Farm Life: Recollections of Ray W. Middlebrook

[Neal]

Introduction: By Neal Middlebrook
Growing up in Los Angeles, I often heard stories about farm life from my grandparents Charles Verdo and Julia Evelyn Middlebrooks and my dad Ray Middlebrooks.The phrase most often used was: “farming was a hard way to make a living.” My grandparents were born south of Hope, Hempstead County, Arkansas. After they were married in 1914 they lived on the 109 acre farm where Verdo had been raised, located on Patmos Road about five miles south of Hope.

Recollections of Ray W. Middlebrook

Sorghum Cane and Cooking
Verdo planted about 1 ½ acres of sorghum cane one year. Sorghum was used a substitute for sugar. When the cane was ready to harvest we had to strip the leaves, chop it down and top the stalk. After the cane was harvested a local farmer was contacted that the cane was ready for processing. The cane was fed into a mule powered juicer with two cog gears churning against each other. I drove the mule around and around and someone else would feed the cane in the juicer.

The cooking pan to reduce the juice to syrup was about ten feet long by five feet wide and six inches high made of copper. The pan had three sections and was placed on bricks with a slow burning fire underneath. The kids had to make sure plenty of wood was on hand to keep the fire going. At one end you poured in the juice and at the other end poured the syrup into clean gallon cans. It took all day to process the cane from juice to syrup. The guy we had contacted to make sorghum syrup received half of the syrup as his payment. I do not think we had to buy any syrup for a couple of years.

Fishing and Swimming with Moccasins
We finally got pop to put up a spring board down at our pond. We usually just jumped in feet first, but one day I tried it head first and got head and shoulders stuck in the mud bottom. I really had to struggle to get out of that clay. I never tried that again. I forgot to mention that before we would go swimming we would beat the water with cane poles to drive the snakes (cotton mouths) to the end of the pond.

We liked to go fishing with our crawdad pole. It was a short pole with line with a piece of pork tied on the end. We would put our line out for 10 minutes or so and lift it up slow and easy and most times find a crawdad hanging on to the pork. We would catch a gallon jug full, play with them and then dump them back in the pond. Pop killed a moccasin in our pond with his shot gun that was about 3 ½ feet long and four inches in diameter. It was amazing that none of our family was ever bitten by a snake.

I hope others will share their stories of “Farm Life.” I have other stories my dad shared with me that I will post from time to time.

Neal Middlebrook January 2020

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