On the Moraine, Part XIII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

Having two old tractors, they tended to drink gasoline. Yet, we didn’t have an elevated farm tank like many had in those days. It was never discussed, but I suspect the reason was, with us being gone from Sunday afternoon until late Friday evening, Dad assumed it would be a target for theft.  

Instead, we had five or six old five-gallon cans that would nicely fit in the trunk of the 1956 Chevy. So, often, the first task on Saturday mornings was to put the cans in the trunk and drive over to Cynthiana to fill them up. I may be imagining this, but I think when we first started going to this the gas station had those antique pumps with the large glass vessel high up in the air. For now, we’ll let this stand, imagined or not.

The gas station building is still standing today. If you come down the road from Rainsboro and turn left on Ohio 41, it is about 100 to 200 yards on the left. Speaking of Ohio 41, I just realized 10 years or so ago that Ohio 41 also goes to Troy. On my birthday in 2016, I drove from Troy to Cynthiana on this road. It winds through Springfield, Washington Court House, Greenfield and Bainbridge before it gets to Cynthiana. It definitely crosses the Terminal Moraine.

In the summer, when we were mowing, we might need to make two trips a day to get gasoline. You could say our ’56 Chevy was “the bomb.”

Why were we mowing so much? For this old conservative, it is a stain on my family history.  

Along about 1958, my parents had enrolled the farm in a program called the “Federal Reserve.” This was a government program that paid you not to plant your farm in productive crops! I still don’t like the idea. 

One of the requirements of this program was you plant your fields in grass (Timothy in our case) and keep it mowed. Hence all the mowing.  

I remember that to apply for this program you had to go to the USDA office in Hillsboro. It was upstairs over the Swonger Dairy in those days.

Now that I have confessed to government handouts, I can move on.

Over the years, we had collected various pieces of farm equipment. It was mostly junk. The pattern was to buy it, dismantle it if it needed work and take any parts that needed machining, welding or anything like that to our shop in Troy for rejuvenation.  

We had an old hay baler that had its own Wisconsin engine. I don’t remember where it came from. We did not rejuvenate it, it was too far gone. 

There was a four-acre patch in the pasture, on the other side of the creek, that was growing up in small trees. Dad didn’t want it to go to trees. I don’t remember the whole sequence of events, but he traded the hay baler in for a new (new!) bush hog. With this machine, he could cut all the portions of the pasture, including the four acres, that were growing up in saplings.  

This implement came in handy for all our farming years.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.