Making Hay: Stories and Essays

by Charles Cooley, Sara Tucker (Editor)

As a youngster, Charles Cooley learned to drive a team, handle a scythe, and tumble hay—skills that had become obsolete by the time he was twenty-five. The Cooley Farm, located in Randolph Center, Vermont, was a typical farm of its era, a place where the extended family—grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins—lived, worked, and played. Purchased by Charles's grandparents, William and Anna Cooley, in 1909, it fed four generations of Cooleys during a period of rapid change. In the fifty years of its existence, tractors replaced horsepower, modern equipment replaced hand tools, and farms got bigger and more specialized. Subsistence farming became a thing of the past. These changes are recorded in Charles's account of farm life in the first half of the twentieth century. His memoir begins with a grandfather who lost his job at the start of the Depression; Grandpa Small never in his life received another paycheck. And yet he kept busy. He made himself useful. He raised chickens and sold the eggs in town. He churned the farmhouse butter. He spent time with the children and kept them out of mischief. He is one of the most beloved figures in these memoirs. Despite the economic hardships experienced by the Cooley family and their neighbors in the 1930s, Charles remembers the farm of his youth as both “a great playground” and a well-run enterprise where children worked alongside adults. He writes about the economics of the Depression-era farm, the family members and hired hands who made it run, and memorable events that shaped his life. He writes, too, about the decision he made to give up farming, a decision that impacted the life of his four boys and, to a lesser degree, every family member with ties to that ancestral home. "Making Hay" is volume 4 of "The Cooley A Family History."

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 27, 2020