Farmers all over the South are now in the midst of their busiest season, but it is none too early to begin making plans for such recreation and comradeship as will lighten the load of steady labor and add variety to the season’s activities. The Progressive Farmer believes with ex-secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston that “the farmer has a right to a joyous existence.” And with this thought in mid we wish to refer to some opportunities for the enrichment of country life that many farmers and farm communities are now using to advantage and the other farmers and communities would do well to adopt.
Some small farmers are finding that even farm work can be made happier if two or more neighbors whose farms are close together “swap work” or help each other out. Suppose each of two farmers has two boys who are chopping cotton. If the four boys are put together on one farm a day and on the other the next, or chop one man’s cotton and then the other, they ae likely to work better and with more alacrity—and the same principle may apply in the case of the plowing and cultivation by the fathers themselves. The happiest occasion to which our older farmers like to refer were the log-rolling and corn-shuckings and house-raisings, not that plenty of hard work was not done on these occasions, but that the hard work was sweetened and made joyous by the comradeship of friends and neighbors.
Of course not all farm work lends itself to the policy of swapping labor, but where it can be done, the gain in team work and human companionship is nearly always worth while.
Nearly every spring we hear pleasing reports of neighbors coming together and planting or cultivating the crop of a sick neighbor. Some neighbor has fallen ill and so has been unable to get his farm work done where upon some good Samaritan with enterprise enough to take the lead invites all the neighbors to come together on a certain day and put the man’s farm in shape. This is one of the finest examples of neighborliness that we know of, and everybody ought to welcome an opportunity to be of such assistance to a friend in need.
Coming now to some opportunities for recreation and social life on the farm, one’s thoughts turn naturally to fishing trips and fishing parties. It is unfortunate that our country folks are very largely turning over country sports to city people. The farmer who works hard through the years is certainly entitled to some time for recreation, and fishing and hunting are the logical and traditional sport for the countryman. An opportunity to enjoy them should be a part of the heritage of every farm boy.
Just as far as possible the social activities of a country community ought to be held at the school house as the logical “community center.” It is an excellent thing for each school to have its own baseball team and for this sport he continued on the school grounds on Saturday afternoons after school closes. “My boys certainly work better all through the week since I began giving them Saturday afternoon off for baseball,” one farmer told us some time ago, and many other fathers have no doubt had the same experience.
Nearly every town of any size now has its swimming pool, and probably no other form of recreation has grown so rapidly in popularity these last few years. Here again, there is no reason why country people should not make greater use of natural country sport. More families might well to what two or three families of kinspeople when we know we have done. They have built a couple of bath-houses, one for the men and one for the women on “the river edge, and often go there during week-ends with their bathing suits, and have more fun than any similar groups of townspeople have at their expensively built swimming pools.
It is none too early to begin making plans for summer picnics and vacation parties. Of course, family picnics are always in order, and any family having a car will find it worth while to have a picnic supper out in the woods or by some riverside or Creekside once every week or two. For larger picnics the best agency of direction and control is usually a Sunday school. Every Sunday school out to try to have at least picnic a year.
Music should never be forgotten, and it is many sections of the South “all-day singings” are still held and enjoyed. It is also a great asset for any school or community if it boasts of a band made up of home talent. There is hardly a farming community in the South in which there is not quite a good deal of musical ability, and as a rule nothing except leadership is needed to make it effective. One of the most interesting of recent events in the writer’s home community was a “wild flower show.” The women, the teachers, the Boy Scouts, and others ransacked the country for miles around and brought together and labeled more than 100 kinds of wild flowers. The exhibit was kept open night as well as during the day, and was a remarkable success. Now a flower show for cultivated flowers is soon to follow. There is no reason why such exhibits should not be held in every consolidated school or high school in the rural South.
For the older boys and girls, or the “young men and young women,” any occasion that will bring such young people together under wholesome influences should be encouraged.—and if such occasions also bring the older folks together at the same time, so much better. That picture of olden English country life as given in Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” deserves frequent duplication in this country:
“And all the village train, from labor free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree,
The young contending as the old surveyed.
In this connection, a Georgia friend contributes a suggestion that is worth passing on to our young folks all over the South. She writes:
‘My own home community woke up and became a delightful place to live one summer when a college boy came back home and organized the Community Social Club, the sole object of this club being to provide some form of wholesome amusement for the whole community at least once a week in a systematic way. The college boy was made chairman of the program committee, and the community had a steady succession of fish fries, straw rides, watermelon cuttings, picnics and moonlight picnics, community signings, swimming parties, tennis matches, etc., for every Saturday afternoon and evening the whole summer. When parties were given in homes, no attempts were made to serve refreshments except watermelons or fruit, because crowds were so large, but every effort was made to provide everybody in the community with a way to get to every meeting. This community found that when such amusements were planned regularly, everybody came and enjoyed them, but when there was no organization to arrange them, there were not near so many community good times.”
From the front page of the Moore County News, Carthage, N.C., Thursday, June 11, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92074101/1925-06-11/ed-1/seq-1/
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