Today I was working at the Ring Farm today, as I do every day I don’t have class and every weekend. There were 300 kids and then adults, a few families and a couple of walk-ins. It was a mad house and order was soon lost as the “responsible adults” with the 300 kids weren’t very organised. Most of the families stuck together in a group, but there was one that was just the 4 of them; 2 adult women and child sisters. There were 5 of us women doing “classes” and two men running the tractors. The owner’s brother was on the tower in the corn maze keeping an eye on that.
As three of us sat at concessions waiting to see who was doing what, I was approached by the family of 4 who wanted to go through the cotton maze and corn maze. They had just gotten off the hay wagon. So I volunteered and we headed to the cotton patch. I gave my short spiel about the stages of growth, etcetera, then decided to go with them through the cotton maze.
As we walked, I talked with the adults, I learned that their names were Nancy and Amy and they came from Franklin County. The girls were Kristen and Tori. Nancy was their grandmother, and Amy was their great-grandmother. There were three generations of the family wandering in the cotton maze. Nancy’s son (the girls’ father) had to work so he couldn’t make it (though Amy thought he was playing golf). In the corn maze Tori said that their father would be taking two days off and their mother three. I asked about they were farming families and they were, though just for awhile. Amy’s father grew cotton, hay, and corn. Amy’s husband grew corn, clover, and something else…I can’t quite remember. He did that for awhile before landing a construction job with TDOT.
I learned several things i didn’t know. I had only heard about the cotton gin in my history book. Coming from Long Island, the “rawest” cotton I’d ever seen was the cotton balls I bought at the grocery. I didn’t know a cotton plant till I was wandering through the cotton patch maze last year. I kinda looked like the caveman that saw fire for the first time. Anyway, I didn’t realise that the cotton gin only separated the cotton seeds from the cotton. Until 1950 somthing, cotton was picked by hand and put into sacks. Amy said she could only pick about 100 pounds of cotton a day but others picked 200-300 pounds per day. The sacks were weighed and payment was contingent upon weight and how clean the cotton was. By clean, they mean cotton and seeds with little to no bits of plant or bulb mixed in.
I also learned about clover. I’d seen clover mixed in with grass and all but never paid much attention to it. Apparently, farmers plant clover crops during a fields off season because they are rich in nitrogen. Then at the end of the season, the clovers are turned into the earth and it helps the earth restore the nutrients used the previous season. Clover is NOT what we find in cloves (cigarettes). There are actually cloves that are grown in tropical climates.
After we finished wandering through the cotton patch, we talked about corn and then started the corn maze. The girls wanted me to stay with them through the maze. I decided to do the maze since there was nothing else to do. The maze is cut out as Rutherford County, TN. The major communities are marked with signs that have the history and a number. We were doing ok, until we got to the back left corner. We were writing the numbers next to the stars that mark where the communities are in the maze. We got off track somehow.
All in all, we found a little over half the communities and the girls were ready to move on. They were tired and it was rather hot in the maze with the sun beating down on us. We all dressed for the cold and suffered for it. They learned about the history of some of the communities, as did I, and they told me some additional information that wasn’t on the signs. I never knew that Sam Davis was a child who was hung as a spy during the Civil War. I just always assumed (and we all know what happens when you do that) that Sam Davis was a grown man who did something great. Eaglesville was named because a freakishly large Eagle was killed in the hills behind the town.
It truly is amazing what you learn when you shut your mouth and open your ears.
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