Remembering A Small Farm

By Tom Poland

 

 

Walking Among Ghosts 

From 1935 until today, the number of small farms in our country has dropped from six million to two million. A way of family life entire disappears as small family farms succumb to change. Regardless of the reasons, the result is denying many children today a harvest of great memories. Gathering eggs, picking tomatoes, getting up the cows, fishing for bream with a cane pole. Those and more. Fortunately I do have memories of my family farm … I share them now with you.

 

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March 28, the day before my sisters and I laid Mom to rest, was busy. People bringing food, funeral details, and other matters. As things settled down, I felt the need to spend time alone and the best place to do that was on my Aunt Vivian’s farm. As a boy, I spent many a day there fishing in the ponds, exploring the pastures and woods, riding an old mule, and playing baseball with childhood friends Jabe, Joe Boy, and Sweetie Boy.

 

Puppy love painted the old barn red.

 

Growing up, I always enjoyed the views along Double Branches Road that leads to the farm. Beautiful farmland and old country stores were welcome sights. Things changed though. My memory is anchored to the past so when I drive past the Rocky Branch Golf Course I still see ponds, pines, fences, and cattle standing about, what Granddad Poland referred to as whiteface cattle. I don’t see men swinging at little white balls nor do I see a clubhouse. As I drive past the rustic Price’s Store, I see old men wearing felt hats and real coveralls sitting on the benches flanking the door. That’s where I got, as I’ve written before, the coldest Coca Cola ever bottled. It had been resting at the bottom of a red cooler beneath a flotilla of dense chunks of ice.

 

Price’s Country Store … site of the world’s coldest Coca Cola

 

Across the road from the store, to me, is the most beautiful home in Lincoln County, what I knew as the Miss Nina Price House. Just beyond it, past some pastureland is Grandmother Poland’s home, the site of many a Christmas dinner. I haven’t been in that home in thirty years, maybe more. Someday I hope to go inside it again. As a boy I stood at the end of her dirt driveway and using an axe handle batted gravel over the highway in a game of homerun derby. If the gravel made it over the powerline, it was a homerun.

 

My father’s old homeplace

 

I drove past Poland Road and the Poland home place with the massive magnolia to the left of the porch. The home looks fully restored from the road but is missing the magnolia that stood at the right of the porch. As I headed toward Double Branches Baptist Church, I looked to the right for an old barn tucked back in the woods. Couldn’t find it. Without doubt, Mother Earth has reclaimed it. At that barn, for the first and only time, I watched Granddad Poland and Roosevelt Elam slaughter a head of beef. It wasn’t pretty. I watched the entire process. (Many years later in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I saw a mass mechanized system for butchering cattle, and I had rather have been that head of beef down in Georgia than a trucked-in head of cattle any day of the year.) I recall, too, that close by that long-gone barn grew a huge pear tree heavy with delicious pears. Again, I would love to see that tree but so much change has transpired I just couldn’t locate the site of the old barn.

At Double Branches Church I walked through the cemetery reading the tombstones of relatives, two of whom had names similar to mine: Thomas Antone Poland, my great grandfather and great uncle Thomas Carey Poland who died before his father by eight years, six months, and nineteen days. In my family archives exists a photograph of me as a two-year old boy. I am standing on Thomas Antone Poland’s flat stone the day of his service, March 21, 1951. I have no memory of him.

 

The stone I stood upon as a toddler

 

I drove to Poland Road and rode through Pleasant View Estates. Somewhere near the estates my sister, Brenda, and I long ago planted pine seedlings for Aunt Vivian. No doubt, the pines were timbered but through dense vines and woods on a hill I saw orderly ranks of tall pines. Did we plant those?

I parked at a gate near Aunt Vivian’s old barn. I climbed over the metal gate and went to photograph the barn. I painted that barn fire engine red when I was 16 or 17. It took me two weeks and Aunt Vivian paid me with one of her cocker spaniel puppies, which I gave to my first girlfriend. Half a century of sunlight had bleached the paint out of the wood but you can still see red paint in places where sunlight can’t reach the wood and in the cement blocks, which soaked up paint like a sponge. That spaniel is long dead. The puppy love faded but the barn, though missing tin and boards, still stands. All that was a lifetime ago.

I walked the farm marveling at its beauty and came across an old schoolbus Uncle Joe stored hay in. Both Granddad Poland and Uncle Joe would consign abandoned vehicles to the pastures creating a sort of museum. I plan to return and make a photo journal about these old vehicles. When I got back to my truck, a man was waiting on me, assuming I was meddling. We talked and I told him I was a Poland.

 

The old bus replaced the collapsing shed … beautiful detritus

 

“You look like a Poland,” he said, adding, “When I saw that car with South Carolina plates I thought someone was up to no good. But when I saw that UGA wheel cover, I thought, ‘Well, he can’t be all bad.’” We shared some memories and moved on.

I stopped near the pond where I caught my first bass. Grandmom Poland taught me to fish there and that pond holds a sacred place in my memories. On the dam she told me it was good luck to have a dragonfly land on your cork. Good luck, too, to spit on the hook. Later, I graduated from a cane pole to a Zebco reel and rod and caught many a bass there using black rubber worms that smelled like licorice. I recall, too, an old wooden boat Granddad Poland had made that always had a water moccasin lurking beneath it.

 

The pond where I caught my first bass

 

I relived boyhood days at the farm as I walked among ghosts. Of all the adults who gathered at Granddad’s old farmhouse for holiday meals when I was a boy, only Aunt Vivian remains. That must be an intense loneliness for her, to be a sole survivor. Gone are Granddad and Grandmom Poland, Nona (Nanny) Hogan, Pola and Lang Steed, Uncle Joe, and dad and mom. It’s lonely knowing all of them are gone, a feeling akin to being lost at sea. Well, lost at sea I am.

I hope to go back to the old farmhouse my aunt rents out one day and study the doorframe to its bath. There, Grandmom Poland used a Phoenix Oil pencil to mark a line gauging my height as I grew. I have no doubt all those marks lie beneath layers of paint, but I want to stand there again straight as an arrow and draw a line. It will be the last line drawn. The end of an era, for after that I’ll never come back.

 

 Somewhere near this dirt road grew a magnificent pear tree

 

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of eleven books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press has released his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. The History Press of Charleston just released his book, Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

 

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