Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1910 - 1914
The Harrises didn't do much farming but just had stock and gardens for their own use. In the woods back of their place there was a little brook, and a gravel bank out of which you could dig fossil scallop shells. They had the first electric lights that I remember. Their windmill was arranged to charge up a bank of wet batteries that supplied the house and barn with electricity. (The batteries used in 1912 consisted of a thick, straight-sided, round glass jar. There was a metal grid in the bottom with a rod leading out for one terminal and a heavy metal crow-foot hanging down from the rim of the jar. The jar, of course, was filled with sulphuric acid solution).
We lived off the farm as much as possible. Father ground up his own peanuts for peanut butter and his own corn for cornbread. He used mostly white corn for the latter, not yellow, and the cornbread was flavored with bacon grease and sprinkled with pork cracklings, a trick mother learned from the colored people. It was so good that I never got enough of it. The corner pieces always had the most crust and, I thought, were the sweetest, so I always tried to get them reserved for myself. There was no thought of refrigeration, but they managed by putting things down in brine in crocks, drying, smoking, or canning in Mason jars. In some ways we lived high by today's standards. Such things as oysters and fish, especially fresh-caught shad (with its roe) from the James River would often be peddled to the door by part-time fishermen. Never since have I had baked shad half as good as that even in the finest restaurant. The oysters were right out of the river and mother made an oyster stew, or scalloped or fried them, or sometimes we ate them raw with a little horseradish. When father opened them there often were baby crabs inside the shell and we kids clamored for these since we looked upon them as you do raisins in buns. They were good in the stew also.
Another luxury was mushrooms. At the right time of the year father would go out in the pasture early in the morning and come back with his hat full of the most luscious ones you can imagine. Mother always sauteed them in butter and they just couldn't have been better. Father always had a vegetable garden and he often experimented with unusual things, or different varieties of common things. For example, he wasn't satisfied with one kind of potato, but tried many new varieties that the neighbors had never heard of. We had yellow, pear-shaped, and shuck tomatoes. We also had "salsify", or oyster plant, and many other things that made our diet much more interesting than any of the other farms around Williamsburg.
Even in 1912 father bought food from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Flour and sugar came by freight in barrels. I well remember a flour barrel standing in the middle of the kitchen and father with a hammer taking out the nails of the top two hoops and then cautiously knocking the hoops up off the top. Once as we children were all standing around as close as we could get he did that and the barrel head suddenly became loose, dropped down into the flour and we all got a cloud of flour in our faces. Syrup came in gallon cans. Once in a while, for a real treat, there would be a wooden box of assorted cookies. Of course most of our clothing and the small utensils for use on the farm came from there. Father never seemed to be in anything but overalls in those days, and you could spot him from afar because he alone always wore japanese turtle-shaped hats that were woven of very light bamboo strips and raised above the head the way hard-hats are today. They were the most sensible headgear possible, but we never saw them on anyone else and never found out how he got started wearing them or his source of supply. Maybe it was Sears Roebuck too.