The year was 1936 when we bought the Jersey Cow. I don’t think I was ever told where the money came from to buy Bessie or how much she cost. I always suspect my maternal grandparents supplied some or all of the required cash. Good cows cost upwards of 30 dollars and Bessie was a good cow. 30 dollars was a month’s income for most working people in the area. Bessie was just fresh which is a big plus when buying a cow.
In the area where we lived there were a large number of small farms, averaging 300 acres per farm. Most farms kept a heard of 10 to 12 head of dairy cows and sold milk to the local Creamery, which is what we called the milk processors of the day. The size of the heard depended on how much pasture the farm had available and how much hay and grain could be raised for winter feed. The most important limitation of heard size was the number of hands available to do the milking. It was not unusual to walk into a barn at milking time and see a kid 8 or 9 years old, of either gender, with their forehead pressed against a cow’s flank, pulling teats. All the milking was done by hand and was a MUST to be done twice a day. If you didn’t milk regularly your cows went dry. So no vacation for the farmer unless he could hire the milking done and no one in our area had the where-with-all to do that. The herds were almost completely Jersey or Guernsey, depending on the whim of the farmer, because of the rich butter fat. The farmer was paid for the fat content of the milk as well as volume. Occasionally you would see a Holstein mixed in the heard to increase the volume. A Holstein produces a lot more milk that the other two varieties but the butter fat content is low. The dairies changed the buying practices sometime in the late 40’s and began to pay only for volume so the Jersey and Guernsey have almost disappeared from the land, replaced by the black and white, Holstein. In many cases the sale of milk was the only cash income the farmer had. Some few had large orchards as well as cows and sold fruit in the fall for a one time cash crop income.
We had moved to the rented farm house in 1935 after my father got a job with the WPA. There was a large area in back of the house we used for a vegetable garden. There were a large number of fruit trees on the property and since the landlord had a large orchard elsewhere, we were welcome to the entire crop of fruit. There were about 35 or 40 acres of pasture available and though the landlord ran several heifers on the property we were allowed to pasture Bessie on that land as well. There was a ramshackle barn that we could use, a spring house, a small chicken coop and the every present outdoor privy that made up the out buildings. All this for only ten dollars rent a month.
I had all sorts of chores to do back then because everyone in the family had to help survive. One of my tasks was to find Bessie each evening, and bring her to the barn for milking, make sure she had clean straw in her stall and hay in her manger. In winter, to take an ax and break the ice in the pasture spring each morning and evening so she could drink. My mother did the milking and always called the cow Elizabeth. In the morning there was the stall to clean and haul overnight leavings to the manure pile in back of the barn. The cow really made a big difference in our diet and added hugely to the quality of the table. We even made ice cream occasionally!
The month after we bought the cow my mother bought a gallon glass churn and a wooded bowl with paddle from the Montgomery Ward mail order catalog. The wooden paddle and bowl was for processing butter. They made a 7 cent error in their favor on the order and when they discovered it fell all over them selves with letters of apology and a five dollar credit on the next order. Back then, companies worried a lot about their reputation for honesty, which is short of hard to believe looking at business practices nowadays. Talked to your Banker lately?
Churning was added to my many tasks. There was a crank on the churn that turned the metal paddles inside. It was a never ending surprise to me when the butter broke. Churning time depended on a lot of outside factors like temperature and air pressure. It always seemed like a miracle to me when the butter suddenly appeared. My mother would gather the butter into the wooden bowl, work salt into it with the paddle, press it into a wooden mold that was suppose to equal a pound. The buttermilk was poured into a crock, covered with a piece of slate and kept in the spring run for cooling. There was nothing better on a hot summer day than a tall glass of buttermilk with a pinch of salt added. A pleasure only country folk could enjoy. The commercial stuff on the market today that passes for buttermilk is a very bad joke.
From the lyrics of, “The Little brown Jug”.
"If I had a cow that gave good milk, I’d dress her in the finest silk, feed her on the choicest hay and milk her forty times a day."