Chapter 184
6/20/2008 updated 11/16/09
Potato Farming
this spuds for you
Hayden Olmsted on the Virgil Farm 1930's
This is my potato picking partner. Yes, all of a sudden 80 years back seems like yesterday. Getting back to my tubers; they say it's OK to look back, as long as you don't stare. Had to dwell quite a bit on this chapter to stimulate those dormant brain cells. Really wanted to recall MY truck farming days, but it's kind of foggy as I was only about 7 when my older brother Dale and I helped Grandpa Hayden pick potatoes. Anyway (Tuesdays with...) Morrie says don't hide your life under a bushel. Here I am sitting on top of a bushel holding onto tipsy Cousin Lyle (now President Lyle), along with Bill, Gail, and Dale standing (Easter 1952). That was about the same time period we helped out and a few years after the main farm was sold off.
Above on the left are horses Jim & Kit with trusty dog Mex ready for spring planting. We used the modern steel wheeled tractor in the 50's. The planter has a rear hopper full of seed potatoes with a forward hopper presumably of lime or maybe fertilizer. On the steel seat is Grandpa's hat. Behind Grandpa up on top of the hillside is where the air strip was later constructed. Prior to the planting Gpa had used a 3 team hitch and plow to prepare the soil earlier in the spring. These seed potatoes were cut from spuds (as he usually called em) that had been in the potato cellar for a long period of time. They develop eyes that grow into tubers or roots, so you cut them into chunks that would each have an eye. The potato cellar was just up the road a piece past Goff's Barn. It was formed right into the ground with laid up stone walls and a little dome to keep the stored potatoes cold for long periods (and through the winter). I seem to recall using Matson's cellar for some storage too. Dale recalls using the open work potato shovel at the cellar, and I think we also used a potato fork or hoe in the fields to uncover hidden potatoes.
Grandpa and Grandma would drive their old 37-47 Ford pickup (seen in first minute of latest Sprockets to Rockets Video and featured in Ch 185) or 41 Chevy maybe with trailer up the side of the hay field to top of hill in picture and past Goeffs to the clearing on top of the hill. Gpa later gave the Chev to Dale which he chopped for a hot rod on our dirt track. We might be inside the vehicle or in a trailer hanging on. I distinctly remember the whine of that transmission in low gear and the steepness of the side hill, wondering if we would tip over. Dale and I enjoyed a ride in the back of that pickup truck on the open highway returning from a swim in Cayuga Lake on at least one occasion.
GPa would attach the potato digger or spinner to the tractor to dig up a row. I remember the Potato Bug or beetles on the leaves and the super ugly hornworm larvae wriggling around. They were not a friend of the farmer. Gpa sprayed to get rid of em (earlier horsepower days). There were also many earthworms uncovered in the rich dark and sandy soil that would attract birds in for a feast.
We got 10 cents a bushel to pick the spuds uncovered by the digger. Think Gma would hand punch a little note card for each bushel picked. We put them into wooden crates (like I was sitting on) that Gpa made by hand from hardwoods at his saw mill. If you look closely at photo on Ch 158 you can catch a glimpse of the potatoes and their crates on the wagon under the burlap potato bags. They were simple rough cut flat slats with square piece in the corners nailed together with a tack hammer. You needed a firm grip or else suffer splinters in your palms. I think I could drag the 60 pound crate of spuds but Grandma would lift them into the wagon behind the tractor. Farm work for youngins is a normal thing in the country. Here is Dad at 6 in 1926 helping Uncle Bud build our barn silo. Silo going up. Silo complete. Believe Gma had water or lemonade in a jug up on the field when the sun was hot. Sometimes we'd eat the raw potatoes, I though they were pretty tasty when you're hungry. If the spud was growing near the surface not completely cover by soil, it would get green and sunburned with a bitter taste, if not downright poisonous. It was a great feeling to be doing something important. Coming back down we might unload the crates directly to the potato cellar or put them in burlap bags. Dale remembers getting paid coins later at Gma's and put them into the round Copenhagen tobacco snuff box. (Gpa often had a chaw under his lip.) Dale's most vivid memory was of running up the road toward home, falling down, skinning his hands and knees with the coins scattering on the ground.
The fun part was delivering to town. We'd have the crates in the back of the PU truck or towed on the homemade trailer made from the rear end of whatever junk car was laying around. When we got to the back alley ways from restaurant to bar we could be in the trailer. I recall the hum of the exhaust fan, the smell of cooked food, french-fries and grease. Gpa would go in a back creeky screen door and the spring would slap it shut. On occasion we'd go in the bar where we'd get a coke, but Gpa might get a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser or sometimes a glass of wine. " Your Grandma doesn't need to hear about this", I might be advised as he put his large strong fleshy hand on my shoulder or neck and give a loving but firm squeeze to make me writhe a little.
Historical note: In the Olmsted Farm Ledger for 1919 there were 161 bushels of potatoes sold at $1 each. Output increased greatly by the 1930 Census where 1582 Bu harvested (from 5 1/2 acres). On the whole 135 Acre farm a variety of other farm products were noted including corn, oats, wheat, timothy hay, sawlogs, firewood, fence posts, eggs, maple syrup, milk, cows, hogs, horses, chickens, and 9 ducks.
NAZI POW's in Virgil 1944-45
There were nearly a half million enemy soldiers from Italy, Japan, and Germany detained in prison camps in the US during WW2. Eighty percent were German. There were 18 POW camps in NY. Grandpa Hayden left the farm to fight Germany in WW1 . Picked up influenza at Camp Pike, Arkansas and was sick as a dog at at American Expeditionary Force at Winchester England Company G Casual Battalion(or Le Harve France). Dad had returned on a ship with German POWs during WW2 after bombing runs in Germany. He was met by German Prisoners of War laborers who were picking potatoes on the Olmsted farm, eating at the dinner table, and getting paid wages. Meanwhile Uncle Nelson had suffered severe hardship in a German POW camp! Nevertheless, Dad had to drive them back and forth to the camp to get the POWS. Used Leo McGuiness for security and his big car; didn't know if they would attack.
Aunt Carol believed it to be the Geneva labor camp located at the Sampson Air Base/ Seneca Army Depot. I had thought Dad pointed out the camp while deer hunting in the Newfield and Danby Forest areas below Ithaca. 15 miles south of Ithaca there was a Top Secret POW Camp near Van Etten called the Idea Factory that let out German POWs to work on local farms. It is the same site known as Cornell's Arnot Forest (pg 29) on Jackson Hollow Road that took in 200 German Wehrmacht POWs from the Normandy Invasion. One family's story confirms the secret camp's location about 15 miles from their home. The facility mailing address was considered Fort Niagara out by Buffalo to keep it's true location hidden. Some radical Nazis did find out the identity and locations of some anti-Nazi prisoners and carried out death threats at various camps. This book describes the program (pg 81) to win the hearts and minds of the Germans. An official Army Document (pg 15) unclassified in 1995 notes the desired National German POW Newspaper printed at Van Etten as part of the Intellectual Diversion Program. (Kev, the Jap balloon attacks on West Coast are documented at the end.)
At the Research Library of SUNY Albany, the Henrich Ehrmann POW premier collection yielded the following images with my spy cam: (1) Van Etten established (2) Re-Education of Enemy POWs (3) The "Factory" at Van Etten There was a warning: "This document contains information affecting the national defense within the meaning of the Espionage Act, 50 USC, 31 and 32 as amended. It's transmission or the revelation of its contents in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law. Restricted." I think its OK to disregard, since several books do. I was looking for specific references to Van Etten or Virgil in the post war letters of the POWs from Germany but came up empty. Ehrmann had previously escaped from Nazi imprisonment in Europe, a college professor in NY, a primary instructor for the POWs when the camp was transferred to Forts Kearny, Getty, & Wetherill, RI and Fort Eustis,VA and did follow up research.
At the same time Private Ryan was seeing fellow American soldiers being mowed down and blown to bits by the German Army on the beaches of Normandy, the captured German POWs were being shipped across the Atlantic to live in comfortable barracks in America and to work on a farm in Virgil. The compassionate and respectful treatment was intended to yield reciprocal treatment for our imprisoned soldiers in Germany. The re-education program was initiated by the State Dept with the Dept of War to help win the peace, an/or spread democracy in post war Europe. It probably helped some and some writers believe it contributed to bringing down the Berlin wall and melting the cold war with the USSR. There were many POWs who wanted to remain in the US as opposed to returning to Germany. It just seems like the fallout from WW2 will continue on and on.
In summary, the Olmsted farm probably didn't get POWs from Van Etten as they were studying most of the time. But it's possible. There was another POW camp at Slaterville Springs east of Ithaca as well as at Horseheads to the South. History always a little murky.
misc references for POWs :
the secret reeducation program (Van Etten) (pg 23) best brief 2 page description
the secret re-education program more indepth 7 page description
POW slide shows how good they had it, second one by Coe College prof
POW publication "Neue Welt" Fort Devens, MA
book: idea factory at Van Etten (pg 128)