Category Archives: Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Back to the land with no electric

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Creek Crossing

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West Virginia is mostly hills with some flatter, rich bottom land in between each ridge. There are what we call actual mountains in the 3000-4000+ foot range on the eastern side of the state and there are also some gently rolling open fields in the Eastern Panhandle and along the bigger rivers. In Ritchie County, located in the NW Central part of the state, what we have is waves of wooded hills with narrow troughs of bottom land in between. Usually there is a sizable creek meandering through the red clay, silt and loam of these valleys, and often times no bridges to get from the road to the other side. The creeks flood on a regular basis and will cover any low water cement bridge, so many folks keep their vehicles on the road side of the bridge during rainy spells and rely on a footbridge to get themselves across to their house during high water.

Our creek crossing was just a  tractor-wide track cut into the creek bank, angled in an upside down V shape, so flowing water did not wash it out too much. Bedrock lined the creek bottom and normally most of the mud washed away, leaving a fairly stable roadbed in shallow water. We could drive the pickup or the tractor through just fine when the ground was dry, but it could get tricky climbing out after some long rains.

We were building a house across the creek, way up on top of the hill, and needed to haul our stack of sawmill lumber up, a little at a time. The Ford 9N tractor was old, the hill was steep and the trailer small. It had been raining off and on for a week but the ground seemed thirsty enough to handle it. We hitched the trailer to the tractor, loaded a stack of lumber, and drove down into the crossing. The load was heavy and the trailer sunk into the mud more than expected. We had to rock the tractor back and forth some, which churned up the mud and made it even gummier.

Meanwhile, heavy clouds started rolling in over the ridge. We never could see weather until it was right on top of us, with the hill blocking the view to the west.

It started to rain. The tires dug in a little deeper. The clay on the steep bank got slicker and slicker. The tractor was going nowhere with this heavy load behind it.

 We started tossing the boards up on the far bank to lighten the load. It rained harder.

Bunnels Run is part of a huge watershed and upstream about 4 miles it runs through the little town of Pennsboro, where plenty of roofs and concrete contribute to massive amount of fast runoff. Our little creek can grow from 12 feet wide to 200 feet wide in the space of 45 minutes if the ground is already saturated from previous rains, and it rains hard enough. Being stuck in the creek when it starts to rising is a scary thing.

I am on the tractor, driving, and Eck gets in the creek with a heavy pole wedged against the draw bar, trying to help push the 9n up the slope. He shoved some brush in front of the tires for traction. It continues to rain. It rains harder. The wheels spin and the creek slowly starts to rise.

The neighbors see we are having trouble and send their two teenage boys, who climb down into the creek to help push. Somebody hands them each a pole and now three of them are wedging the poles into the muck and trying to lever the tractor up the hill. In low gear, I am trying to crawl up the hill without spinning. The creek continues to rise as we inch ever so slowly forward.

The guys are in water up to their thighs and the engine is still clear of the rising water. I wish we had a tree or something we could chain a come along around to help, but there is nothing but elderberry and small black willow bushes growing nearby.

The rain keeps coming down and the creek keeps on rising. The guys are up to their waists now and we are all getting panicky. We can not afford to lose this tractor. We can also not have anyone get swept away. Another neighbor hooks up a rope and pulls from the front. That seems to be the tipping point. The tractor is slowly, steadily, climbing out. Whew!

We quickly reload the lumber after reaching flat ground again and park the tractor on the old railway berm, away from the creek. We are able to cross back over the creek to our side using the neighbors single pole foot bridge. The rain keeps coming. The creek rises a couple of more feet before it spreads out all over the bottom. We got out just in time.

We are so glad to have neighbors who go above and beyond when we need them. We will be ready and willing whenever they need help in return.

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Bucket Baths

When you don’t have running water or an automatic water heater you make do with what you have. You can take a perfectly good bath using only three gallons of water, even without a bath tub.

Summer  Time Baths

When I first lived without running water, back in the early 1970’s in West Virginia, I had to go down to the creek and fetch all our washing water in buckets. I learned pretty quick that it was easier to haul two at a time than just one because then I could walk without being lopsided. It is a good way to build up arm muscles. It is also a good way to learn how to conserve all the water you can, if for no other reason than saving yourself some hard work.

In the summer, taking baths in the creek was no problem. We used Dr Bronners Peppermint Soap, which is fairly benign, but we still hauled a bucket of water out onto the bank to rinse most of the soap off, so it would not go directly into the creek. Cool creek water and peppermint soap is refreshing on a hot summer day.

Even after we had a pitcher pump and a well around the back, we still had to pump it by hand and haul it inside. Plus, you always had to remember to keep enough water saved back to prime the pump.

Laundry

Doing laundry and diapers by hand was the most challenging water job. That required hauling lots of water- 6 gallons for wash and 6 for the rinse. I had to heat water for the diapers and they got done separate from the main wash. Every thing else got washed cold. I had these great aluminum wash tubs out near the clothesline (with drain plugs!) and I used an old time wash board to scrub really dirty denims and such. To conserve water, I washed all the lightly soiled stuff, like sheets and shirts, first, then did the socks and saved the denims for last.

Fall Bucket Baths

In the fall, when it started getting colder outside we hauled the water in the big blue granite ware cooking pot and heated it up on the stove. That took almost 30 minutes on the gas stove or a little longer on the wood stove, unless it was cranking hot.

bath bucket
Bath Bucket on Stove

We would carry the bucket outside to the porch, and squatting on the stone step and using a small saucepan, pour a little over our heads, lather in the shampoo, and then do a partial rinse onto the ground. After that, we did a whole rinse with our head over the bucket so we could re use the water for a body wash. Standing up we’d pour some nice hot water over ourselves, soap up, pour some more to rinse off and then- for the best part- dump the whole rest of the bucket over our heads. The sudden rush of hot water felt so good at the end.  Even better than a real shower. We had to wait for dark for this kind of bucket bath because our porch was visible from the road.

Kids did not have that problem and they could entertain themselves for a good while in their little tub.

Tub for the Little Ones
Tub for the Little Ones

Winter Time Baths

When winter set in, our baths had to come inside where there was heat from the stove. Our living quarters consisted of one room that measured 16 by 24 feet and we had a lot of stuff in there. A double bed, a single bed, a crib, a couch, treadle sewing machine, wood cook stove, gas cook stove, kitchen sink cabinet, and a table. It was kind of crowded. We didn’t have a drain system for the sink, just a bucket underneath that we had to empty by hand. No bathtub. So we improvised, using a wrought iron coffee table that had a removable glass top.

Coffee Table Bath Tub
Coffee Table Bath Tub

We would start heating the blue enamel bucket on the stove, take the glass top and set it aside, and then drape a shower curtain all around the edges, held up with clothespins-the two piece wooden kind with the spring clamp. When the bucket was the right temperature we’d set it down inside the table and then climb in with it.

You had to hunker down and be careful not to splash water out the sides of it but it actually worked really well and also caught most of the cold drafts.

I remember one really cold, snowy day, some friends arrived unexpectedly while I was taking my bath in the table. The door was only about 6 feet from me and I hollered,

“Quick! Come in and shut the door. ”

They were standing there with their mouths open,

“What are you doing? Are you inside a table? Taking a bath?!”

“Sorry. Didn’t know you were coming. Give me a second to finish up here.”

They walked over to the other end of the room by the stove to warm up while I toweled off and got dressed.

“Well, now we know how you guys take a bath in this place. Wasn’t really wondering, but I have to say, I  never would have thought of climbing inside a coffee table. How do you empty the tub?”

“Watch this. It’s easy.”

I proceeded to remove the clothespins and gather up all the edges of the shower curtain, gave it a slight twist,  hung it over my shoulder and headed out the door.

Five seconds later, I hung the curtain on the wash line out on the porch and I was back inside. All cleaned up.

“Wow. That is such a good idea. Course it would be even easier if you brought your cast iron tub in and ran a drain line.”

“Right. Where would we put it?”

For the six years we lived in Ritchie County, we did our bucket baths according to the seasons, although every once in a while we would take a real shower at a friend’s house. When we first started out, we even went to the little motel in town a couple of times and paid them three dollars to use their shower.  But that was cheating.

I have since lived in other places, in Nelson County Virginia, where we had to haul water and do bucket baths. Wells and septic systems are seriously expensive to install and it took us a while to be able to afford it. Outhouses and bucket baths worked just fine. for quite a few years. When I finally managed to get electricity, running water and a water heater I felt like I was coming up in the world.

These days, I still appreciate the hot running water that magically comes out of the tap when ever I turn it on. I will never take it for granted. It is good to know however, that we can live without it if we need to.

-wendy lee, writing at Edgewise woods gardens and critters

 

 

 

 

Critters, Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Goats and Crawdads

Goats do not like to get their feet wet. They don’t like dirty water. They don’t like their barn messy. Considering that, you would think they would do a better job of being neat and clean, wouldn’t you? But no. They drop nanny berries into their water bucket, spill their grain in the dirt, and climb all over the clean hay. When it rains they huddle in their little barn and look down their Roman noses at the terrible wetness out there and refuse to come out. If you drag them out for milking they pussy foot around, dancing on their tip toes (er,hooves, I know) in an attempt to keep their dainty feet dry. It is pretty comical to watch.

We had Nubian milk goats, the kind with the long, floppy ears. They are seriously cute, especially when they are kids. They can be a real pain when it comes to keeping them out of things, though. Like the garden. Or the fruit trees. Or the house.

Kasha on our bed
Kasha on our bed
Kasha was the flightiest, quick-stepping, udder swinging, raindrop dodging goat we had. She bleated like a stuck pig whenever she didn’t get her way. She could sail over the woven wire fence around the garden, do a little twist in mid air, and bleat like a screaming banshee at the same time. Lolipop was more sedate and a whole lot bigger and came from a commercial dairy.
Lollipop on the Milking stand
Lollipop on the Milking stand
She could knock over a grown man if she wanted to, which luckily, she never did. Lolipop once defended the herd from a Newfoundland/ Great Pyrenees, by rearing up and timing her powerful head-butt to coincide exactly with the arrival of the dogs head at the fence. The huge black dog was boring down on her at full speed. Knocked the dog senseless. It was impressive, plus it gave us time to get a rope on him before he tried again. She must have weighed over a hundred pounds and when she reared up she was as tall as I am. The poor dog didn’t know any better. Cherokee lived his first two years chained up in a yard in D.C. and had never seen a goat before. A friend of ours had found him in a “good home wanted” ad in the latest issue of “The Mother Earth News”. For some reason he thought bringing him out to our place was a good idea. The next day Cherokee broke his rope and tried to get the neighbors milk calf that was grazing on their lawn. They almost shot him for a bear. We had to ask him to leave and train him somewhere else. He eventually turned into a good dog.

The spring of 1975 was super wet in Northwest Central West Virginia. Seriously. They called it that on the radio. Ritchie County had at least a little rain every day for a month that June. The creek came up, it went down, it came up again. It overflowed the banks. Mud was everywhere. We could not work the garden and plant. There was a rice paddy right by it. The barnyard was a mucky mess and the goats were very unhappy about it. The chickens looked scraggly in soggy feathers. The water got so high that even inside the barn was getting soggy. We were digging ditches with the mattock all over the place, trying to drain the water away. The goats were huddled in the barn peering out as we worked.

Standing there in my mud boots, scraping away at a ditch, I thought I heard a bathtub draining. You know the sound. Kind of a sucking, swirling glug, glug sound. It was loud and somewhere close by. Except here was no bathtub, not even in the house. Plus, we were standing in the middle of the barnyard.

“Where in the world is that sound coming from? Can you see anything?”

We finally looked down and found a swirling water tornado-lookin-thingy about 10 feet out from the barn wall in a low spot.
“Wow. Check this out. A Crawdad has drilled us our own barnyard drain hole. How handy is that? Little West Virginia ground lobsters helping us out.”

There was a small hill of tiny, round, mud balls mounded up and water was pouring over the top into a hole about an inch or two across. The water was pouring through pretty fast, just like going down a drain.

Crawdads are the same thing as Crayfish and some people eat them, mostly further down South though. They move backwards when they swim and forwards on land, eating insects. We had come across some huge ones on our place that measured about eight inches long when we were digging the well hole. Didn’t know they could be so useful though.

Wendy lee, writing at edgewisewoods.com

Want More Crawdad info? www.nps.gov/laro/learn/…/Crayfish-facts.docx

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Tractor in the Creek

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The bottom land soil was good old West Virginia red clay. The kindthat sticks to your boots when it ‘s wet and makes you get taller with every step. The stuff that you scrape off as best you can before going inside or getting in the car. The kind that swallows up pickups in ever growing mud holes. The kind that makes you wish you had remembered to lock the hubs in before you got stuck in that knee deep mud hole. The kind that swallows up the tractor you were using to pull out the VW that was already in there. The kind that makes for red stained wash and arguments about who tracked that stuff in.

We were hauling sawmill lumber up to the house site way up on top

Start of the House on the Hill
Start of the House on the Hill

of the hill and had to cross the creek to get to the road up. The crossing angled down into the creek going a little downstream and then climbed back out of the creek angling back up stream. This makes sense when you think about the wear and tear of creek water on the road bed. It makes for a little less silt build up in the tracks.
So, we’d been making a lot of trips but the rain had been holding back and the creek staying low. The banks were about 5 feet high and the creek probably less than a foot deep where we crossed. It was getting a little slick on the far side where the creek water carried up with the tractor tires, but not too bad. There were only a few more loads to go.

Then it started to rain. I don’t know where it came from, but the clouds moved in, blotted out the sun and it was coming down. Hard. We couldn’t see weather coming in that far, with all the hills so close by, and hadn’t been listening to any radio. It took us almost an hour to load the trailer and get it cinched down tight for the steep climb up the hill. We really wanted to get all the lumber up to the house site now , and not have to wait for the ground to dry out again, so when we finally got the trailer loaded back up with the last of it, we started across the bottom and down into the creek. It had been raining hard the whole time we were loading and the creek was starting to rise just a little.

Bunnells Run is a long creek and drains a huge area and comes through the town of Pennsboro first. There are a lot of roofs, parking lots and paved streets in town that send all the rainwater straight into the creek. It moves fast with nothing to slow it down. This creek rises fast. It depends on the sort of rain you get, and how ready the earth is to absorb it, just how fast. The ground was not taking it in. It was all running off. As the tractor got down into the creek the water came up to the rear axle and the trailer started to slip sideways off the gravel bed at the crossing. We kept it moving though and managed to pull it out the other side. I rode on the side fender up to the top of the hill and we dropped the trailer and headed back down as quick as we could on the narrow steep grade.

When we got back to the crossing, the water was even higher, but at least we weren’t pulling the trailer anymore. We headed down into it and realized too late just how deep it was, and how fast it was moving. The water came over the air intake and stalled the motor out. We could not get it started again. We climbed out over the front of the tractor and jumped off on the other bank and went to get the pickup and a chain to pull it out. No go. The truck wouldn’t start. We stole the battery from the VW bug and tried again. The water was rising and really muddy with red clay, looking like mashed bean and bacon soup. I ran and got the wooden pry poles from the shed and Eck climbed down into the water and started prying from the back of the tractor while I tried to pull with the truck, but we couldn’t get any traction on the wet slope.

The neighbors heard us down in there shouting and three teenage boys came running out to help. They jumped right down into the muddy water and started pushing on the back wheels. I hooked up the pony with his log pulling harness to see if we could do any good with that. Daniel was pulling and all four guys were in the water with pry poles and pushing. It was scary. The water was almost up to their armpits and I was afraid they would get washed away but they just kept on sticking those poles under, prying up and the tractor slowly started to move. The pony was pulling, the four guys were pushing from behind and hollering, and the wheels slowly started to turn. Another brother finally showed up with his huge four wheel drive truck that had a winch on it and he hooked up and started reeling it in. The red mud tried to hold it back but we won in the end. Whew.

Bunnells Run in Flood
Bunnells Run in Flood

Everybody climbed out, covered in muddy water and looking like drowned rats. They pulled the tractor to higher ground and our friends headed off home, sopping wet, covered in red mud and freezing cold. You can’t get better neighbors than that. They totally saved our tractor. We will have to work hard to repay them.
The rain kept on coming down for another three days. The creek continued to rise and went from being about eight feet wide and a foot deep to being two hundred feet wide and about eight feet deep. It covered the entire bottom. Nobody could drive in or out for over a week, but most folks had foot bridges that they could get to when the water started coming down a little. All the crossings had to be dug out and reworked before anybody could use them though. We were grateful that no one was hurt and the tractor was not ruined.

The flood waters never came over the furthest creek bank, the second flood bank further back. According to the neighbors, the only time it has done that was in the flood of fifty, something I hope to never see. It got houses that time. This time it just got hay land, and almost, our tractor. We learned a little bit more about respecting the creek and what good neighbors we had.

-Wendy lee, October 24, 2015 writing at, https://www.edgewisewoods.com