Five Gallon Pails
A tired, worn out barn near my boyhood hometown now sits vacant during the late fall surrounded by acres of harvested corn fields. The “temporary” handiwork of a past farmer is illustrated by the patched roof, fading siding and uncovered openings on a couple of barn levels.
What caught my eye were the two pails on the ground near the open entrance on the front left. Though most city folks would drive by them without a glance, to me they brought back memories of countless morning and evening chores when I would use an aluminum scoop shovel to fill pails like this with ground corn out of our cement floor feed room and grab one pail in each hand and carry them about 20 yards through the barn into a small feed lot and dump them in wooden feeding troughs my dad built for the cattle to use as their dinner tables.
At the age of 10, the pails were heavy and cumbersome and by the time I had made my required eight or ten trips back and forth, my back would ache and my muscles threatened to go on strike. But in a few short years, my young man’s body began to muscle out and though I didn’t enjoy the labor each day, it was no longer a struggle physically to carry feed like this.
My recollection of the origin of these pails is hazy although a few were originally full of grease or other chemicals. Some were galvanized gray while others wore colors of deep blue, black or an occasional white and they were all old. During my formulative work years, none of the pails were plastic as tin ruled the day. Some pails had a wooden handle to make it easier on your hands to carry but years of use wore most of the wood away and left the remaining wire handles to do a job on tender hands.
Nearly every old farm kid I talk to has similar recollections of equipment they used to do their chores. Most of the farmers back in the 1950s were not very mechanized in their barn operations and depended on their resident labor force to keep it and the rest of the farm running smoothly.
(Photographed near Avoca, MN)
Five Gallon Pails
A tired, worn out barn near my boyhood hometown now sits vacant during the late fall surrounded by acres of harvested corn fields. The “temporary” handiwork of a past farmer is illustrated by the patched roof, fading siding and uncovered openings on a couple of barn levels.
What caught my eye were the two pails on the ground near the open entrance on the front left. Though most city folks would drive by them without a glance, to me they brought back memories of countless morning and evening chores when I would use an aluminum scoop shovel to fill pails like this with ground corn out of our cement floor feed room and grab one pail in each hand and carry them about 20 yards through the barn into a small feed lot and dump them in wooden feeding troughs my dad built for the cattle to use as their dinner tables.
At the age of 10, the pails were heavy and cumbersome and by the time I had made my required eight or ten trips back and forth, my back would ache and my muscles threatened to go on strike. But in a few short years, my young man’s body began to muscle out and though I didn’t enjoy the labor each day, it was no longer a struggle physically to carry feed like this.
My recollection of the origin of these pails is hazy although a few were originally full of grease or other chemicals. Some were galvanized gray while others wore colors of deep blue, black or an occasional white and they were all old. During my formulative work years, none of the pails were plastic as tin ruled the day. Some pails had a wooden handle to make it easier on your hands to carry but years of use wore most of the wood away and left the remaining wire handles to do a job on tender hands.
Nearly every old farm kid I talk to has similar recollections of equipment they used to do their chores. Most of the farmers back in the 1950s were not very mechanized in their barn operations and depended on their resident labor force to keep it and the rest of the farm running smoothly.
(Photographed near Avoca, MN)