Notes for Oscar Dixon Galbraith

GAYLE AND MARTY GALBRAITH GENEALOGY

Notes for Oscar Dixon Galbraith

Oscar Dixon Galbraith was my grandfather, a man whom I have loved all my life, and still do, even though he has been gone from this earth over 40 years. Him and my grandmother were affectionately known as Oscar and Ann by his neighbors. At that time, many of the people in the Thompsonville, Ill area were related, if only distantly. This added to the sense of community and caring I felt while growing up in Thompsonville. When I was born, they lived in a two bedroom farm home on 15 acres about Ľ mile outside of Thompsonville on the Akin road. Oscar, my dad, and my uncle Henry built that house several years before I was born. I was born and lived in the house that my great-grandfather Samuel Jones had built years before at the corner of Akin road and the main highway thru Thompsonville, Ill route 34. This house and most of the downtown area were demolished by a tornado in the 70s

Grandpa lived the kind of life that the "back to the earthers" of the 60's would have adored. He and Ann grew and produced on that 15 acres nearly everything they needed to sustain life. It was almost heaven for a young boy growing up. They usually had two cows, a half-dozen pigs, and 150 chickens, a large vegetable garden, a small peach orchard, half a dozen bee hives and a family of half-wild barn cats. When he milked the cows twice a day, the cats never left his sight, because they knew they would get a bowl of milk before it was over.

The milk from the cows was made into butter, and cottage cheese. (I still have the first churn that I churned butter in at Grandma's) The butter and cream was kept cool hanging from a bucket in the cistern. We drank all the milk we needed, and mixed the rest (usually about 5 gallons or so a day) with table scraps, vegetable peelings, potatos, and a little hog mash. This fed and fattened the hogs royally. When I got older (ten or 12), I got to slop the hogs. I loved to watch the big gluttons eat. They hated me and chased me out of the hog pen whenever they could, because I liked to throw corn cobs at them.

Grandma canned whole chickens for the winter, this also served to reduce the size of the flock over the winter months and reduce the feed requirements.. Then, come spring, she started a new bunch of hatchery chicks for the summer. Young frying chickens and eggs were sold in town to pay for the chicken mash and other food supplements.

They had about 15 peach trees along one side of the front yard, and under the trees were a half-dozen bee hives. Every summer they had washtubs full of honey and bushels of peaches to can and to sell. Needless to say, I got my share of sweet honey in the comb and fresh peaches. Oscar had more than an acre of vegetable garden, and he grew every kind of vegetable and melon I have ever seen. What we didn't eat or sell in town, Grandma canned for the winter, or stored in the root cellar. Berries grew abundantly in the wild, so we didn't bother to raise any. We just picked them in season wherever they grew. There were a couple of acres in corn to feed the chickens. It was all hoed and weeded by hand, and husked and shelled by hand.

Every year they butchered several hogs late in the fall and smoked the bacons and hams in their smokehouse. They used every part of the hog except the squeal. We had ham, bacon, sausages, rendered lard, pickled pigs feet, and cracklings for cornbread. We ate the hog brains scrambled with eggs for breakfast for a couple of days afterwards; We had thick, delicious pork tenderloins fried with eggs and potatoes at breakfast for the next week; and we ate the lard, cracklings, and smoked meat all winter. A couple of neighbors usually dropped by to help with the butchering, making hog-killing time one of the social events of the year.

Grandpa got up early in the morning, about 4:30 am, to milk the cows. Then worked all day, and milked the cows again in the evening. When I was out there, I got up a lot later. As I got older, (7 to 10),I got to do most of the fun things like feeding the chickens, collecting the eggs and feeding the hogs. Then there was always hoeing the garden and the corn. I always helped, but weeding I hated. There was always plenty of time to just wander the woods, and fish - and hunt when I got old enough.

In the evenings, we sat on the front porch swing and talked and listened to the foxhounds run. Most nights someone had some dogs running somewhere within hearing. This prompted endless discussions between grandpa and my cotton-nosed Great Uncle Fred about whose dogs they were and just what they were doing. A good hound-dog man could pretty well tell what was going on by the sound of the dogs. After it got good and dark, we all went inside and lit the kerosene lamps for a while. Grandpa looked at seed catalogs and farm journals, Grandma sewed or did some other small chore and I crawled around at the edge of the light pretending to fight off an army of goblins in the dark front room. And then we went to bed.

In the summers we had dry spells which were hard on the crops at times. When it hadn't rained for a week or more, the tension would build up in Grandpa, and a lot of the talk would center around when it would rain. The garden and corn was Grandpa's livelihood, and it seemed that we could feel the stress and thirst of the plants within our very being. When it finally did rain, we felt such relief and satisfaction. We would sit on the front porch and watch the rain fall with a sense of quiet joy. I haven't raised anything but weeds for a long time, but I still remember those days when a summer rain starts to fall.

Grandpa wasn't one to get excited easily. One time we went berry picking, and Grandma made us a blackberry pie. Later, we were sitting at the kitchen table, eating the sweet rewards, when I noticed a big, well-baked green worm protruding from the side of Oscar's pie. "Grandpa! Grandpa!", I said. "There's a worm in your pie!" He looked down at the worm thru his bifocals, and said "Oh." He pushed the worm aside with his thumb and continued eating.

Oscar was a kindly man, well respected by his neighbors, and adored by his grandchildren. In all the years I knew him, I never saw a hint of anger, or a raised voice with either family or neighbors. He was a man of inborn dignity and gentle humor. The thing I wanted most in the world was to please him and Grandma. I followed him everywhere he went on the farm and on market days in town. I was so proud of him! When I was a little boy, and even as a young man, many times I tried to picture how Jesus must have looked. Somehow the picture always came out looking like Grandpa. Knowing my grandparents so intimately, has given me an abiding compassion and respect for all old folks . This precious legacy is one of the most important that any grandparent can leave with the world.

The summer that I was 16, grandpa was 73. He was a slender man with weathered, sun-wrinkled skin and a body hardened by a life of hard work. That year Grandpa and Grandma moved into town and bought a small 2 bedroom home on an acre of land. During my summer school vacation, grandpa and I dug a new cistern. That is a well about 6 to 8 feet in diameter at the bottom and narrowing to about 3 feet in diameter at the top. It was shaped like a one-liter soda bottle. This type of well stores rainwater that is diverted from the roof of the house through a gutter and downspout to the well. That was the only kind of water supply available in Thompsonville when I was young. Only the fortunate few had a spring-fed well. Grandpa did all the digging with a pick and shovel in hard clay, and I hauled the dirt out in 5 gallon buckets on a rope. He did the hardest work and still wore me out every day for the several days it took to dig the cistern. After digging, it was plastered on the inside and a waist-high well cover was bricked-in to cover it. That long, lazy, summer seemed to last forever, as I helped Grandpa around the house and the garden, wandered the woods, and fished and hunted squirrels. A boy lives in the eternal now, and little did I know that these wonderful times were not to last much longer.

Oscar's Memorable Sayings:

About Books - " If he had to, a man could get by with only three books. - The Bible, the dictionary, and the Sears Roebuck Catalog."

About habitual liars - "He would tell a lie when the truth would serve better".

About who to trust - "Son, Always trust in the Lord, and you will never go wrong."

Ray and Lola Williams and Family are buried head-to-head with Oscar and Ann, just a few feet away. They lived just a few hundred yards down the road from Oscar and Ann on Akin road, and were probably their best friends. It seems fitting that they are buried together.

BG Galbraith