Milkweed

May 24, 2025
Milkweed growing in the hoop house
has a head start on the outdoor ones!
 

We let milkweed grow in select spaces in the hoop house as an attractant for butterflies. But it's edible too. My newspaperman Grandfather, W.D. Fish, refers to himself as Golly in his weekly newspaper column, widely read - even by the Metzgers and Mattesons who lived here before this present generation.

He writes in 1965:

Ever eat milkweed greens? If not you missed something good. At any rate, 'way back about 1885, when this old timer was ten years old, we had some. We'll tell the story and some readers may be interested.

Our family lived about a mile from Whitesville in a small one-story cottage at the mouth of Hazletine Gully. A tiny stream ran down the gully but it was so small it would run out of water in a dry season. There were three other families that lived nearby. One was Calvin Jones. 

Neighbor Jones had fenced in about one acre of land along the stream for pasture for two or three calves. During one summer there were no calves and milkweeds thrived.

Golly's mother – bless her kindly heart, gathered the new and tender ends of the plants. Where a tender stem was broken off a new growth would quickly appear. This meant a consistent supply of greens for weeks or maybe for months. How mother prepared and cooked the milkweed Golly was too young to remember, but they were excellent food

The greens cost nothing. mother made our bread – salt rising of course – eggs were 10 to 12 cents per dozen and butter was 10 to 12 cents a pound.

At the head of the gully was the Hazletine farm. Ed Hazletine had a large orchard with many varieties of apples. He kindly would give all the apples you could use. We believe the man would have been insulted if you had offered to pay for them.

He had a box mounted on the fence bordering the orchard with large letters "Hungry Box." When early apples became ripe, the box was filled. They were free as the air we breathe.

Some folks scoff at the words, "the good old days" but there were some good old days almost 100 years ago. Golly knows!

Golly, so old he lives much with his memories, recalls his mother telling, after he was of adult age, of my awakening her in the dead of night and demanding that she sing "Minnie." It was a real task but dear, kind mother did it. Now we can remember neither tune nor words.

Interested in trying to forage milkweed? Up-to-date information can be found here.  And I'll have to keep looking for "Minnie" but I'll save that for my personal blog. 

Apple Evaporator

As the apple blossoms flutter to the ground in our Pennsylvania orchard, we wonder will there be apples in the fall - will the fruit set, avoid insects and disease, and the ravages of unpredictable weather?

My newspaperman grandfather, plying his trade in Coudersport from the 1920s until his death in 1969, wrote often of his experiences as a youth in nearby Whitesville, N.Y. This remembrance of the apple industry of the late 19th Century deserves to be shared.

W.D. "Golly" Fish writes:

Are there apple evaporators in this year of the 1965! I doubt it. Who would want dried apples in these days? And could anybody be so hungry he would eat dried apple pie?

Every farmer had an apple orchard a half century or so ago but there are few orchards in this area at present. The old trees are gone and young trees have not been planted. It is probable that if small trees were planted now deer would eat and ruin them. If they were in a valley, if the deer did not destroy them the beavers would.

I had a job in the evaporator at Whitesville about 1895. It was built by Merz Brothers of Webster, N.Y. Since it was a boost for the village, volunteer help was solicited. It was sort of understood that those who lent a hand in erecting the building, some 30 x 72 feet, would be favored in employment when apple drying started.

Golly, a youth, anxious for a job, worked ten hours a day, one week, for nothing and boarded at home when he did get the job. He worked nights, keeping the furnaces hot, and three or four times a night he had to go to the second floor and turn the apple slices that they might dry evenly. The pay – memory fails but it was about one dollar per night. A dollar was real money in those days!

A building I imagine to be similar to the
Merz Brothers structure in Whitesville

In his youth, Golly worked at a variety of jobs – farm hand, sawmill worker, made honey boxes, worked in a cheese box factory, shoveled earth in gas line ditch and many other activities – but printing intrigued and fascinated him above all else.

The old apple dry house disappeared years ago and apple orchards are scanty in Whitesville area. They have departed with the blacksmith shops and the sawmills.

Change! Change! Change!

Farming From The Interstate

Whizzing by on the interstate, I can grab only a brief moment, my phone pointed out the window, to capture farming nuance in this vast and troubled country. But the pictures tell a story of struggle and success, even in the same frame. 

... and from Ohio, this tribute to Rutherford B. Hayes, America's 19th President, painted on the side of a barn:

"The bold enterprises are the successful ones. Take counsel of hopes rather than fears to win in this business."

Hayes served as chief executive at the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the modern industrial age. He was well suited to the task, having earned a steadfast reputation for integrity throughout his career as a soldier and a statesman. Upstanding, moral, and honest, Hayes was ironically elected after one of the most lengthy, bitterly disputed, and corrupt presidential elections in American history.

One can only hope that an upstanding, moral and honest person will rise up to end this bitterly disputed and corrupt period of history we're enduring in 2025.

 

Slide Rock Apple Orchards

Orchard Tractors from the 1950s

We packed up and headed west a couple of weeks ago for a visit with daughter Kate's family in the mountains of Arizona. Always drawn to Farmers' Markets while traveling (we visited Flagstaff's on Sunday), we also seem to find our way to farms. 

Slide Rock State Park was our target that day with plans to soak up the sunshine, hike and bask in that cosmic energy unique to the red rocks of Sedona. And so it was that we discovered the Pendley Homestead.

 

Frank and Jane Pendley's offspring carried on their family's farming heritage until the mid-1980s when they sold the orchard to the state of Arizona and it became Slide Rock State Park, incorporating a popular swimming spot (in the Coconino National Forest where our daughter is Watershed Program Manager) with natural water slides and icy-cold water even in the height of summer.

Reimagined sites, with their carefully crafted descriptions and found objects pieced together send me on a journey to know more, to really imagine with my own sensibilities, the lives lived and lost in those spaces. Twenty-first century research tools at my fingertips can offer me a glimpse of the trials and tribulations of a family making their way in the early twentieth century - making their way in a western landscape so very different from our gently rolling Potter County hills.

But they faced the same kinds of vicissitudes of farming as we do, even with our 'modern' methods. Hailstorms, late spring freezes, deer damage, insect damage, injury, accidents, finding markets for the fruit - it's all there in the records of old newspapers from the era.

From 1970,  the headline screams "Oak Creek Fruit Crop Wiped Out By Cold Snap" and the story goes on to report: "What appeared to be one of the largest deciduous fruit crops in many years in Oak Creek Canyon is now only a dream."

1934: "An experiment in Oak Creek Canyon to help control insect pests was underway by the agriculture experimental station of the University of Arizona. Frank Pendley, prominent fruit grower in the district, asked for help with reference to the wooly aphis in his orchard." 

This from 1963: "What would you do if you had a thousand boxes of apples and nowhere to sell them? That's the position in which Tom Pendley finds himself in this fall and he frankly is at a loss as to what to do about it." And in 1971, it was "Oak Creek Orchard Men Battling Deer ... Antlered Invaders Love Fruit." 

The Pendley home today

With a backdrop of the red rocks, fruit trees along Oak Creek

Read more about the Pendley Homestead here.

A Warm Welcome

 

What fun to share this old farmstead with old friends - that is friends who shared the journey through the 12 years in the Coudersport Area Schools!

We hosted Jane's class reunion last Saturday afternoon, scrambling to accommodate everyone if rain promised by the weather folks came to pass. But after on and off showers in the morning, the skies cleared for the afternoon reunion and 70-somethings enjoyed catching up and laughing and remembering the good old days.

Classmates David Schaub and Tom Shirey, remembering their glory days on Metzger* Field (next to the high school), posed questions about the origin of the old football field to Coudersport Library Director Teri McDowell and she was off and running.

Her well-researched presentation about the history of football in Coudersport and the athletic fields in the community was a highlight of a delightful afternoon. 

It was only after everyone had departed and the rains came and went that the sign on the barn changed to this!

*While the athletic field bears the name Metzger, the benefactor was distantly related to these Metzgers! 

From 1907

 

1907

"The industry is one of the most important in the community because it purchases the grain of the farmers in this section, always paying the best market price for it. Industries of this nature are indispensable help in the commercial upbuilding of our community."

From The Potter Enterprise, 1907:

"At the corner of Main and Chestnut streets stands one of the most completely equipped and successfully operated flour and feed mills in this section of the state. Their location is very advantageous owing to the fact that the railway switch used by them is in direct connections with the C & PA Railroad,  so direct in fact that is is but the work of a minute to swing the cars either loaded or unloaded upon the main track, thus avoiding the confusion and loss of time attendant upon a long period of switching."

"At the right of the switch projects the elevator opening from the mill.... Two men shoveling the grain from the car into the elevator can empty a car in exactly two and one half hours. A few steps to the right and a trap opening disclosed the belt elevator that was conveying the wheat to the machine that was to give it the first process in becoming flour."

"Seven hundred bushels per hour are carried by this smoothly running and comparatively noiseless elevator to a very ingenious machine called a separator which takes out the roughest dirt. ... Just the width of an elevator shaft separated the "cleaner" from the polishing machine containing six double rollers made of the finest quality of chilled steel and revolving in different directions with varying degrees of speed..."

"Another turn, a walk of about 20 feet and perhaps the most marvelous machine stands. Underneath are numerous canvas tubes that extend to every elevator in the building except the outside one.  Mr. Guilden opened the top and then the flour as it came from the various machines through the elevators sifted by this wonderful machine into the various brands of flour."

"The plant has a capacity of one hundred and fifty barrels of flour per day. Owing to the fact that the company has plenty of fine storage room, they are not under the necessity of sacking their flour as fast as they mill it. They produce fifty tons of feed in 24 hours, The complete storage capacity of the plant is forty thousand bushels."

"A fine grade of buckwheat flour put out by this concern is creating a demand for itself throughout the country. Corn meal is also an important output, Some of the brand of flour manufactured are Gold Eagle, Special Patent, Choice Patent and Fancy Blended."

"The Eulalia Milling Company was established in 1905 by D.W. Van Wegen of this place and Miles Johnson of Cross Fork. Both are these men are far sighted and progressive business men who are always ready to do all within the scope of their influence for the advancement of Coudersport."

Remembering

Yesterday was the birthdate of Arthur Eugene Metzger. Were he still alive, he would be 100 years old.

His fierce love for this farm - these pieces of land stitched together by the Dingman Run Road - defined him in so many ways. It was this love that was planted in the man I married, the man who carries the name, often these days with the Jr. suffix omitted as the Senior Arthur has been gone for more than 40 years.

Polio - infantile paralysis - struck on this farm in the summer of 1944, days before Arthur and Wanda Gooch had planned to be married. 

From The Potter Enterprise, August 10, 1944

Arthur, with Wanda by his side, spent months in the hospital in Sayre and later at a rehabilitation facility in West Virginia.

Potter Enterprise, 1946

'Never fully recovered,' the newspaper story says. But the man I first met in 1970 had recovered and built (with Wanda always at his side) a fulfilling life - a much different life than the one he had dreamed of on this farm. He walked with the assistance of leg braces and crutches, his broad shoulders and strong arms a testament to his strength and determination. They had been a part of his life since that fateful summer.

Farming - especially in the days before air-conditioned mega tractors and gps guided equipment - demanded great physical strength and, while the whole family supported the effort, it was too much. By this time, he was raising two children, and his parents sharing farming responsibilities while caring for the older generation and raising a young daughter, were stretched to their limits. He knew his farming dream wouldn't support the needs of a growing family. The whole family pitched in to make it work as he set off to college at nearby St. Bonaventure and graduating magna cum laude in 1961.

His career as an accountant with the Federal Government took the family from the farm to locations in New York, the Harrisburg area and then northeastern Pennsylvania. Nearly every weekend and every hunting season, they packed up the station wagon traveled back to the farm.

He and Wanda planned their future together here, a time when they could retire. They fixed up the old horse barn, built a new workshop when the old one was destroyed by fire, and made some modern updates in the old farmhouse.

Memories are blurry sometimes, much like the picture at the top of this post. Though I've heard pieces of this story from many perspectives over the years, it's not my story to tell. Perhaps some day those who carry the memories - his sister Dawn, his daughter Carol and his son, Arthur, will tell their own stories.

I like to think of him as a grandfather, for the birth of our daughter Kate changed him, softened what I perceived as a hard, protective shell and brought him great joy. In fact, they delighted in one another.

By the time Joey was born four years later, Arthur Sr. was ill and returning to this farm in retirement was just a dream. He died in this house in the early summer of 1983.

We all miss him.

with grandson Joseph Arthur, February 1982