The men who settled in Aurora County could not have survived without the hard work and willing cooperation of the wives they brought with them. These women put food on the table by planting gardens, raising chickens, milking cows, separating milk, churning butter, gathering wild fruit, rendering lard, baking bread, canning and drying fresh produce for winter use – all while cooking three meals every day without electricity or running water. The women birthed and cared for the children, sewed and mended clothing, kept the house clean, washed the clothes on washday, worked in the fields when needed, and doctored family members with homemade remedies – often while pregnant or nursing the baby that came almost every year.
History tell us a lot about the men – their farming methods, their roles as businessmen, town leaders and politicians – but very little about life from a woman’s point of view. Women’s diaries and memoirs, when available, can help tell their stories. Aurora County history is enriched by the carefully crafted memoirs of Ella Todd Wilson, a former Plankinton resident. In the late 1950s, she mailed several fascinating handwritten memoirs to her great-niece, Adeline Van Genderen, the editor of the South Dakota Mail. In great detail, Ella chronicles life on the prairie from 1887, when she was an 8-year-old child emigrating from Scotland with her mother, to 1943, when she and Mr. Wilson moved further west.
Ella was 24 years old when she and her husband took over her aunt’s homestead in Hopper Township. They worked this farm together from 1905 to 1911. In this excerpt, occasionally edited for clarity, she describes the work required of women as the men gathered during harvest season to thresh the grain. In her story, Ella demonstrates a woman’s resourcefulness when challenged by unexpected situations and abrupt decisions:
The early threshing machines were horse powered and threshing (separating the grain from the chaff) was a neighborhood project. It took many men, who swarmed in at noon dusty, thirsty, and hungry. They washed outside the kitchen door from a barrel of water and wiped dry on a row of roller towels.
There were often twenty men to feed and their capacity was enormous. All things had to be planned so that everything was ready at the stroke of twelve. Great quantities of meat, potatoes, gravy, coffee, vegetables and pie had to be not only ready, but on the table, with great plates of bread scattered here and there and plenty of butter, pickles and cole slaw. Cucumbers and onion in vinegar were most appreciated to cut the dust. The neighbors usually brought dishes. Few could set so many places.
Often, all the men couldn’t sit down at once, so all had to be in readiness for the second table. After that, there was a third table of cooks and children. And after that, the dishwashing and washing out of roller towels the men had used. One could usually find a dry spot if one rolled it round far enough. Many of the men stayed for supper, eating just as much.
Thrashing time often had its tragedies in the kitchen, and one learned that it was best to drain a large kettle of potatoes in a dishpan, where they could be retrieved. No potatoes was a tragedy, indeed, and the kettles were both heavy and hot. Once, when I had two babies, one a little over two and the other nine months, I made pumpkin pies. When I took them from the oven, one flipped. It was almost 11 o’clock. I had a few crabapples, luckily, so I hurriedly made a crust, washed and quartered them, cut out the cores and sliced, skin and all, as thinly as I could. It came out of the oven shortly before the men came in, so there was hot apple pie for those who preferred it. And they said it was good.
When my husband came in, reviewed the table, and saw everything wasn’t yet dished up, he said, ‘Now hurry, hurry!’ I retorted, ‘That’s what I had been doing!’ I’d give telling a man to hurry! I felt, at that moment, the world would go on quite well, even if the last dish weren’t on the table!
It was bad enough to cook a thresher dinner, with help, and have it eaten, but, once, I prepared one all alone, on the third or fourth day of threshing. It was all ready to dish, table set, when the threshers pulled over to Corker’s, who had nothing ready, which was probably worse. Men! Mrs. Corker and her girls got a hasty meal together, while I wondered what I was to do with brown stewed chicken, a small mountain of potatoes, and all the rest of the stuff.
Few of us had any refrigeration, other than the root cellar (an earthen cellar beneath the house used for storing food) and my husband was to be gone for the next two weeks eating somebody else’s cooking. The boys fared well that day on potatoes, cole slaw, sliced tomatoes and a lot more. I wasn’t going to throw out that chicken, so I canned it, in complete ignorance of the dangers from canning chicken that way. After the thrashing season we ate one of those two-quart jars every week and lived.
Fascinating stories like Ella’s illustrate how women’s resourcefulness (though sometimes underappreciated) was critical to the well being of the family and community during these early years of prairie life in Aurora County.
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It Happened Right Here: Harvest Time for Women, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, September 5, 2013.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 