Attorney's Wife Prefers Life on Farm, 1916

Article by A.L. French, North Carolina, published in the February 1916 issue of The Southern Planter

The fact that the farm is not only the business headquarters of the owner, but the home of himself and family, is one of the, to me, distinguishing features of the farming business that is most appealing. And yet, how many times during the past year have I heard ladies who are compelled to live on the farm deploring the fact and wishing they might live where more beauty and pleasure could be found, as if on God’s earth anywhere, more beauty and pleasure could be had than on the broad acres of a well-to-do owner.

In striking contrast to the above was an experience I had the past fall when stopping in a far south home for dinner. The mistress of that house was a city-raised girl who had seen all the so-called pleasure of urban life, who had tasted the pleasures of concrete walks, social functions, where one good lady was viewing another over the extent of the layout the husband’s pocketbook would provide for, of an expensive city house set in a section where land was so high in price that it had to be purchased at so much a food front; of the afternoon spent in calling upon people she cared nothing for. She had experienced too, the nervous headaches that were the accompaniment of a strenuous social season. She married a lawyer-farmer, whose farming interest and inclinations so far exceeded his law interests and inclinations that they let their city home and when I visited them, had been living six miles from the city for three years.

She said to me, “It is so much more beautiful out here among the big green fields, and I just love that creek down in the pasture. Fred and I go down there and fish in the springtime, and this great wood over here at the right of the house, isn’t it a beauty, with its golden and green foliage? And you have no idea of the good times we have here when our friends come and we all go nutting over in the hickory grove. Then when the nights are hot in the summer, we motor over to the lake.”

“Yes, we have a Henry Ford,” she remarked in reply to my questioning look, “and I run it, too. And say, with all the fun we have and all the company, our living does not cost one-half what it did in town.”

“The school here is not just such a school as those in town, but it looks to me that the children are acquiring about as much knowledge as the things that are of any account as they would in the city schools, and Fried has stirred the neighbors up to add some country life studies.

“I don’t mind if the term is not quite as long, for I would rather have the girls with me during the hot spring days, learning about the chickens, garden and the home work, than to have them shut up in a hot school room, for I am sure they will have better health and am confident that what they learn on the farm will be worth just as much to them as the things they would learn out of the book, and Fred wants the boys with him out on the farm. The only trouble is, he says, that the boys are so interested in the farm work, cattle, hogs and colts that they want to make improvements in the soil and the quality of the stock faster than he can get to them. Oh, yes, we have more work of a certain kind to do than we had in the city, but this work seems to county for something and the nerve-wracking work in the city, so little of it did anyone any good.”

The conditions on this farm were no different than they would be made on thousands of the farms where discontent makes life unpleasant for all. There was a fair-sized house with some of the modern conveniences, a big grassy lawn with flowers and shrubs, that the children and their mother gave the most of the care to.

The farmer has cleaned the bushes out of the pastures, so the beautiful grass-covered hills filled the eye with their loveliness. The old fence rows had been cleaned up and the fences restretched.

Just those little things had been done that cost very little money, but are a measure of the love and care that has been bestowed upon the farm home, and with everyone with something to do, plenty of good books and the best magazines and papers in the house, and a feeling on the part of the parents that the proper bringing up of their children was the most important thing connected with the home life. An almost ideal country home condition prevailed and the pleasure I experienced by the hours spent in that home I shall long remember.