Ref: Town and Country Newspaper Pennsburg, Montgomery County, PA Saturday - July 9, 1904 FARMING IN YE OLDEN TIMES It is a frequent and true saying that one-half the world knows little of how the other half lives, and there are only a few veterans of farm life, that are still able to tell us the many incidents of the life on the farm in "Ye Olden Times." How many of the readers of Town and Country who have seen their first sunset on a farm, that do not wish time and again, that they could go back to their boyhood days and roam barefooted in the dusty country road or the narrow pasture lane, his head covered with his familiar old strawhat, whose brim was spoiled while destroying the nest of some bumble bees. Such innocent days of yore, when you and I lay cooing in our little red trundle bed, or roamed through the fields of ripened grain, when we heard the click of the old German scythe, cutting away Grandfather's clover during a mid-summer day. How our hearts would throb with gladness, if such a change could be made, and what we have left is only sweet remembrance of our own experience, or the hearsay of some old friends who are now spending their reclining years in our midst and who are still able to tell us, how they and their ancestors used to farm, fifty to one hundred years ago. Throughout the counties of Montgomery, Berks and Lehigh, farm veterans who have turned the eightieth milestone of their lives, are met now and then, but they are few indeed. Among such, there is probably not another couple throughout the entire settlement of the Pennsylvania Germans, who have had so varied an experience of farm life through a greater part of three score years and whose reminiscences are more entertaining, than those of Mr. William WEYAND and his wife Rebecca (picture), who live a few miles beyond Sassamansville, where they still show to their neighbors and friends that not only the young graduate of a farm school is able to raise good crops, but that the veteran of "Ye Good Old Days" is the young man's worthy competitor. Mr. and Mrs. WEYAND are one of the oldest farming couples in Montgomery county, who both are still actively engaged with the tillage of the soil, and what they and several others, whose experience has been just as varied, have experienced, is worth reproduction in clear type, as the tale those old timers unfold, is new to the younger generation, while it brings back the days of youth to those in the Perkiomen Valley whose hair are tinged with a silver lining. When those old veterans were boys and girls, they did not think of using an alarm clock with electrical appliances to boist them out of their sweet repose, but bright and early when the hands of the clock pointed to the figure four in the morning, they awoke and did their chores around the barn and after eating a five o'clock breakfast, they and a squad of fifteen to twenty men, each equipped with an old German scythe, started for the long narrow meadows and in this manner not only the meadow grass as cut, but all the clover and timothy were mowed in a similar manner. Oh, that sound still rings in my ear, when we boys stood alongside of that old familiar "dengel stouck" - an anvil of a peculiar shape, upon which with the aid of a 'dengel hummer' also a peculiar shaped hammer, we used to beat that old German scythe until we had the required thickness and the blade equipped with a sharpened edge. In that period the young man who understood to sharpen his German scythe was considered a perfect mower; as he, who did not understand to keep his scythe in a cutting condition was also unable to mow. The sharpening of the scythe was often done in the early morning and on rainy days and during such days you could not pass a farm house, where the sound of the anvil did not reverberate through your ears. Those old fashioned scythe are now and then seen on the older farms and nothwithstanding, that they belong to past generations, they are still considered of better quality and keener edge than the Yankee affair of an English scythe, where you have to buy a dozen, before you are able to get one that will be of good service, for more than a year or two. Now that the grass was cut, we did not have the means as you and I have today, to hitch our horse in the hay-tedder, hay-rake or hay-loader, but we simple grasped our rough and ready hands around an old hickory rake, such as are still made and used at the present time at such places where modern machinery is still found unpracticable. From morn till night we raked, men and women, and the sight of a score of us boys and girls in the fields was a merry sight indeed. It showed good fellowship and their was happiness all around. When it came to hauling the hay home, the women did the loading and the raking, while the older men used the forks and lifted the hay upon the hay wagons. When the unloading part had to be done, we had no modern ideas as you see in every barn, where with a twist and twirl and the power of a horse a load is unloaded into the haymow in five minutes, but with our brawny arms and hands; with the aid of forks we rolled one forkful after another into the haymow, while the little boys and girls tramped it down with their barefeet, now and then you heard a howl when ones toes came into close contact with thorns or another touched a hornet that slumbered in the hay. Haymaking was hardly over before the rye and wheat got a golden tinge, and those old fashioned sickles were brought into use which had been resting for a year on the garret, and many of those who today number their years of life among the eighties, know how their parents cut all their grain with this antiquated instrument. From ten to twenty men would enter the harvest field, each equipped with a sickle and in this manner all the grain was cut. Later however came the cradle and its advent was considered just as marvelous, as when the self-binder superseded the self-rake. At the time the cradle was swung to and fro, the cradlers were generally followed by women who tied the grain into sheaves, and we have still some of the older women among us, who, although past the four score mark, can tie a better sheaf than the young son or daughter of the farmers of today; who at this later period do not get a chance to learn the art on account of the exclusive use of the self binder. When the same was cut and tied into sheaves, it was put on shocks and left on the fields for a number of days and sometimes a week, if the weather looked favorable. No grain was cut in the morning and housed in the barn by twilight, as is now done, and of course you found no damaged flour in grandmothers' flourbin and her bread was the pride of all. At that time farmers had no idea of cutting their wheat one day and hauling the same to the mill the next day. Harvest time generally lasted four weeks, as then all farm machinery was unknown in this section of the country. Just fifty years ago, the farmers in this vicinity had an inventor in their very midst, who probably made the first machine to cut grain. It was built on the style where an extra man was needed to drop the grain, when enough was gathered for one sheaf. Just across the Montgomery county line, in Berks county, can yet be seen the foundation walls, where the first grain cutting machine was manufactured in Pennsylvania and in the Patent Office at Washington, can still be seen the model of Benjamin YEAKEL's first idea. So successful was the work done by this machine, that the demand for it became enormous, and during one single year one hundred and thirty of those machines were manufactured, giving employment to twenty-five persons the entire year. Each machine was sold for $100.00. For many years this grain cutting machine was found on nearly every farm in the upper end of Montgomery county and lower end of Lehigh, as well as some parts of Berks county. Soon other inventors brought forth new ideas and one pattern after another followed, till finally the selfbinder made itself welcome on nearly every farm. No YEAKEL machine is known to be in existence, and if there is still one stored away on some old farm, the writer would be pleased to hear from the party, so a photo could be secured of this invention of one of the early minds of genius of our early forefathers. Those heroes of these early days, although some of them still using the cradle on the hillside fields, would gladly revive those old days of cutting grain, not that it would be deemed a cheaper or better way, than what is now used, but to bring back old reminiscence, and to see who was still able to sharpen an old German scythe; use the sickle, or swing the cradle to and fro to perfection. The older farmers say the lessening of labor on the farms of our eastern counties of the State cannot be appreciated except by those, who have had experience on farms fifty or sixty years ago, that is, by a fair comparison of the present with the past.