A farm from my boyhood days In Lancaster County, Pa.

[Dusty Dan]

As I write this, I am remiss that among the many memoirs that I have written through the years, that I did not include this, when I was younger. To the best of this old guy’s memory, it is all true. I wish I could remember more and if some errors occur, please forgive.

There was a farm, an Amish dairy farm, located in East Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania near the villages of Leola and Leacock Pa. It consisted of approximately 200 acres, about 100 head of Holstein cows and a large hen house of hundreds of white chickens. 

I was in my 13th, 14th and 15th summers in 1958, 1959 and 1960. In 1961 my family moved away. I liked to ride my bike to the farm which was about a mile from my house and visit the Amish family. It was the John Glick family. John and his wife had somewhere around 10 children, mostly young girls as I recall but one boy was 17 at the time and his name was Henry and he was my friend. I also remember Ada and Rachael. Henry said that come time to harvest the tobacco crop, that his father had said that he needed extra help. Too many young girls and not enough strapping young lads to help harvest the crop. He would pay me $1.00 an hour, ok for me, and I was invited to stay and have homemade ice cream on their lawn by the farm house when the days work was done, on some occasions. 

The tobacco, used for only cigar wrappers as I recall, was ready for cutting by mid to late August. Two mules or work horses pulling a tobacco wagon that had two parallel long rails running the length of the wagon. The tobacco stalks were cut off at the bottom using a long handled cutting tool with two sharp scissor blades at the bottom. After a stalk was cut, it was speared with a pointed spear head which was slid over a length of wood called a lath. Then with about four stalks on a lath, the tobacco was handed up to a young lad on the wagon and he would slide the laths down along the rails from front to back until the wagon was full. Then the mules would pull the wagon back to the tobacco barn and the tobacco was unloaded and hung in the barn on rafters to dry. Once dry, it was taken down and wrapped in brown heavy paper and shipped off to market or to the factories where cigars were produced. It was hot, dusty and dirty work but I loved it and I respected the Amish and their culture.

I also helped to bring in hay, carry milk to the cold water bins in the milk house and also helped to sort the eggs by size and weight in the large hen house. Their family also sold their fresh produce to the neighbors in the small community there, by driving their buggies from house to house once a week . They used a gas operated generator to supply the power for the automatic milking process.

The farm is long gone now. A housing development has taken the place of the fields and the farm buildings. As I understand, as I returned years later, the family sold the farm for reasons unknown and moved to a settlement of Amish further north in Pennsylvania.

But, even though faint now, in my 74th year, the memories still linger and I wonder what ever happened to my friends, the Glick family.