Image Workshop - Documentation and Download Option(s)
 1981-1990 |
File Identification:Outlaw-052 | Date Scanned:photo'd ~ 1980-95 | Source of Scanned Image:W.H. Outlaw Jr. | |
| Original Source of Image:W.H. Outlaw Jr. | Digital Archiver:W.H. Outlaw Jr. | Image Restorer: | ||
| Original Image Size:- | Scan Resolution (dpi) (Reduced files=200 dpi): | Exact Date of Original Image: | ||
| Estimated Date of Original Image:House ~1980, Ice House ~1995 | Basis for Date Estimate:general memory | Unreduced File Size(px):952 x 1418 | ||
| Location: | Background: | Activity: | ||
| Unreduced File Size(MB):537 x 800 | Reduced File Size (px):1.7 | Reduced File Size (KB):173 | ||
| Information with Photo: | ||||
| Subjects:House at W.H. Outlaw farm Ice House at Mark A. Watson farm |
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| Comments:The house was built as a community project to quickly replace the original big house, which burned. No images of the original house exist. I did get Mama to sketch an outline and I hope to find it sometime. This little replacement house has four rooms. As it is now configured, the southeast room is the kitchen, the southwest is the living room, and the other two are bedrooms. Soon after they married, Mama and Daddy lived in two of the rooms and Aunt Bessie and Uncle Buren, newlyweds, too, lived in the other two. (At first, I think they shared the space, but decided to compartmentalize later.) Daddy and Uncle Buren had inherited the farm together and later Daddy bought Uncle Buren's part. (The other property of Granny Della was assumed by her brother, Uncle Jerry, who was the estate administrator following her murder.) In my childhood, Mama's brother (Samuel L. Watson) and his family lived there until they moved to Sam's acquired property, about 1955. At the time that Mama and Daddy lived there, Daddy taught--I think he made $90/month and the school year was short, perhaps 6 months. I guess Mama enjoyed living there as the property joined her parents'. She was born and had her first child just up at the old Sam Watson homeplace (which I also refer to as the Mark Watson place). I expect the road stayed pretty hot between the two houses. I doubt Granny Watson could keep her advice bottled up too long and, if as in later years, she took every opportunity to say something unpleasant to or about Daddy. There are only few specific stories that I can recall at the moment concerning that time and place. I know that Mama and Uncle Buren had a joint cucumber project; both were big-time gardeners. (There was a large pickling plant in Nashville and I guess this would have been their market.) As Mama worked in the cucumbers, she left her babies in a box in the shade at the end of the rows. The other story would best be appreciated if you knew Daddy and Uncle Buren. Daddy was slow to anger, but slower to cool down, and getting angry was speeded a good bit if he didn't get his way. Uncle Buren didn't seem to welcome suggestions as far as I remember. But, I really don't know what came between them one morning at the woodpile. It was serious enough that one (Daddy, I think) got the axe after the other. At a distance of 70 years nearly, this little image might evoke humor, but I sometimes reflect--what would life have been like for me (if there were a me) with a father in prison for murder and never knowing Uncle Buren. Life could have changed in a moment of anger when judgement and love are suspended. Forever. There's a lot to be thankful for. Unfortunately, as I write this in March 2007, the house is in a state of ill repair and nothing really can be done. I mull over it and get ambitious and go back and inspect it once more, but each time, I realize that there is not a simple replacement to any part of it. It is just old, parts are rotten and termites have had their way with it, too. It is a sad realization when one recognizes that what he would like to have is simply not practical to restore. The bottom image is the ice house. In the foreground once stood the smokehouse. It was a log structure, logs ~5 inches in diameter with about ~1 inch space between them. The overall dimensions were perhaps 12 x 15 feet. In my childhood, the family would kill 4 hogs when the weather got cool--it was an all-day affair. I don't remember a hog being killed that Grandpa didn't shoot himself--one well place .22 round in the forehead. The hog would fall over, twitching on its side, some with more movement, some with less. Then, a sharp knife was inserted in the chest-neck interface and the artery was cut--as the blood came out the spurts, the pig's life was spent. After it was shot, the hog always had a focussed look, but I guess he couldn't see. I hope not. Then, the hog was immersed in hot water in the syrup kettle and left there briefly, after which he was removed and most of the hair simply came off by the handsful. The men scraped the carcass with sharp knives, essentially shaving off the hair that was not released by the scalding. One by one, the hogs were hung and the entrails were removed. Of course, the intestines were saved--my, did they smell! Granny Watson and her team of helpers went some distance and inverted them and scraped the insides. Whew. Probably wouldn't pass my sense of hygiene these days. Meanwhile, the liver was saved. (Mama could not be disabused of her notion that I loved liver pudding, so back when she was "up and at 'em," she'd have several slices of pig liver boiling as I visited. It was my job to grind the cooked liver up--using Grandma Gaskins' grinder. To the ground liver, Mama added just the right amount of cooked rice and cooked onions. She formed it into a loaf, usually, and cooled it. Actually pretty good, but the fun part of watching Mama busy around with her little helper (little is contextual, over 40 years, over 200 lbs.)) Back to the main point--no organization here--the layer of fat and skin was removed, and this is where the little ones came in. Granny Watson had two outside wooden tables and she put a knife in the hands of every grandchild she could find, and cut, we did, all the fat into small cubes(~1.5 inches on the edge). The fat was cooked down by use of two washpots that were mounted in a furnace in the well shelter (right, background). The hot liquid fat was squeezed out with an Enterprise sausage mill. Salted, these cracklings couldn't be beat, esp. the ones with the skin, which was chewy and leatherlike (nothing at all on the order of the commercial pig skins). Meanwhile, there was activity in every direction. (. . . not to mention cross comtamination--eating cooked pork with the same hands as being used to cut raw pork.) Some pieces of pork were cooked and put for long-term storage in ceramic pots that had been filled with hot hog grease. (Everything was sterile under this layer of grease, so good meat could be fished out for consumption later.) Chops and ham were cut out, and esp. the tender loins, the only time in the year that we had them. They were fried for dinner that night, coated with sugar and served along with fried sweet potatoes, also with a coat of sugar plus cane syrup. (Obviously, the central theme in cooking was to fry.) The bits and pieces of pork were ground up and loaded into the sausage stuffer (getting about dark now) and the sausages were made. Of course, these natural casings were imperfect and had holes here and there from the scraping, so they would have to be tied off every so often. And, over the next couple of days, we had fresh sausages (and it was the custom to give all one's neighbors fresh sausage, and they reciprocated on their hog-killing day). . . .all of which brings us to the point of the smoke house. Sausages, hams, whatever were hung on tiers and slowly smoked to dehydrate and preserve them. They were left in this rather open smokehouse until consumption, just generally as they were first hung to smoke. Rodents were not a problem: Granny Watson kept a battalion of cats, and she would call on me occasionally to thin their numbers, using the same .22 as used for the hogs. (Granny took the part about "dominion over all beasts" more seriously than I do.) The meat in the ceramic pots was just to the right inside the door, and other floor space was occupied by food put up in glass jars. Having spent so much time on what one can't see, I will ironically skimp on the Ice House, which you can see. The building was obviously small (maybe 8 x 8) and had double walls that were filled with sawdust. There was also a good layer of sawdust on the floor. I never saw it in operation; in my life, it was just a place for odds and ends to be stored. Back in its day, though, blocked ice (produced by an ammonia plant in town) was placed in the building to maintain low temperatures. I don't know whether it was used year around or only seasonally. |
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