The Warriners started farming in Greenwood around the time of the Civil War.
While this picture is not of the Warriners, it depicts how farming was done in the mid-1800s. Lots of back-breaking work.
Farming and country life in general changed tremendously from the 1860s when the Warriners came to Greenwood and the present. At first it was pretty much as the Amish live today, only more primitive. At the time I was born (1943) there was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no running water until the deep well was drilled at the barn so the cows would not have to be turned out twice daily to go to the spring. That was done in anticipation of electricity but in the meantime the pump was operated with a gasoline engine. Up until then water in the house was supplied by a pitcher pump in the kitchen which connected to a dug well in the side yard and another hand operated pump attached to a driven well in the front yard. Clothes were washed by hand. (My other grandmother at some juncture had a gasoline operated washing machine, richly deserved as she had ten children, although that must have been a late acquisition since Mother talked a lot about bending over a washboard.)
Milk was cooled in ten-gallon cans immersed in a tank of ice-water. There was a small building, walls insulated with sawdust where blocks of ice were stored. My memory of the ice-house was that little collection of boards that were falling apart with sawdust trickling out between the cracks. It had been abandoned in favor of running a steady stream of the fifty-degree water from the deep well through the tanks in the milk-house. That continued until well after electricity arrived, but eventually the milk plant insisted on mechanical cooling. That was still done in cans until bulk tank coolers came in use in the late 1950’s, I helped lay the concrete blocks for the new milk house that would accommodate the first of two bulk tanks and eventually the pipeline milker. From hand milking with his mother in 1923 to milking with bucket milkers powered with vacuum from a gasoline driven pump to, eventually, machines that piped the milk directly from the cow to the cooling tank. Dad experienced it all.
The same sort of progression took place in the crops field. The grain cradle, flail and fanning mill gave way to the grain binder and threshing machine, then to the “combine” which cut, threshed and cleaned the grain right in the field. Likewise, hay first was cut with a scythe, then a horse-drawn mower, (I actually mowed hay with Beauty and Nancy when I was 13) and ultimately a tractor powered mower-conditioner. The hay was originally put up in “haycocks”-small stacks- in the field by hand with pitchforks, likewise loaded on wagons to be hauled to the barn. The next progression was the horse-drawn rake and hay-loader which was pulled behind the wagon, elevating the raked hay up delivering it to a man with a pitchfork who stacked it. The loaded wagon was then backed into the second story of the barn where a grapple fork was lowered from the ridgepole of the barn roof, set into the stacked hay and pulled up by means of pulleys and horse-power, moved on a track over the hay-mow and dumped. Then the man who had stacked it on the wagon got to re-stack it in the mow. Now of course we have balers and all sorts of mechanical handling devices.
Tilling, and planting were similarly mechanized. Silage harvest went from the “binder” that cut and tied corn stalks into bundles that were loaded manually onto wagons, then run through a stationary chopper that blew the corn up into the silo. Nowadays the corn is chopped in the field and even silos are becoming a thing of the past, since dairies have become so large that the silage is stored horizontally in bunkers.
One of the major features of rural life in the early days was “changing works”. When it was harvest time for oats or corn the neighborhood men went from farm to farm, often with community owned equipment to haul and chop corn silage or haul and thresh the oats with a stationary machine. Part of the big day was feeding the ‘thrashers’. I remember Grandma and Mother cooking all morning to put on a big meal for the men at noon. There was always lots to eat and pie. Leonard Hollenbeck always insisted on having his pie before the meal, “Just to be sure I have room for it.”