Minnie Shatterly Cornfield Bean

[hmoosek]

I know very little other than it’s a cornfield bean. This is another bean I got from Remy. Seed Savers has a brief description.

“Cornfield bean with red streaked pods with cream-tan and dark mottled seeds.”

[woodeye]

Looks like they are rearing to go! Your place is quickly becoming the bean capital of Texas.

I know that Texas is the Lone Star state, but it sure ain't the Lone Bean state...

[hmoosek]

Yes, it’s starting to get out of hand. This started out as a germination test! I just wanted to make sure my seed stock was still viable.

[hmoosek]

I figured it was about time I come up with something for them to climb. I hobbled together a little something with some scrap wood I had sitting around. It’s not the best, but maybe it will work this time around. I Hope!

[woodeye]

I bet they'll like that just fine. They look happy to me... 

Is that an old water cooler in the last picture?

[hmoosek]

Yes Sir. I’ve got all kinds of junk around here. Two or three of those and old wringer wash machine.

[woodeye]

Same here, I've got hand-me-downs from several generations. I remember when I was a young lad, we had a water cooler running in the house. Didn't have central air until I was a teenager. But it could be worse, at least we had electricity to run things such as that. The folks said they got access to electricity about 2 years before I was born. So we even had running water, and a bathroom inside the house! I've been spoiled all my life...

[heavyhitterokra]

Hmoosek, I like that old bean trellis you've got there.  It reminds me of some of the stuff we used to have lying around when I was a kid.  Dad worked construction and would bring home all kinds of things like that.  He always had good intentions, but none of it was ever really put to good use.

I grew up living in the old Hulbert Halfway House.  It was called the "Halfway House" because it was located on the old stage line, along Fourteen-mile Creek, 'half way' between Tahlequah and Wagoner.  (This was the place where Cherokee Bill shot and killed Lawman, Sequoyah Houston, as he rode horseback along with his posse, skirting the banks of Fourteen Mile Creek; back in June of 1894.)  Effie Crittenden ran the place back then.

books.google.com/books?id=AcyTDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=cook+gang+shootout+sam+houston+killed+fourteen+mile+creek+oklahoma&source=bl&ots=kcGFZGUTP-&sig=ACfU3U2CMSerXIfCz1um63zdy4cLAkZkQw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6tJ-Wzqj5AhUBg2oFHXGiCkQQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=cook%20gang%20shootout%20sam%20houston%20killed%20fourteen%20mile%20creek%20oklahoma&f=false

Hulbert was not located back then, where it is today.  It used to be located along the banks of the creek, amongst some of the best bottom land in the county. Hulbert was moved to its current location on higher ground, about two miles East of the old location the year they started construction on Fort Gibson Lake (about 1937-1939 or so).  It wasn't always a rundown, back water, hole in the wall, speed trap.  Hulbert was a nice place back then, named after Ben Hulbert.  Hulbert had a cotton gin, a lumber yard, a stage coach stop, a double log resort house, a halfway house, a diner, a cemetery, a Church, a feed store, a grocery store, and a quarter mile horse racing track.  When we were kids, back in the '70s, my brother and I used to race our horses on that old track.  Now, it's so grown up with underbrush that I would be hard pressed to locate it again.

The Halfway House was sort of like an old hotel.  On the outside, it was 28' x 28' square with a hip roof. It had four covered porches, one porch for each guest room.  It had four guest rooms, each room was 14' x 14' feet square, each room had two windows, each room had a separate potbelly stove connected to a central brick chimney.  Each room had two doors, each door was a fancy 6 paneled wooden door with a skeleton key lock and a fancy, black agate door knob.  There was one door leading outside, and one door leading to the room next to it, so that the inside doors could be opened to connect all 4 rooms.  It had no kitchen and no indoor plumbing.  Each room had a wash basin and a pitcher to hold water. 

At the time it was built, there was a separate kitchen and dining area next to it where guests could go to buy their dinner and it had a pair of 'two-holer' outhouses around back, one for the men, one for the women.  It was re-located to our family farm in the late '30s.  It had a swept dirt yard and was landscaped with flowering Honey Locust trees and roses.  I can almost smell the honey Locust blossoms, just thinking about it.  In Summer when the trees bloomed, Mom would pick sprays of Honey Locust blossoms and place them in each of the 8 window sills, so that the warm summer breezes would waft their sweet smell throughout the house.

We had electricity all of my life, but we didn't have running water until I was 12 years old. We had an outhouse until I was 13 or 14. In winter, Dad kept the toilet seat hanging on a nail behind the wood stove. He'd beat your butt if you left the seat out there in the cold, so, "Yes, in winter we did have a heated toilet seat."

We had an old ice box with a 50-pound block of ice sitting in the top of it to keep our milk and eggs cool, not a refrigerator, an 'ice box'. Later, we got a kerosene refrigerator, then about the same time we got an indoor toilet, we got an electric refrigerator and a gas stove rather than a wood cookstove.

I inherited the old wood cookstove when I got married in '82. The wood cookstove was a 1927 model Home Comfort. When my wife and I moved out on our own we went back to having an outhouse until about 1991. I was 30 years old before we got indoor plumbing. Air conditioning didn't come around until 1994. We didn't know what it was like to have air conditioning back then, now I can't imagine being without it.

I remember the day I got that first window unit, Dad sternly told me, "Son, you're throwing your money out the window! Wy, I wouldn't have one of those on the place!" About a year later, he got a central heat and air unit and from that day on we all complained that he was freezing us out of the house with it. (He kept it cold enough to hang meat in there).

I sure wouldn't want to go back to the old wood cookstove in the summer. I kind of miss it in winter though. I don't miss the kerosene refrigerator either. Even though we have indoor plumbing, I still maintain the old outhouse. I built it myself when I moved out, about 40 years ago. It's still in great shape. The roof leaks a little, but that just gives it character. 


Sign of sage advice tacked on the wall of the old outhouse around back. "Don't squat With Yer Spurs On!"

Air-cooled in summer, with a heated seat in winter.

The old sign on this side says, Hot Bath 25¢ Clean Water $1.00

[heavyhitterokra]

When I was a kid, I guess everyone was so strapped for land payments that they didn't have much money for anything else? Plus, we lived so far out in the sticks that it took quite a few years to get things like electricity and water out to us. We didn't have access to rural water until I was old enough to drive. All the years before that, we ran off a well. The well would go dry after a couple of loads of laundry though, so it wasn't enough to really run a household. We did a lot of our bathing in the creek.

When Mom died, we finally got a water meter and dug a 1,200-foot-long ditch to bury it 2' feet deep by hand. We had an old '53 Ford tractor with a lister that Dad pulled behind it with a log chain while I operated the wooden handles. We dug as deep as we could get with that, then finished with picks and shovels. We hit huge rocks along the way that had to be blasted with dynamite. Back then, dynamite was 65¢ per stick at Master's Hardware Store in Tahlequah. It would be my job every day after school to bust rocks with a sledgehammer and to drill holes for dynamite with a hammer and a star bit until Dad got home from work to blast them. Things like that made the going pretty slow.

When I got married, I moved into an old farmhouse up the hill from Dad's house and had to dig another ditch 700' feet long to get water up there too. Hand digging a septic system was out of my reach.  That's why we had an outhouse for so many years. We had a hand-dug well and no pump. All of our water came out one bucket at a time.  We didn't get electricity up there for about a year.  Our kids were half grown before we ever got a telephone that wasn't on a party line.

Those were some good times. 

[hmoosek]

I had modern conveniences at home, but chose to stay with grandma every weekend and anytime I didn’t have school. She had electricity, but no air conditioning and no running water. We bought water into the house in a bucket and dipped it with a dipper. Once weekly into town to fill up the water tank. We had an outhouse, but when she got older, we got her a bedside toilet that only she used. She lived that way all her life. She lived a few miles out in the country and they didn’t bring water out that way till a few years after she died.

heavyhitterokra They were good times. The only sad memory of the old home place I have, is the morning I woke up and she was gone. That’s been almost 50 years ago. 

[woodeye]

Man, if ever in your life you needed a friend that owned a backhoe, those were the times, heavyhitterokra. That's a lotta ditch. I've seen times I'd sure like to have some of that dynamite for cheap like that. I remember our telephone was a party line, but I can't remember exactly when it became a private line. I don't remember having a area code back then either. But I do remember that our telephone number started with CL8, instead of 258 like it does now, and later on it got real fancy, rotary dial! It was a different world back then, but I miss a lot of the ways things were--way back when...

[hmoosek]

I put in some new string this evening so every bean has an opportunity to grab ahold and take off. I’m starting to get things arranged in the yard. Well…Sort of. On the Southwest side of the house, I have Calico Peas, Minnie Shatterly beans and Shadow Boxing tomatoes.

[hmoosek]

I don’t know what to make of these. Supposed to be a cornfield bean yet they just sit there.

Update August 17th

[hmoosek]

Well looky here. After a month of sitting still, the little fellow decided to start climbing! I don’t think this would be a bean I’d plant in July again. It did not like the heat at all. The other bucket I have of it, is about dead. It’s a delicate little vine.

[woodeye]

Thar she goes. I see it now, took me a little bit to see what your meant, moose. But yes it looks like you might have a runaway on your hands, fast and furious...