Reflections: When we listened to the city rooster crow

It seems that, at least in some communities, chicken-raising is making a come-back. It wasn’t all that long ago that small-town residents commonly woke hearing a rooster crow at sun-up.

Well within the memories of lots of local folks, including me, more than a few residents of most if not all small towns kept some chickens. Some townies even kept other livestock, although the general practice of having a family cow in town was pretty much over by the time World War II started. The family driving horse or team had disappeared with the advent of economical, dependable autos in the early years of the 20th century.

But in the late 19th century and early 20th century, many small-town residential lots were actually miniature farms, complete with down-sized barns and other outbuildings.

Farms were once, figuratively, machines designed to produce livestock and grain using a variety of specialized tools and structures from barns to chicken houses. Likewise, folks who lived in town also produced a lot of food, although they generally didn’t produce enough to sell, at least in the quantities farmers did.

Like farmers, though, besides their house, the most important building small-town families owned was their city barn. In the days before automobiles, many small-town folks kept a driving horse and a buggy (and possibly a cutter – a small one-horse sleigh) for transportation, which were housed in the small town barns that dotted communities all over the nation.

Many families also kept a cow to provide fresh milk for the kids along with cream and butter for cooking, and a few chickens – the key ingredient for those wonderful fried chicken Sunday dinners – that not only also produced eggs but also acted as autonomous garbage disposals. Most household garbage could be discarded by simply throwing it into the chicken yard where it was converted into eggs and (eventually) fried chicken.

Some town folks also kept a pig or two, although that seems to have been fairly rare.

But horses, cows and chickens were pretty common throughout small-town America. Sometimes, a little stand-alone chicken house was built to house the poultry, but most often urban chickens were kept in an addition to the barn or the woodshed. The town barn on most city lots included a stall or two (you needed a team if you had a carriage instead of a buggy) along with space to hang harnesses and a spot to roll the buggy or carriage in to store it out of the weather.

Family cows were also kept in town barns, along with a milking stool and a few cats to keep the local mouse and rat population in check in return for a few squirts of fresh milk during the milking process.

A stock of feed was also kept on hand, oats for the horse and ground corn and some hay for the cow.

Elsewhere on the town lot was the ever-popular outhouse (in the days before sanitary sewers were added to the joys of small town life) and, quite often, a smokehouse where ham and bacon were cured.

While town families didn’t necessarily grow crops for market, they did quite often favor large gardens that produced a variety of staples for the family, from potatoes to peas. A few fruit trees, and a grape arbor often rounded out the town folks’ facilities and amenities.

As time passed, the various uses to which town lots and buildings were put changed. In those pre-Social Security days, senior citizens had to find a way to survive, and they often did it by raising fresh fruits and vegetables to sell to the local grocery store. And like their country cousins, they also collected the eggs from the chickens they raised to trade at the local store for groceries.

When my great-grandparents retired from farming and built their retirement home and moved to Oswego back in 1908, they probably figured since they were already in their 60s that they’d live another decade or so. So imagine their surprise when they kept on plugging away for another 30 years. Which meant they had to find some way to keep home and hearth together.

So they grew and sold raspberries, black walnuts, and fruit from a small orchard they planted. They made their own wine from the grapes they grew on the arbor along the sidewalk that led from the house to the barn and the outhouse. And they smoked hams and bacon in the smokehouse they built next to the barn.

My great-grandfather also farmed the vacant lots along the riverbank to raise some food for the family chickens, cow and horse. And he went fishing, which my grandmother said was a very serious business with him – no fooling around or talking allowed as he stalked catfish and the carp the federal government had stocked in the Fox River starting in 1882.

A photo of the area where they lived snapped just before they built their new home shows a few horses and cattle sort of aimlessly wandering the neighborhood, which was curiously devoid of trees. Today, the area is fairly heavily wooded but back then the native trees had long been cut used for heating and other purposes.

Talk about a different time – most suburbanites would stand amazed and appalled if their neighbors suddenly brought a milk cow or a couple horses home to live and graze out on the front lawn. But 100 and more years ago, small towns were really small, with lower concentrations of people that allowed for pursuits definitely frowned on today. And without things we take for granted these days, like Social Security and Medicare, folks had to keep making their own ways in the world even if they wished they could retire.

Given that so many retired farmers moved to small towns when they got to retirement age in days gone by, it seems might have been relatively easy to take the family off the farm but it wasn’t so easy to take the farm out of the family.