Some Observations from the Hill

by Hub Brown Every now and then I get to thinking of the former resident here. Billy Welch lived a good share of his life here all alone. If I think I need a cup of instant coffee, I draw a cup of water, stick it in the microwave, heat it, add the coffee and a little milk, and it's ready to drink. If Billy felt the need of a coffee during the warmer weather, for if the weather was cold there would always be a fire in the kitchen stove with a tea kettle of hot water. If there weren't a fire, he would go to the wood shed pick up the remnant of a chestnut fence post and with his single bitted axe split off some fine slivers, pick up a few pieces of light stove wood, go in and start a fire just at one end of the fire box. With a copper bottomed teakettle he could have hot water very shortly. 

 When we first moved on the Hill, we used to help him with the haying. Back then he did everything with pitchforks for he had no ropes or pulleys or anything to use horsepower to help put the hay up in the barn. This didn't suit Gram so she started going to auction sales and picking up some equipment. 

 The first hayfork she bought was a single harpoon. This was a steel shaft with a pointed end which you shoved down through a pile of hay on the wagon. If the hay wasn't long and mixed up sometimes there would be very little held on to the shaft by the trigger at the bottom of the shaft which was released by a little lever and a lite line called a trip rope at the top of the fork. 

 His hay at that time was made up of a lot of wild grass and that type of fork didn't work very well. So next she bought a double harpoon fork which worked a lot better but without any track in the peak of the barn, that summer we just sort of dragged the hay off the wagon and up in the mow.

 So next we bought steel track and hangers that were fastened to the rafters at the peak of the barn. Right over where the wagonload of hay would be on the barn floor there was a piece instell called the frog. When you pulled a big forkfull of hay off the wagon it went straight up till it hit the frog. Then the pulley locked into a little car that ran on the double sided track and away it went toward whichever end of the barn you had the other pulley fastened. When unloading a wagon load of hay, the man on the wagon held the trip rope and when the forkload of hay was where he or the men in the mow wanted it he would pull on the rope and the hay would drop there.

 In the years before this, if he didn't have a hired man Billy would hitch his team to the wagon, pick up his pet pitchfork and put on a pretty respectable load of hay alone. He had a certain pattern that he always followed so that when he got to the barn and pitched the hay off, he always knew where each forkful went. He could fill a little mow right next to the wagon by himself, but in the larger mows he had to have help.

 Churning the butter and taking it to town always interrupted his farming, but that was about the only way he made any money.