Smithfield  and the  Smithfield  Jail

as told by Curtis Strode to Joe Helle

To the old codgers on Main Street it was the Calaboose. Whenever an errant citizen who had been an unwilling guest of this well-known but unpopular establishment was called on to explain his being out of circulation, he had to 'fess up to being thrown in the Calaboose. I do not recall any of the fair sex having been incarcerated there, but in these days of Women's Lib and "equal opportunity" it could happen.

The original Calaboose was built sometime in the late 1800's of native wood and ended up as a chicken coop in the south part of the village. It was destroyed by fire, but our memory is vague as to the fate of the chickens. (If the reader wonders why chickens were kept in the Calaboose, Joe, it was because they ran afowl of the law." -- Curtis Strode)

That original Calaboose was probably on a rock foundation, Popular at that time and more secure to escape. The present building was put up in the early 1900's when there was a concrete block factory in the village. The new Calaboose was used mostly as a sobering-up establishment for the local rounders whose capacity for firewater was greater than their ability to hold it, and for occasional visitors from a neighboring town who transgressed the local ordinances. The Calaboose got to be known from coast to coast as "a good place to stay." With the coming of better roads to the county jail, there has been no need for this hostel for unwilling occupants and it has been very much neglected in recent times.

There really wasn't much excitement in our small village during its early history. Some of the more arousing moments came from an occasional runaway team or a dog fight, or the occupant of the Calaboose. One local hero -- a sorry victim of too much firewater and an unwelcome guest  provided the local loafers with some excitement. They got a heavy plank and rocked the old Calaboose. Someone yelled, "We'll get you out, Ed, they're planting dynamite under it; hang on, and you'll go out with it!" The story has been told many times with considerable variance.

Brock Chapel - United Brethren Church

The United Brethren Church was formed in 1849 and held its first meetings in the Brock School northeast of Smithfield. Later the congregation built the Brock Chapel across the road from the schoolhouse. In 1912 the congregation decided to move into Smithfield dedicating their new church 15 June 1913.23 That building with an addition built in the 1960's continues to be a place of worship today for those of the United Methodist Faith, the result of a merger between the United Brethren and Methodist Faiths.

Smithfield Methodist Church

The Methodists organized in 1839 meeting first in private homes. Later they met in a log house built for that purpose and then in nearby school houses until a permanent site was constructed on South Main Street in Smithfield. After the fire in the 1940's, the structure was rebuilt and used until the two faiths merged. The Nazarene congregation now uses it.

Mt. Pleasant Christian Church

This church was organized in 1860 and the congregation met in the neighborhood schoolhouse until a church building was erected in 1862. Built of logs cut from buckeye trees, it was commonly known as the "Buckeye Church."

The Buckeye Cemetery is located nearby the Mt. Pleasant Church site and is the final resting-place for many of the descendants of Frederick and Katharine.

In the early decades of the 1900's, each church sponsored an annual Sunday School picnic. They were big events attracting participants from all the surrounding communities. Buckeye held its picnic on Put Creek, the Smithfield band providing excitement and strawberry pop on ice in a big tub. Homemade ice cream and fried chicken were standard fare. The Sunday School picnics held by the Smithfield churches were held in a big grove of white oaks north of Aten Hollow.

Tragedy at Buckeye

A tragedy occurred in this community 20 Mar. 1877. On his way home from school, eight - year - old Jimmie Couch strayed from the other children and got lost. The neighbors searched but he was not found until the next morning lying dead upon the bank of Spoon River just above Buckeye Ferry (Whites Ferry)

Whites Ferry

There is no record of when this ferry was opened, but it was in use by 1877. The bridge which replaced the ferry was built about 1913. Fred Grey recalls: "Around the turn of the century there was a ferry at this location which I suppose operated until the bridge was built. I always wondered how it operated.

When I was a youngster there was a store there which sat on stilts about ten feet in the air with stairs leading up to it. I don't know what happened to it, maybe a flood got high enough to get it. On weekends was the busy time for this store as all the farmers gathered there for picnics and just togethers; even people from the surrounding towns came. There was a little beach on the river where us kids could play."

How a Ferry Worked

"A steel cable was stretched tightly across the river. The boat was suspended below the cable for lighter cables or chains attached to pulleys which ran on the main cable, and worked by winches, or more properly capstans, on the upper side of the boat near the ends. When the right cable was shortened and the left cable lengthened, the boat would move to the right. To reverse the direction of movement, the left cable would be shortened and the right cable lengthened. The ferry-man also had a tough piece of wood several feet long and about the size of a 2 x 4, with a notch at one end. By placing the notch on the cable and pulling back it would bind on the cable, and the ferryman could assist the current if it became necessary. The boat at Whites Ferry is said to have measured about 12 x 30 feet."

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     The harvesting of grain as I have known it by Joe Helle

The separator (threshing machine) to the right of the steam engine below had no self-feeder, a later development. The man standing in front of the separator would cut the twines on the bundles of grain and feed the grain through. I question whether or not there was a weigher on the machine, but a blower had been added by this time. Dad would use this machine for threshing; then once the grain harvesting season was over, he would use the engine in his sawmill. He later traded the 18 H. P. Garr Scott for a 20 H. P. Reeves. We loved that Reeves Engine. It had everything you could ask for in a steam engine. It was easy to fire up in the morning. In fact, I was to later own a Reeves engine on my own.

A good threshing run, the co-operative effort of a group of farmers, was no trouble with such good machinery and the larger, newer separator. We wanted to have eight bundlewagons, four pitchers, enough grain haulers with wagons to haul the grain to the bins as a wagon load was threshed, a separator man, an engineer, a water boy -- my job

--and all the assorted small fry who were always part of the excitement around a threshing machine.

After we got a good run threshed out, perhaps then we could pick up a smaller run where the going was not so good. Then, the time came when the good runs were disappearing. A company or a partnership of five or more farmers would purchase their own outfit. As a result, the larger threshermen such as my father ran into a lot of competition. I knew of larger threshermen with as many as 18 outfits in the harvest fields. This did not last very long.

The threshing run as I knew it began in the 1880's and had its heyday from 1900-1925. In 1928, I worked in the harvest fields of North Dakota. There, the thresherman came in with his own crews. The farmer was expected to take care of his grain. If there were no wagons or trucks, we allowed the grain to drop onto the ground.  The thresherman had three crews: one working, one coming and one going. I went with the crew going home; another story.

Before long, tractors came into vogue, along with smaller separators. The steam engine in the harvest fields was on the way out. For several years, usable separators were shipped to the Dakotas. The turn in agriculture to soybeans pushed the separator out of the Midwest and made a home for combines. Hindsight is better than foresight. Looking backward should give us the signal we need to go forward without making the mistakes of the past. Using that as a guide, I will try to pick up some of the errors that have been very close to us all.

As a boy, I went with Dad to the John M. Brant Company of Bushnell, a large dealer in steam engines and separators of that era. John loved to surround himself with threshermen and tell a few of his off-colored stories to these prize customers. One of his tales stayed with me and remains a pertinent lesson to all of us today. "Why, John," someone told him, "in five years they won't be making steam engines." John told him that in five years there would still be two things:

the production of steam engines and d--n fools like the speaker. Predictions aside, the steam engine went fast and took a lot of oldtime threshermen with it. (Are we as blind to the future as John and his loyal band of followers? Was the giant, financially - troubled International Harvester Company of the 1970's as short - sighted as the John M. Brant Company and the threshermen of yesterday? Did IH drink too much of the sweet wine of success? Had they studied the cycles of change with new generations and new products, would the Il-I story have been a different one for me and my family?)

Reviewing harvesting, there is a good record from the McCormick Reaper to the present. Each generation or era has shown change -- up to the self-propelled giants of today, one of which I had the privilege of riding in last summer. Only one operator is required to harvest the 80 bushels of wheat per acre, twice the 40 bushel yield of my boyhood. Conveniences include an air-conditioned cab and a row of monitors, which I did not understand, to alert the operator to problems that might develop in the range Out of sight, smell, or sound. So different was the harvesting crew of my boyhood and the still larger crews of the Canadian wheatfields with twelve wagons and tour workers to pitch the bundles of grain into the separator. We never used the larger separators here; they were too cumbersome for the many narrow bridges and small fields. Yet, here was this man with his self-propelled machine harvesting more grain more efficiently in one day than any crew of my day.

We had three kinds of time on a threshing run. There were standard and daylight savings times -- daylight savings time being unpopular with the threshermen. Work had to wait for the dew to go off or the rain to dry. Come 6:00 p.m. and it was the middle of the workday. And, there was Hired-man Time. I remember it as being slow in the morning and fast in the afternoon. This was not very popular with the Old-Time threshermen either.

Mealtimes were the highlight of the day. The task of washing up was accomplished in the yard under a shade tree. Supplied were tubs of water, soap (usually homemade lye soap), towels, and plenty of horseplay. There was much to be learned from a threshing crew that wasn't taught in school or in books. I'm still a little sorry for those good scholars who got their sole education from books and missed out on the experience of following a threshing crew. Book - learnin' ain't what it took to keep the steam up and the separator busy. You had to take your turn and be there when needed. And more... you had to get along with a lot of people just itchin' to take you down a peg.

The workers on the threshing crew consumed vast quantities of food. Those threshermen dinners will carry a legacy down through the ages. Some places fed good, and some.... There were three shifts at the tables. I, as working man (or was I still a boy?) usually rated a seat at the first table unless a tank of water held me up. At the third table, your eating companions were the cooks, the small fry, and always those few stragglers who preferred to eat their dinner with the womenfolk. We had one character I still marvel at. He ate and ate down to the third table. He would say that he kept getting up hungry because they guyed him so. He was a little man, but he must have been hollow clear down to his shoes.

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Meanwhile, Back in the House...

by Mable (Herrick) Hobo

One of the best times at Grandma's -- "Lizzie" (Helle) Orwig -- was threshing time. Uncle Charlie Bolon and his big boys always came to thresh. The neighbors helped each other. It was a busy, hot time. An exciting time for the youngsters but a lot of work for the farm wives. Grandma and I used to do all we could before the day. On threshing day we were up at dawn, about 4:00 a.m. standard time, getting the other things done. We had made the cake the day before but the pies were done that morning before time to put the big beef roast into the oven. Sometimes Grandma would have fried chicken and chicken and noodles, but Grandpa preferred her to have roast beef and would drive into Cuba to pick up the groceries she needed. At least he wanted the threshers fed well and the men all knew when they did the Orwig threshing they would have a good meal. Some places this was not so, as Grandpa knew when it was his turn to return help. In later years he usually sent Dad (Rueben Herrick), Uncle Frank (Orwig) or Uncle Milt (Orwig) -- whoever was available.

There was a long "veranda" across the front of the "new house" (northwest of Cuba) and a screened in porch across the back, except the corner where the entrance and the buttery (pantry) were. For the threshers' dinner the table was extended almost the full length of this porch. Aunt Bertha (Helle) Bolon would come to help Grandma, Mother (Catherine Orwig Herrick) and sometimes one of my aunts. I usually set the table, poured the iced tea or lemonade, chipped the ice, etc., while the ladies mashed potatoes, made cole slaw, gravy, cut cake and pie. I thought I was grown up when Grandma started letting me cut the bread, cake, pie -- and the Longhorn cheese.

A typical menu for threshing day was: roast beef, brown gravy, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, green beans, peas, corn (usually creamed and the men really liked it the way Grandma made it), cucumber pickles, beet pickles, celery, bread, butter, jam, iced tea and lemonade (threshers always seemed to be thirsty), yellow or spice cake and pie. Lemon pie was one of my favorites. Grandma baked the tilling in the crust. Not the lemon meringue type. (I wonder if anyone has her recipe for this? Sure wish I had copied some of her recipes, like her Lace Biscuits. I have a recipe for them but they do not come out like hers did!)

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