The Baird Farmhouse

My great-grandfather, John Baird, built the family farmhouse in 1868 and moved in with his wife, Hannah, and three daughters. The house reportedly cost $1,807 to build. The original house consisted of a two-story Colonial-type front section, parallel to the road--with a living room and bedroom on the first floor and three bedrooms upstairs--and a single-story kitchen-dining room to the rear with a winding staircase up to an unfinished attic. A new room was added to the north side of the kitchen-dining room for Hannah’s parents when they moved from Pennsylvania in 1875 to live with John and Hannah.

After my great-grandfather’s death in April of 1888, his daughter Henrietta (my grandmother) and her husband, John Harris Baird, with their three-year-old son DeForest (my father) moved to the home farm. That same year the house was remodeled extensively by adding a second story to the back of the house (making two more bedrooms upstairs) and building a new kitchen and a long, screened side porch, plus a Colonial-style front porch. There were no further significant changes to the house for almost sixty years.

This was the house I grew up in. Although it was somewhat bigger and better than most farmhouses in the Prairie Home community at that time, it was quite primitive. There was no electricity, indoor toilet--or any running water other than two hand pumps at the kitchen sink. (Nearly all of our neighbors had to carry water in from an outside pump.) There was no central heat or insulation in the walls and no double-glazed windows. As you can imagine, that house could get really COLD in the winter and really HOT in the summer.

In the winter months we practically lived in two rooms--the kitchen and dining room--since these were the only rooms that were heated. That is, they were heated during the day and evening, but the fire in the stoves usually went out during the night. Dad would get up early and make fires in both stoves and the rest of the family would get up when those rooms started to warm up. We’d jump out of bed in our cold bedrooms and hurry downstairs and get dressed behind the heating stove in the dining room. Then we’d wash up using a wash basin in the kitchen sink. It isn’t just a figure of speech--we really did live in those two rooms.

Even in the summer most of our activities were in the kitchen and dining room, but in warm weather we made more use of the screen porch and living room, got dressed in our bedrooms, and were not nearly so “closed in” as in the winter.

The Kitchen Our big black Majestic cook stove dominated the kitchen. It served double duty; it not only cooked and baked, it heated the room in winter--and, unfortunately, often made the kitchen awfully hot in summer. And the “reservoir,” a four-gallon water tank on one end of the stove, was our source for warm water. You lifted the lid on the reservoir, dipped out as much warm water as you needed, and then went to the sink and pumped an equal amount of cold water to replace the warm water you had taken. For really hot water, there was always a big teakettle on the stove.

Regulating the temperature on an old-fashioned cook stove was a high art that is probably dying out. We used corn cobs as kindling to start a fire and to give a quick boost to a fire when it seemed to be dying down. Wood was a main fuel, but it wasn’t very dependable because some pieces burned much hotter than others--and you couldn’t always tell which was which when you put wood in. Coal was by far the most consistent fuel, but it also had its drawbacks. First, it was more expensive. Also, if you should happen to let the stove get too hot it was very hard to try to bring the temperature of a coal fire down. About all you could do if you had a cake in the oven, when it was getting too hot, was to open one of the lids on the back of the stove’s cooking surface and pray that this would decrease the “draw” from the chimney and thus reduce the heat. Sometimes this worked; sometimes it didn’t. (I doubt, however, that this had anything at all to do with the origin of the expression “the luck of the draw.”)

The sink was another vital area in the kitchen. The drain was to a field tile that ran down to the creek. There were two hand pumps; the right-hand pump delivered water from the deep well at the windmill, which was quite hard and had a rather high iron content. The left-hand pump brought water from the cistern, which caught runoff water from the roof and which often went dry during the summer. On the coldest winter nights the water pipes under the sink would sometimes freeze and Dad would have to thaw them with a blowtorch.

There was a pantry in the kitchen, partly under the back stairs. Cookies, crackers, flour and other foods were kept in metal boxes because we were never able to get rid of all the mice in the house, although we set mousetraps regularly. Thinking back on that pantry reminds me of the time Donald and John made a batch of root beer from Hires root beer extract they had ordered from a magazine ad. They didn’t have any bottles to put it in for aging, so they used quart mason jars. This worked fine until one hot day one of the jars exploded, sending glass shards and root beer all over the pantry. They had a big mess to clean up that day, but the root beer in the other jars tasted pretty good. We made other batches later, but were careful to keep close tabs on the aging process. There were no further explosions.

I suppose that almost everyone today would be appalled at the garbage disposal system we had back then--but it worked for us. A big seven-gallon bucket sat on the floor near the sink and we dumped all kinds of garbage in it--table scraps, moldy bread, a burnt batch of cookies, milk that had soured, dishwater, whatever. It was emptied twice a day----and fed to the hogs. They loved it. (And the bucket was carefully rinsed out before coming back inside.)

Since the kitchen was the only room in the house with any kind of a water supply, this was the room for washing up and for family baths. For wash-up you dipped water from the reservoir on the stove into a porcelain wash basin, took it to the kitchen sink and picked out your individual “wash rag” from among several squares cut from discarded long underwear material and washed up. On “bath night” a standard galvanized laundry tub was brought in from the wash house, filled with warm water, and we all took turns bathing with the youngest bathing first and progressing on up to the oldest--all in the same bath water. This may seem “gross” today, but back then it was “practical.” My, how times have changed our perspectives!

The Dining Room Although it is true that we ate most meals in the dining room, this is really sort of a misnomer--it should have been called the family room, because this is where we really lived! This is where Dad worked at his desk almost every night.. This is where we kids did our school homework around the big, round dining table after the supper dishes had been cleared. In the early days the table was lighted with an ordinary kerosene lamp. Later we had an Aladdin lamp which was much brighter. In 1939 we got electricity--but since we were trying hard to minimize the cost of the electric bill, there were only three 40-watt bulbs in the new electric fixture over the table--which gave barely more light than the old Aladdin lamp

Dad’s desk was in the northeast corner of the room and this was his domain. His handwriting was rather hard to read, but he was pretty good at his “hunt and peck” system of typing with his index fingers--and he wrote some really outstanding stuff. His original typewriter was an Oliver brand, which had only three rows of keys on the keyboard. Later he traded a nice pig for an up-to-date Woodstock model. He smoked his pipe, filled with Granger “Rough Cut” tobacco, and concentrated on his work, no matter what was going on elsewhere in the room.

Mother’s treadle sewing machine was in front of the north window, beside Dad’s desk. It was there that Mother spent many afternoons, mending our clothes--making do. She often said, “Life would be so simple if it weren’t for elbows and knees!” She was really good at making our clothes last a little longer. She was also an expert quilt maker and could sew very fine seams.

Every fall Dad would bring our Estate Heatrola heating stove in from the store room and set it up in the dining room. This was a rather modern stove for its day and was sometimes capable of “holding a fire all night.” This meant that after Dad had shaken down the ashes in the morning there would still be enough live coals to “catch” the corn cobs used to start a new fire. It also meant that the room would stay just a bit warmer than if the fire had gone out. (I’m sure there must be others somewhere, but I’m not aware of anyone besides myself who regularly thanks God for the convenience of modern automatic heat.)

There were seven doors in the dining room and there were seven of us, so on Christmas Eve we each hung a sock on a door knob for Santa to fill. One of those doors was to the back stairs. The first step came out into the room and this was the “time-out” step. For minor misbehavior we kids were made to “sit on the step and think about what you have done.”

The “Bathroom” This was a bathroom in name only. It had a clawfoot bathtub--but no running water. Since it was quite a job to carry buckets of water in to fill the tub, it was very seldom used for bathing. In fact it was usually referred to as the “toy room” because of a big wooden chest where we kept our toys.

In the fall before Mary Grace was born Dad ordered a chemical toilet from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. After he had installed it in the bathroom he called us boys aside and explained that the new toilet was to be reserved for Mother. “She hasn’t been feeling well lately, so this is to be a special convenience just for her.” We all agreed that this was a good idea.

(Many years later I was working for Sears in Chicago and learned that the catalog layout for that chemical toilet was considered a hilarious “inside joke.” It seems that the copywriter laid out a full-page banner headline touting SEARS HANDY INDOOR TOILET and for emphasis put each initial letter in red. It wasn’t until after the catalogs were printed and mailed out that the embarrassed catalog editors realized those red initial letters spelled out a prohibited vulgar word.) Anyway, our chemical toilet rusted out after a couple of years and was never replaced. A full-fledged bathroom was installed when the house was remodeled in 1946.

The Living Room There isn’t much for me to say about the living room or “front room”--we didn’t use it all that much while I was growing up. It had a very nice upright piano, a big, heavy, old-fashioned oak and leather davenport with matching chair and what we referred to as the “library table” and a big bookcase. I always loved to read and remember sometimes lying on the davenport and reading in the summer and at other times having fun “picking out” tunes with one finger on the piano, but otherwise I have few living room memories.

In some years, for special occasions, Dad would drag a “base burner” heating stove out of the “store room” to heat the living room in winter. I have no idea now as to how a base burner was different from other heating stoves of the era, but I remember that it had four little “isinglass” windows in the front where you could see the glow of the fire. (In my very, very limited current research on this subject, I find my dictionary states that isinglass is “a transparent, almost pure gelatin prepared from the air bladder of certain fishes.” That isn’t the same thing I refer to, although I’m pretty sure those windows were called isinglass. I seem to recall that these semi-transparent windows were made from a clear form of mica, which had a very high resistance to heat.

My earliest memory of the heated living room in winter was when I had just turned four years old and Uncle Walter and Aunt Louise were there for Christmas dinner. That year I got my first pair of tiny round-point scissors for Christmas and was fascinated to be able to cut out paper things with my very-own scissors. Later, I wanted to see how they would cut heavier material--so I cut a little hole in Uncle Walter’s pants. The scissors worked all right, but I didn’t get to try them out again for a month.

The Screen Porch We used the screen porch a lot in the summer. It was generally cooler on the porch than inside and it still afforded relief (mostly) from the hordes of flies that used to plague farms with lots of livestock. In summer we used a three-burner Perfection “oil stove” (it burned kerosene) on the porch for much of our cooking, since this helped a lot from keeping the kitchen from getting unbearably hot. But the oven for the oil stove (a removable unit that sat on top of two burners) never worked very well, so we had to heat up the kitchen when we wanted to bake.

There were a couple of old wicker rocking chairs on the porch--and we would bring out other chairs on the hottest days. There was an old white cupboard where some dishes were kept, but was often used for cold storage in the winter. There was a big wood box for storing firewood. But the thing used every day (twice a day) year-round was the milk/cream separator. And Paul and I used to have to take it apart and wash and dry it every day.

The Downstairs Bedroom The most memorable feature in the downstairs bedroom was the awful double bed. It had an ancient cotton mattress (ancient even in the 1930s), but the worst part was the worn-out bedsprings that made the mattress sag way down in the middle. You practically had to hold on to the side of the bed to keep from rolling right down into the middle. Another interesting thing about that iron bed was that it was painted a bright lilac color. Every spring the Wilkinson Lumber Company in Bethany printed a coupon in the Bethany Echo that could be turned in for a free half-pint of enamel paint. One year the featured color was lilac--and that’s the year the bed got painted.

This is the bedroom Mary Grace was “isolated” in during her first summer. This was the coolest room in the house and relatively free from flies, so the baby stayed here in her cradle most of the day while the rest of the family went about its work. However, we all visited with her as often as we could.

Mother and Dad used to switch their bedroom at the beginning of each season. In the summer they slept downstairs in the coolest bedroom and in winter they changed to the middle bedroom upstairs, which had a register in the floor--above the stove in the dining room--and thus was the only bedroom that had a little heat to take the edge off the cold. Dad said that this was for Mother’s benefit and we all thought that this was appropriate--even Donald and John, who then had to switch back and forth the “wrong way.”

The “Store Room” By the 1930s the Bairds had lived in the farmhouse for more than sixty years and, as we sometimes joked among ourselves, “nobody had ever thrown anything away.” So, we needed lots of room for storage. The store room was the single-story addition built in 1875 for great-grandmother Hannah’s parents, William and Eliza Foresman. It became a convenient storage room after their deaths. This is where the heating stoves went for the summer months, and where other seasonal items were stored. There must have been ten or twelve old-fashioned trunks stacked up in the back, each containing the personal effects from an ancestor. Mother knew what was in each one. “John Harris’ things are in that brown one and Henrietta’s wedding dress is in that smaller one on top.” A well-made tote contained Grampa Garman’s hand tools. The store room was chuck full of old things. An old oak chiffonier was used to store our “better” dishes and tableware--which had been handed down from previous generations. Other odd pieces of furniture were well past their prime, but “might be useful some day.” There was even a old horsehair sofa and matching chair up in the little attic that “John Harris and Henrietta had had shipped all the way from St. Louis.” (Horsehair furniture had long gone out of style--and nobody liked to sit on it anyway because the stiff bristles tended to be “pinchy.”)

The Upstairs Bedrooms There were five bedrooms upstairs--two good-sized ones and three small ones. Only the two larger rooms had closets, but the west bedroom, “Roger and Paul’s room,” had a rather handsome walnut wardrobe that Grampa Garman had made. All of the beds had heavy cotton mattresses and old “flat” springs that sagged in the middle.

Since there were no bathrooms in the house, every bedroom had a “chamber pot,” which we called a “hing.” I don’t know the origin of this word “hing,” but I would guess that Dad made it up to help avoid embarrassing moments when a young child might “say the wrong thing” in front of company. We always referred to urination as “tinkle,” and defecation as “grunt.” In any event, one person in each bedroom was expected to carry the hing out and empty it every morning.

“Aunt Mary’s room,” the northeast bedroom, was never slept in when I was young. Earlier Aunt Mary had used this room for visits back to the farm where she grew up, but after Aunt Ella broke her hip in 1919 Aunt Mary never again stayed overnight. So, the room became…another “store room.” Our out-of-season clothes were laid out on the bed. Boxes of Christmas decorations were stacked in a corner. There were boxes of old family photographs, boxes of old letters--some dating back to the days before postage stamps were used-- boxes of ribbons we had won at fairs, boxes of all kinds of family “treasures.”

For several years after Mother moved to Decatur (late 1957) and Harry Bennett moved into the home farmhouse, “Aunt Mary’s room” remained a storage room for Baird keepsakes. Then one nice summer afternoon Mother and all her children met at the farm to “clean out Aunt Mary’s room” so the Bennett family could use the room. At first it went well; there were a few things that obviously needed to be discarded so we built a fire to burn them. Then the process slowed down to a crawl as Mother went through boxes she hadn’t seen in years and wanted to reminisce about old times. After half an hour or so of very little progress, we moved Mother over to the north window, across the room from the door, “so you can see better,” and MaryGrace took up the post by the door to say what should be saved and what should be burned. The next couple of boxes contained Mary Grace’s hats and dresses from childhood, and without any hesitation she immediately pointed out toward the fire. She hadn’t liked the clothes she wore back then and had absolutely no interest in looking through those boxes again. By the end of the day we had set aside a dozen or so boxes to take back to Decatur for Mother to go through at her leisure, but everything else went out to the fire. Thus ended the day we “cleaned out Aunt Mary’s room.”