1929 Canner, or Green bean times
This is the pressure canner I use to put up veggies. It is now 88 years old, built like a Sherman tank, and twice as heavy. My Great Aunt Nova Dee was 12 when my great-grandpa bought it and she told me its story. The year was 1929, and her daddy would work all day in his west Texas fields and then come home and get his axe. Then he would walk forever to find mesquite trees. She said if the wood was cut in the spring of the year the bark would pull right off and the wood lice would never eat it- it would last forever. So my great-grandad cut these trees and made them into posts to sell to a man until he had enough to buy the canner. But when it came, his wife, Gertrude, was terrified of it. He had to be the one to use it first and show her how.
He had also been the one to teach Gertie to cook. When he had been "sparking" her, people told him that he didn't want her because she couldn't even cook. Turns out her older sisters held court in the kitchen so their food could be what impressed the menfolk. They made Gertrude do all the cleaning; my moma remembers her house being neat as a pin. But my great-grandpa Ray Vaughn was set on her and said he would just teach her what she needed to know. And he did.
Once Gertie got over her initial fright, the other people in the community wanted to use it also. But they were too scared that it would blow up and so they would only use it in Gertrude's house, in her presence.
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| Great-grandma Gertrude Beeman |
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| Great Aunt Nova Dee and Grandpa RV about 4 years before the tornado. Look at Dee's flapper cloche! |
My grandpa says he remembers that day was the first that his daddy let him lead the mules in the cotton field and he was so proud. He would have been about 6 years old. Then his daddy looked up at the sky and said something bad was coming and to run on home.
When the storm hit, Gertrude and the seven kids huddled in the dugout cellar with a roof overlaced with logs, while Ray Vaughn sat on the top step and held a rope to keep the door closed.
Aunt Nova Dee says there was the most terrible sound and it went on for what seemed like hours. Finally there was only the sound of rain. One of her brothers said he ought to go out and check on his sow and her babies. Great grandpa let him open the door. The brother looked out and then sat right back down on the step. Nova Dee said her father asked, "Is there anything left?" Her brother replied, "Not a thing."
She said she couldn't imagine how her daddy had felt holding that cord and knowing the whole time that everything he had worked for was blowing away, and him with seven children to feed. When they emerged the house was gone, all but the porch, and the wood stove was sitting out in the field with one piece of pipe still sticking up. She said her mother went about looking through the rubble.
In the kitchen there had been a long work table with a curtain in the front that covered metal buckets filled with their own lard, and the flour and cornmeal that they had milled. Gertrude found the bucket of flour intact, propped the stove up with rocks and started a fire. She washed a pan in the rain water and used the flour and some water from a puddle to make my grandpa and the youngest brother some gravy to eat. Nova Dee says they were still so small that they had to eat.
Nova Dee found her doll in the mud, and the wardrobe where they kept the whole family's church clothes and shoes. It was so heavy it had merely fallen over on its face, the contents intact but soaked through with water. They also found their feather pillows strewn about and Gertrude began emptying the sacks so as to wash all the feathers and re-stuff them. Can you imagine washing muddy feathers ?
My great-aunt was then 16 and an amazing horse woman. She had on her daddy's old felt hat and was trying to gather the spooked horses to hitch to a cart when a neighbor boy named Orville came riding over the hill.
Turns out this teen was sweet on Dee and had "walked out" with her several times. Whenever she tells this story she always says, "Oh! I'da rather seen my black box than Orville coming over that hill!" That means she'd have rather died and seen her coffin than him see her muddy and bereft. Great-Uncle Orville always said he'd never forget the sight of her: her father's hat on, wrangling the horses in the mud. Great Uncle, because he convinced her to marry him later that year.
Aunt Dee said no matter what happened the family never went hungry. "Now, we didn't always like what we had," she'll admonish, "but we had it." That included all the food in the root cellar that my old canner had put up.
Times were hard even after they managed to salvage wood from the destroyed house and pull all the nails that were usable. We don't think of it now, but they couldn't even afford new nails. Ray Vaughn had twin brothers who were deaf and worked as tailors and they each sent him $25 dollars- a huge sum. With it he put a new tin roof on the one long room he had managed to rebuild.
But this was also the time of the Great Depression. Folks were so poor and the land was so dry that cattle were dying in the fields for want of food. The government stepped in with a program that bought your cattle for a pittance amount, and then they were rounded up to trenches and shot, only to be buried. A strange sounding plot for a time when people were starving, but it was an attempt at decency.
By law, once purchased, the animals were not supposed to be used for meat, just covered over. But some officials, including those that bought great-grandpa's cattle, were much more lenient. They allowed you to take as many freshly killed animals as you could use. Ray Vaughn came back with two whole cows and commenced to butchering them. Nova Dee and her moma spent all that day and the next using the pressure canner. First, all the cuts of meat: roast, steaks, strips, were browned and then canned in metal cans that were crimped and pressured. All the rest of the meat, and they did not waste a bit, was put through the grinder and into the giant clothes washing pot to make chili. This was canned in jars as it something easy for the boys to heat up themselves and eat.
Aunt Nova Dee said they were purely exhausted afterward, but they got all that meat put up. After all, there was no refrigeration. In fact, after Nova Dee and Orville married, they lived in Texas until 1952. They moved to Arkansas then and at that time electricity had still not come to their poor rural part of Texas.
Yes, there are a lot of memories in my old canner. After Gertrude and Ray Vaughn grew old, she would cook all of her meats in the pressure cooker. Ray Vaughn had lost all his teeth and this was the only way he could eat it.
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| Great- grandpa Ray Vaughn, Great- Grandma Gertrude, Grandma Betty Jean (expecting my uncle) and Grandpa R.V. Gosh, isn't grandpa handsome?! |
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| Aunt Nova Dee at 101. Her brother, my Grandpa RV, is 91 and on the couch, my moma is beside him. |
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| My dear friend and I snapping beans to pressure. |
