Growing up in Bothwell:
Recollections of Farrell Summers,
November 2002
Tennie Thompson came to America from Denmark when she was thirteen. She lived by the railroad tracks in Brigham City for two years with a midwife to pay back her forty-dollar immigration fee. When calls for the midwife’s services came in the middle of the night, young Tennie’s job was to hitch up the horse and buggy or put them away. Tennie feared the transients that hung around the railroad tracks, especially when she worked outside in the middle of the night.
When Tennie’s family moved to Bothwell several years later, they lived in a dugout on the west hills. She worked at the Roche Ranch in Thatcher where she helped cook for the ranch hands. One day she was up on the hill looking for a cow, and James Summers came by on his horse. Eventually, Tennie and James married and had eight children: Maynard, John R., Marion, Norma, LaVera, Orion, Zelda, and Farrell. Farrell was the last child born in the family home, located where Doug and Roger Newman have a heifer corral today on the east side of the Bothwell Canal.
Henry and Mary Newman were the neighbors across the canal, living in a green, wood-framed home. A little farther north of the Newmans lived the Johnsons. Gospel Johnson was a polygamist: one wife lived across the Bothwell Canal north of the Newmans, and the other lived in a red brick house through the field on the Little Line Canal. An apricot orchard grew on the west side of the canal, surrounding the Newmans and the two Johnson houses. The canal was lined with tall poplar trees. The Johnsons were old people by the time Farrell came along. Farrell was in the kitchen one summer day when his mother was canning peaches. Old Mrs. Johnson would come over frequently to visit, “You know, Tennie, I got so tired of Gospel, having him around, I sent him to live with the other wife for awhile.” The Johnsons had children but they were raised by the time Farrell came along.
As a child, Farrell and Dad went out to the granary once a month to fill grain sacks. Farrell held the sacks while Dad filled them with grain to take to town and trade for kerosene for the lamps and some flour to make bread. Another source of income was the cream from the cows. The milk was put in the separator: the cream was sold, and the milk was fed to the calves and hogs. Every Saturday, Mother churned butter. She had a metal churn about ten inches in diameter that stood about two-and-a-half-feet tall. Farrell took his turn plunging until the butter came out of the cream. Mother would also bake twelve loaves of bread per week.
Mother made all Farrell’s shirts when he started going to district school in Bothwell. Bib overalls were bought as well as a pair of scout shoes that cost a quarter. Scout shoes had about five-inch uppers and were laced. The soles were made of something other than rubber. That was before much was done with rubber. By the time school got out, the shoes were so worn, the children were practically barefoot, and Farrell stayed barefoot until school started again in the fall.
In 1927, Farrell started school in Bothwell. He walked every day, joining Dallas Stokes on his way. The power company had dug holes for the power poles so electricity could come to Bothwell, but the project was slowed because of rain. Water completely covered the dirt road. The two little boys wore rubber boots and splashed along in the barrow pit. Suddenly, Farrell sank down till the water covered his head. He came up gasping and grabbed a nearby survey stake. Dallas asked, “What were you doing down there anyway?” The holes were over six-feet deep and Farrell had hit bottom. He was walking along and just stepped into the hole.
When the electricity finally got to Bothwell, the community didn’t light up. The change was slow. People never had fancy lighting fixtures in their homes. Everett Roche wired the house. The old house was made of adobe. The walls were finished with lathe and plastered over. There were no wall switches or plugs. A wire was run through the attic and threaded through a hole in the ceiling. A light bulb was attached. It could be turned off and on by pulling a chain.
Another childhood memory was helping Dad on the dry farm by Blind Springs. Dad put Farrell on the weeder while he did some fencing. The weeder was a rod weeder, one of the first ones made. It had a wooden frame and a square rod that went into the ground and turned the opposite way to pull the weeds out. It had a big board with a plank on it. The farther the driver was to the back of the plank, the deeper the weeder. Farrell was not even heavy enough to put the square rod into the ground, so Dad sacked a sack of dirt, put it on the plank, and said, “Get up there and sit down.” Then he handed Farrell the reins, “Go ahead.” Farrell drove six head of horses on the weeder while his dad fixed the fence. The little boy thought this was the height of living.
Farrell recalls that his childhood was a laid back time in his life. About the only hurrying he ever did was tending the animals. Dad believed, “You get up and you go out and you take care of the animals, then you come back in and you start thinking about having something for yourself to eat, but the animals eat first because they make our living.” That is something Farrell still reminds his grandchildren of today.
During the Depression, Mother would save the crusts and all the dry bread for Saturday morning breakfast. She had a steamer of some kind, just a couple of pans, one was perforated. She’d put the bread in there and it would become soft. Then she’d made milk gravy. Once in a while, if they had a pig, there would be some bacon in the gravy.
Tommy Adams from Thatcher worked in the Federal Land Bank during the Depression. Even though things were bad, the Federal Land Bank never foreclosed on a person. Wheat was $0.28/bushel. They just put the indebtedness on the end of the contract. When prosperity came back, the debts were paid off. Thanks to the way the Federal Land Bank was managed, not a single farmer in the whole valley lost his farm. Later, Harry Drew, who lived on the farm now run by Calvin and James Bingham, moved to Tremonton where he established a name for himself working for the farmers at the Federal Land Bank.
The house was on a twenty-acre parcel of land by the canal. The Summerses also ran an 80-acre parcel where Buster Marble now lives. An additional 120 acres were dry farmed by Blind Springs. Dad had thirteen head of big workhorses and two saddle horses. He reckoned if he had two six-horse hitches going, he had one horse resting in case another horse got sore shoulders. Six head of horses pulled five sections of harrow day after day after day. There would be a line from each outside horse going back to a person on the saddle horse driving them. Dad believed if a horse worked hard for nine hours a day, the animal had to have something good to eat besides grass. He always kept his horses fed good. If one had a sore shoulder, it was laid off until it got better. The horses would get a drink in the morning, then water was hauled up to the farm for drinking. The men hauled their drinking water in canvas water bags. One-thousand gallons of water would last seven head of horses about four days working all day long in the summer heat. The Summerses had a 1,000 gallon water wagon which they would replenish at A. L. Cook’s farm south of their farm. Cooks had a good well and a windmill with a 1,500-gallon water tank (across the road a little west of Rindlisbachers now). Cooks owned one whole section up there.
It would take a month to plow fifty acres with horses. Six head of horses were harnessed to a two-bottom plow that only took two feet per swathe. In a good day, four acres could be plowed. Rather than ride a horse that had worked all day, Dad insisted that the boys walked home from the Blind Springs Ranch. It is called Blind Springs because a blind spring used to come out of a ravine up west of A.L. Cooks’ section, on the south side of the freeway. Across the road was a house and barn owned by Adolph Harris. The barn still stands. The house and corral were torn down when the freeway came through. Also destroyed was one of the best springs there was.
Farrell’s brothers owned a big combine drawn by ten head of horses. Two horses were hitched on each side of the tongue. Between these two horses would be a doubletree harnessed to two other pairs of horses. These six horses would be the lead. Four additional horses were in back on the tongue. The header stuck out to the side so the horses would not tromp the grain except on the first round. The horses pulled the outfit, but a gas motor ran the draper canvas, a belt that took the grain and threshed it. The draper canvas went into the cylinder, which was whirling fast and knocked all the grains out of the head. Then the straw went over sieves, bouncing the chaff out on the ground.
It took four men to operate the combine. One man drove the combine. One man raised and lowered the cutter bar. Farrell put the sacks on. Grain was never handled in bulk at all. Les Stokes, DeLon’s dad, sat on the side where there was a chute like a slippery slide. It held five sacks of wheat, all individually sewn by Les. When the chute got full, Les would pull a rope and the sacks would slide to the ground. The farmer would pick up the 120 pound-sacks of grain with wagons and take them to the grain bin where they were dumped.
Les sat on the combine and sewed sacks together all the time. One day he bent over and split his pants out. On the spot, he took his pants off, sat on the grain sacks, and sewed them back up with a hefty roll as big as an adult’s thumb, just like he sewed the grain sacks.
Dad, the three oldest sons, and Farrell would custom cut grain in the area. The Summerses would cut Fred Eggli’s grain first because it would ripen earlier up on the hill. The combine was a big, old cumbersome thing with steel wheels three-feet wide. It made such a racket as the horses drug it up the gravel road, it could be heard for miles. The combine was set up and ready to go, and Fred still had not come out of the house. Dad sent Farrell to the door saying, “Farrell, go over to Mr. Eggli's. Tell him we’re here to cut grain, and we need some sacks.”
Farrell went to the door and knocked, wondering why he had to tell Mr. Eggli the combine was in the field. It was so noisy, the whole neighborhood knew. Farrell told Mr. Eggli, “Dad and my brothers are out here ready to cut grain, and they need some sacks.”
“Jiminy Christmas! Sneaking around like a thief in the night! I’ll be right out with them.” When he brought the sacks to Dad, Mr. Eggli apologized, “Just didn’t hear you coming, Jim, just didn’t hear you coming.” The Summerses looked at the big combine on metal wheels pulled by ten horses and thought Mr. Eggli was the lucky one if he didn’t hear it coming down the road. Mr. Eggli was a pretty nice old man. He was a German and sometimes had trouble with his words. His trademark phrase was, “Jiminy Christmas!”
Wheat was handled in bulk when tractors began to pull the combine; it was not a self-propelled unit. The bin could hold twenty-five bushel of grain and the whole operation could be run by one man. The new combines and a tractor could do twice as much as ten horses and four men, plus all the sack lifting was eliminated.
Machines sped up the work, but there was still a lot of work to do. The Nimuras were a Japanese family who lived in the home where Bob and Alta Thayer live. Tommy, Cuzzie, and Masa are the family members Farrell can remember. Farrell picked tomatoes, hauled sugar beets, and harvested onions for the Nimuras. A lot of the children of Bothwell would pull the onions and lay them in windrows until the tops dried. Then they topped and sacked them for ten cents per sack. The Nimuras were wonderful neighbors.
Sugar beets were the biggest cash crop. Hay was also a big crop. Farrell ran the derrick horse while his Dad and brothers put the hay in. His father would sell the haystacks to sheep men. Sheep were kept on the farm during the wintertime. They had a herder and everything. When the snow got over two feet deep, the Summers men would load the hay on a sleigh and feed the sheep in the fields.
Winters in Farrell’s youth were a lot harsher than they are now. When the first snow came, the cars were parked in the shed for the winter. Oftentimes James and Tennie and the neighbors across the canal, Henry and Mary Newman, would go to town together. The Newmans used to cross the frozen canal and the foursome would cut through the fields in the bob sleigh. Most of the roads were never kept up during the winter, and the snow was usually higher than the posts and fences.
However, the road was kept open on the east side of the canal between Wallace Anderson’s and Roscoe Anderson’s corners. A ditcher was tied to the side of the runners on the bob sleigh and pulled by horses to clear a path on the canal bank for the rural delivery mail carrier, Ray Holdaway.
For the children, there was always plenty of snow to cut into blocks to make an igloo, though Farrell never could figure out how to make a roof that would not collapse. With the canal in front of the house, there was lots of ice-skating. Water was kept in the canal year around because it was the water source for the livestock and people, too. The canal would freeze solid enough for cattle and men to walk across the top; a hole was chopped so cattle could drink.
Dad rigged up a water system for his family right on the edge of the canal. He had a cement box about the size of a card table. He had a pipe coming from the canal into the box which was filled with gravel and charcoal to filter the water. From there the water went under the road into a big cistern close to the house. On top of the cistern was a big pitcher pump. After the dirt settled, the water wasn’t too bad. Once a year, Dad would lower Farrell into the cistern where he would scrub it with a big broom. However, even fresh out of the canal, the water was not too bad.