Taylor Philips Family farm

0:00:01	Introduction
0:00:40	Growing up in Burke County
0:02:18	Milling Wheat at the Gristmill
0:03:03	Threshing Wheat Conservation
0:04:06	Transition to Combining
04:50	Farming Operations Without Equipment
0:05:46	Transition in Farming Technology
0:06:31	Silage
0:07:15	Education and Careers
0:08:01	Family Reunions
0:09:33	Story About Sister Being on “Strike It Rich”
0:10:25	Transportation Before Cars
0:12:35	Religious Values
0:13:30	Story About Buying a Car and Family Members
0:15:44	Family Work in Farming
0:16:12	Raising Animals
0:18:51	Changing Agricultural Practices
0:21:01	Family Farming and Businesses
0:21:55	Farming with Horses
0:22:54	Slow Industrialization Process on Family Farm
0:25:42	Crop Rotation, Tillage and Irrigation
0:26:40	Gardening/Farming for Providing Food
0:27:42	Cash Crops
0:28:45	Selling Corn
0:29:49	Farming Collaborations
0:31:47	Corn Shuckings
0:33:04	Government Intervention
0:34:11	His Family’s Farm Today
0:37:14	Chicken Houses
0:38:42	Overall Challenges and Difficulties
0:39:25	Sustainability Across Crops
0:40:39	Typical Day
0:41:51	Passed Down Knowledge
0:42:36	Favorite Traditions
0:44:17	Favorite Memory
0:45:05	How Farming Has Changed Over Time
0:47:19	Farming and its Importance in American Society
0:48:03	Conclusion

[0:00:01]

>>BM: Hi, this is Bethany Mace, and I’m sitting here today with Phillip and Bernice Taylor. Today is November 20th, 2024, and here we’re in Connelly Springs, Burke County, North Carolina. So today we’re going to explore Phillip’s relationship with farming and him growing up in Burke County. And so yeah, let’s get started, Phillip.

So, I just want to kind of ask you what year were you born in and your age, if that’s okay?

>>PT: Born 3/10/44. I’m 80 years old.

>>BM: And have you always lived in Burke County?

>>PT: Yep.

[00:0:00:40]

>>BM: So, what was it like growing up here?

>><span style=”font-weight: 400″PT: You know, back in our younger days we were in a place where electricity and water, running water, wasn’t there yet. So, this storm last week, or a couple weeks ago, really brought the reality of being thankful for electricity and running water. But anyhow, we and just about everybody else in those days had milk cows. I mean, either they bought milk from their neighbors but everybody about had a milk cow. And that was a time frame when people were getting away from farming with horses. But there were a few people around in our neighborhood (phone rings) bought tractors. We farmed all ours with horses and we raised everything we eat, practically.

Well, in the fall of the year, daddy would buy a bag of pinto beans, but we raised, and again, it was not uncommon for us to have a hundred half-gallon jars of blackberries that we picked, you know, and canned So we did a lot of canning, and we raised our own wheat, raised our own corn. We raised corn to make cornmeal, to make cornbread. And we raised our wheat to make flour and we’d bring it over. There used to be a gristmill on Old Mill Road right over here, just before you cross the Henry River Bridge. It was an old mill, grist mill up there. (ice machine noise) And we’d hitch up the wagon anyhow and we’d take it out to Avery Hildebrand.

John Hildebrand’s grandpa run that place for a while and then Richard Bradshaw and then when they finally closed it up, and then we didn’t have the, we didn’t combine the wheat. When we got our wheat in, you’d cut it with a reaper and shack it in the fields and go cut some corn and make like a teepee on top of it, keep the water off of it so it’d dry. And then there’d be thrashers come over and your, I guess it’d be your great grandfather Oliver Lowman. He had a threshing machine. And they’d, they’d bring it on, they’d bring it on your place. And he would, you know, thresh your wheat, and he’d separate the wheat from the straw.

He’d build a straw in a big old bale, and the hay would, the wheat would come out in a sack on the other side. Somebody’d be up there in a little old stand, they’d be bagging the wheat. But then when they quit making, quit, closed the grist mill, people had to go different routes. So, then they moved to what they called a combine. And the last year my dad raised wheat was, I don’t know, probably in the mid-sixties. He cut wheat, had it combined with a combiner. Those combines have really been innovated and are a real piece of machinery now. As some of them, you know, get this fellow over here, he’ll get 18 rows at a time. And so, so he couldn’t get it ground, so he ended up feeding that to the hogs and the chickens.

[00:0:05:00]

>>PT: And so, our farm, we farmed, I guess it was 40 acres over there. And we raised corn. We, you know, nowadays they spray corn, but in those days you plowed them about, you’d plow a field about three or four times for you. And what you’d got, you’d call, lay it by, you’d plow it the last time. And so, my dad, he still worked with those horses. He died in 1980 and he still farmed with those horses in ’79 (1979). So, he wouldn’t let a tractor on his place.

>> BM: Really?

>>PT:He said, pack the ground. So, then after all my brothers and sisters got through school and the last two were in college, Maynard bought a tractor. He finally let us on the field to bale his hay cause there wasn’t nobody there to haul the hay. So, you know, it was, and see our uncle right above us, he, when he come out of the Navy, he started a dairy farm, his land bordered ours right there. And so, we spent a whole lot of time up there in the summer hauling hay for him too, just like we did it at home and I think he was milking around 25, 30 cows and he made silage.

[0:06:31]

And so, the way they made silage when it started back then, I know it’s a wholly different setup now, but they had people that had hoes cut off about so long and sharpen them and go through the field and cut it down, put it on a trailer. And then they hauled it over there to a silo. Those two silos still standing up there at my uncle’s place. And he had what he called a cutter blower. And you’d have somebody feeding that corn in there and he’d cut it and blow it way out. And the silo was about 30 feet tall, I guess. And he’d blow it in there until it’d get full, you know. But, but yeah, farming, farming has changed. So, then all my brothers and sisters, except the two oldest and myself, went to schools of higher learning. I had to learn mine the hard way, not on the job. (Interviewer laughs) But you know, there were nurses and teachers and Ronnie, my brother, just younger than I am, he taught school for 42 years. I did construction work for 40 years. So, you see pictures of these cranes around here, that’s what that’s about.

But, you know, as we all started going our different ways from the home where, and so then we, we started having reunions. But it’s on the 4th of July. It’s still on the 4th of July. But my dad still raised gardens like he had all over this area. You know, he could make a garden grow now. And so, everybody would, when they left after the reunion, they’d leave with their car loaded down with, you know, potatoes and okra and cabbage and apples, whatever. We had a few fruit trees. To go back to when we were at home, and we didn’t have electric lights and the running water and so when this storm come through, uh, we at least lit two of those lamps, oil lamps in there.

[0:09:33]

And so, I said just bring that over here and set it on the nightstand. And I grabbed me a piece of paper and I’m going to read it. Ain’t no way you can read by an oil lamp. But that’s what we had when we were in that house. And my sister went to Wilson College and she was going to New York to be on a show on television called “Strike It Rich”. Now, that “Strike It Rich” show, she won 500. (Interviewee and Interviewer laughs). But anyhow, she won that and so people called in and gave lumber and, you know, different building material, and so the house that my sister lives in over here that you go up Taylor Road, the first one on the right, sits up there on the hill, that’s the one that was built from the beginnings of that show on “Strike It Rich” on television. And so, we were in a time frame where there wasn’t many cars either. I guess some people had cars, but everybody didn’t have cars, but we didn’t have one. So, we had to walk to church and we had a path that went, the old house set across the road from where this one is now. It’s set over where them barns is at. So, we walked to church and we’d walk through and come out. We had two ways. We could come out up here and come out on the Hoyle Road right there beside that the local service, uh, local station over at the local store.

>>BT: The salvage store.

>>BM: Oh. Yeah.

[0:12:35/span>]

>>PT: We’d come out right there and then walk on over to the church, and then there was another one that come through, down by this farm, Romers Farm, the one that had the dairy farm, walk down through it. He had a trail through there and come out about where John Hildebrand lives down there, somewhere right along there. I don’t know just exactly where it’s been so long since I’ve been down in there, but yeah. And we’d walk to church over there and I always, back then, I always wondered, I said, especially when we was having revival and, and you’d have, you know, it’d be dark when you got out and you didn’t have lights everywhere like you got today, you know. I mean, when it was dark, it was dark. And so, I often wondered why somebody wouldn’t stop and pick us up in the dark over there. And then I got to thinking one day, well, who in the world already got their car full of people to stop and pick up 10 or 11 more? But we were took to church.

We were taught to love people and love one another. And, and I think that’s where we’re missing it in our, you know. Somehow or another, there’s so many people in our church, this is in my lifetime, that, you know, they get out and they go to college and then it, it just don’t seem like church is important to them. And that’s the time they need it the most. Cause you’re making a decision on what you’re going to do the rest of your life and you probably choose your mate. And so, you know, there’s a need for people. You know, I’ve told people if your parents drove you to church when you was growing up, you ought to thank them. (Interviewee and Interviewer laugh).

Oh me, but we live, you know, we, that house that I was talking about that they built when my sister went up to New York, that, that house is. Uh, we moved in that house in, I’m thinking, 1956, and that’s a big deal for us, cause we was all in that one room mansion, and I was gonna show you a picture of it, I might find it directly, I don’t know, but anyhow, several of us when we moved over to that house, graduated high school. When I was a senior in high school, I bought me a, I went down to Northwestern Bank in Hickory and borrowed 350 dollars and bought me a 1953 Studebaker, and then I was going to Tennessee to pick up my sister. I hadn’t made over two payments, I don’t believe, and I rolled that thing end over end down the mountain. The brakes locked up or something.

>>BM: Oh, gosh.

>>PT: But if you go around the home place, there’s a bunch of pecan trees. And we planted those, you know, uh, I guess when my brother, Doug, was in from college. He went to Western Carolina and back when it was a two year college and then he had to go to NC State to finish up and he did most of his work up there in Madison County up above Asheville in a little place called, well out from Weaverville.

>>BT: Marshall.

>>PT: Marshall, a little place called Marshall. But he’s all involved up there now, so. But, all of us, you know, all of them, all that bunch, all of them knew how to work. And they all did work. I mean, when it come hay time, them girls grabbed a pitchfork just like we did and pitched hay and packed it in the barn.

[00:0:16:12]

>>BM: And so, when you were young, like what type of farming did you practice? Like, did you raise animals, like raise a lot of animals or a garden?

>>PT: Well, I think, you know, back then, I think most people out in the country had a milk cow and a hog. They had milk, and those that didn’t have a milk cow, bought milk from their neighbors. And so, we had the horses and the cows to milk. So, you had to get up early in the morning before school. I thought there for a long time it was against the law to milk them cows when it was daylight. It was dark when we milked them in the morning before you caught the school bus. And then we always had things to do when we got off the school bus. And, then you’d have to end up milking the cows in the dark. So, when I was a senior in high school, I think we had six milk cows. And, and then naturally you got, you know, I was thinking, animals on the, on the farm. Well, naturally you have one that would die occasionally. And so, when I was a senior in high school, my dad had to be at work at two o’clock down at Henry River Mills. That’s the only public job I ever knew him having. But anyhow, he come and got me out of school at one o’clock. Took me home and told me to bury that horse. Now a horse is a pretty good size animal. It died, you know. And so, I went down there, and dug a hole, and put the horse in it and was covering it up when the school bus went up the road at four o’clock. So, I dug a pretty good hole in a small amount of time.

[00:0:18:51]

>>PT:Yeah.

[00:00:25:42]

>>BM: And so, did y’all practice any tillage or crop rotation?

>>PT: Oh yeah, yeah. We always, well daddy raised corn and he raised wheat. So, he’d raise corn on maybe this section this year and he’d raise wheat on the other section and then the next year it’d be right around he’d raise wheat down there and he’d raise, so yeah we practiced it. We didn’t have too much washing of the soil away when we was growing up.