The Grain Trains
7/14/2012
Back in the 70’s I lived on a rural backroad in what was called North West Central West Virginia. No lie, even the radio stations gave the weather reports by referring to that moniker. Basically it was a long gravel road following the creek called Bunnels Run. There were maybe 15 or so houses along the 8 mile stretch of road and a lot of folks had to cross the creek to get to their houses and barns. I lived on the roadside of the creek but we were building a house way up on the hill on the other side, but that is a different story.
Most of the folks living on the creek grew huge gardens and put up a lot of food for the winter. Many had a couple of pigs and chickens for eggs. Some of them had milk cows or in our case milk goats. Some folks had enough bottom land to put up hay and keep some beef cows as well. Some of them had enough bottom land to have a pretty good beef operation going, maybe 30 to 40 cows and their calves. Only one family grew much corn and that was because they had large open land that was not as prone to flooding. Bunnells Run was capable of doing some serious flooding pretty often and created numerous difficulties. Whenever it rained for longer than a day, the folks living on the far side had to park their cars along the road and walk in over their foot bridges. Sometimes the water was too deep to even reach the foot bridges and they had to either stay home or stay gone.
Everybody had outside jobs, even the beef farmers. The better paying jobs were way over in St. Marys and Parkersburg, along the Ohio River. It was 45 miles one way but necessary if you wanted a decent house and vehicle. Folks with the local jobs were definitely not doing as well as the ones who worked down on the River.
People were pretty neighborly to each other, helping out in the hay, getting each others’ tractors unstuck when they got mired in the mud, helping pull calves and load cattle for sale. Produce got traded back and forth all the time without involving money which no one could spare anyway. We worked in the hay, bucking bales and were paid in beef at butchering time. We would help each other butcher hogs and make apple butter for a small share to take home. Folks looked out for each other and found odd jobs to pass around sometimes. And folks spent enough time rocking on their porches to appreciate what they had most of the time.
Then came the massive sales of US grain to Russia. The U.S. was shipping all kinds of corn and wheat to Russia, who had enlarged their livestock numbers without growing enough grain to feed them. This drove the price of grain up, which was good for the large producers out in the Midwest, but it also made feed down at the local feed store too high to afford. This in turn caused too much livestock to be dumped on the market because small farmers could not afford to buy grain for them. People needed a certain amount of corn to fatten the beef and the hogs properly and they couldn’t even get it. It was all being shipped to Russia. Train cars full of corn were rolling through West Virginia all day and night there for awhile, on their way to the shipping ports.
So some folks who happened to have farms with the rail lines running through them started to get active. Every now and then a train would derail where it ran through a farm that happened to be so far back from any road that it was hard to find the way there. Calls would go out on the 4-party phone lines and all the neighbors and their families and friends would gather all of their saved feed sacks load up their shovels and grain scoops and head over there. At the farm gate would be guys and guns making sure no railroad people got in. The Sherriff did not show up for a few days. Everyone filled their sacks full of corn, loaded their pick ups and wagons as high as they could carry and carried it home to the barn. The market price of hogs and cows plummeted due to so many folks selling them early rather than paying the exorbitant grain prices so the small family growers canned , froze and cured a lot of pork and beef that year, enough to last for 2-3 winters. Nothing went to waste and nobody was stingy either. It was us against them. Them being the government types who thought it a good idea to take care of others at the expense of folks here at home. Good folks who work hard and deserve better. The Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz was all for US farmers increasing production to make up the shortfall in U.S. grain stores that these massive sales had caused. He wanted farms to “plant fence row to fence row” and “get big or get out … adapt or die,” which for hill farmers in West Virginia would mean death to the family homestead. He cut the set aside program that paid farmers to stop growing grain in erosion and flooding prone fields, from 25 million acres in 1972 to 7.4 million acres in ’73. This was an abrupt change to small farm income sources, especially for low income folks needing it for seed money each year and it was a major set back for land conservation.
Nobody ever got hurt too bad when the trains derailed and I don’t know what methods were used to accomplish it. The trains generally traveled pretty slow through the hills. It was probably expensive to pick the cars back up and get them on the tracks but I suspect there was insurance for such events. It tore the farms up more than anything with all the heavy equipment coming and going. Local folks only had a few days to get in there and clean up what they could before the railroad managed to make their way in and put a stop to the looting but I don’t believe there were ever any lawsuits over it. I think the railroad guys were mostly like us and didn’t really want to see all that grain leave the country when we needed it.
*In the summer of 1972, the Soviets shook up the grain market when it hid from the world the fact that their grain harvest was in trouble. Then they made secret deals with the five biggest American grain companies for 24.2 million tons of grain worth almost $1.5 billion in 1972 dollars – $7.6 billion in 2009 dollars.
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe70s/money_02.html
-Wendy Maddox
edgewisewoods.com