Talk: Pioneer reminiscences and fence building by the moon

Collected by Irene Carlisle Transcribed by Nathaniel Lucy Told by James M. Walden Busch, Arkansas Reel 140 Talk: Pioneer Reminiscences and Fence Building by the Moon James M. Walden: . . . My father settled that farm in 1856. He was from Tennessee. Well he came from Tennessee to Missouri and from Missouri down to here. But he made his first crop over there in 1857 and that's been in our family from that day on. Of course that boy wouldn't sell it now for no price. And I remember we didn't have nothing, just the old rail fences. And I lived back in that day and time where there was no such a thing as a cook stove in this country nowhere. Irene Carlisle: . . . cook? Walden: Well the fireplace, the old Dutch oven. That was all the cooking. Either outside in the summertime or in the fireplace in the summer in those old Dutch ovens and the old iron pots. Cooked the beans and meats . . . Carlisle: Right over the fireplace? Walden: Yeah. And I saw him, he would stir up the piece of ground and he'd always wait. He'd have the boys, there was five of us boys, two girls, but there was two of us boys too young to do any work but the others did when they wasn't in school. And he would always have the rails made, he usually kept one to two hired hands, and he'd have rails made and they'd be hauled and strung out on this fence row and every weed bush thing was cut. But he would always wait til the new moon. And then once in a great while though, he'd have to build one on a fuller moon. And they'll pick up rock the size of a brick or maybe large again and they'd put on the end of that pole. Well I have seen those that was did that a-way on a fuller moon on the fall of the year that half of that pole would be buried down in the dirt. But on the new of the moon, they just laid . . . fence row he used a stakes. And he would set his stakes where his was going to go. They'd be just as straight as if your eyes could set those stakes Well he'd take a stake according to the length of your fence rail. If your fence rail was eight foot long, he'd use a three foot stake. And if it was a ten foot fence rail, he'd use a three and a half foot stake. And he would hold that stake up in sight it with to stakes back there and he'd put it to the ground. Well that's where one corner would be, right there where he crossed that stake. Then he'd come down to the next corner down here or half way to that corner I mean and then he'd guide that stake and he laid that stake over here. And that cross was made over there. That's the reason your rail fences was zigzag. And that was the way he . . .Funding for digitization provided by the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Happy Hollow Foundation