A Self-Sufficient Farm in Armstrong County, PA

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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This story is from Mary Frymoyer, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.

In the 30s, I can remember walking with my mom about a mile through the last bit of virgin forest in Armstrong County, Pa., to our mailbox. They were all dirt roads then.  Soon just before getting to the mailbox, I heard the putter-putt of the mailman’s Model A Ford coming up the hollow. As he stopped I heard “peep peep” from mom’s order of 100 chicks. At 13, I was helping her dress 60 fryers, by hand, of her annual 100 chicks.

At 4 years old I remember picking yellow blossoms for Gram to make her dandelion wine and picking pennyroyal for some medicinal tea. At that time the butchering was of at least 300-pound hogs. It was done near the big bake oven outside of the summerhouse and a three-log tripod and pulley was used to pull the scalded hogs out of the barrel to put on a table, to scrape the bristle hair off the skin of the hog. I remember that place for both my grandfathers died there, within 30 days of each other that year, pulling those hogs up out of the barrel. My younger brother never saw his grandparents and me only once. Those big hogs were for lard; 200-pound hogs of today wouldn’t do enough.

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