neighbors. We only had one Amish neighbor the rest were all English. A lot of the time in the evening if we worked for one of the neighbors that day, they came and visited us in the evening, bringing a can of pop or some candy. This was something Mom and Dad would not spend their money on, so we kids loved these visits.
In Tennessee, we got used to the long walk to school. Our English neighbor James told us if we ever had any problems, going to or coming from school to just scream at the tops of our voices and he'd come running. That made us kids feel good and a lot safer that somebody cared, and was watching out for us. One evening on the way home from school, we were about three quarters of a mile off the road, cutting cross country, when we noticed somebody was following us. We all got scared and took off running, but whoever it was kept on following us. We ran in the woods, down hill through a ravine and up another hill. Then, we came up on a ridge and stopped. We heard a tractor. Sure enough our neighbor was up there working in the field. Relieved, knowing our neighbor would protect us, we ran toward the farm tractor. James shut off the tractor, and said, "What's wrong?" We were still so scared that we all tried to speak at once. James said, "Please, calm down. You don't need to be scared. I'll take you home and no harm will come to you."
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