"Ready to roll"

Oral histories are always interesting, often fun, and sometimes “tall,” especially when it comes to snow stories: “I had to walk to school, three miles up hill each way, barefoot in deep snow...” Snow in New England is just a fact of life, and one my ancestors took in stride even when the snowfall was excessive. My somewhat reticent father told me only a few stories, mostly with the admonition to “don’t publish until after I’m gone!!” The story of one “adventure” he and his older brother had one winter came without restriction:

Before horseless snowplows became common, my grandfather and his neighbors worked together with teams of draft horses and a huge snow roller to compact the snow enough to make a smooth, more easily traveled surface for horses, wagons, and sleighs. The snow roller, a huge wooden drum filled with rocks, was fitted with a buckboard seat high over the roller from which one or two men could control the team of horses or oxen. Each neighbor would roll from his property to the next, then switched teams; everyone shared the work and the road’s entire length was done.

Am and Cony Church

When my father Ambrose S. Church (1912–1995) and his brother Cony L. Church (1909–1927) were just boys, they loved that ride. They loved the horses. They loved the machines.

What they loved most was spitting in the snow.

The older men usually chewed tobacco while they worked, and lacking spittoons left brownish-yellow spots in the pristine white snowbanks. For young Am and Cony that was just too cool to resist, but knowing that their father (and mother!) would never give them chewing tobacco, they made their own.

Sneaking into the cow barn, Am and Cony grabbed hats-full of the cows’ feed, a coarse molasses-based multi-grain concoction, mixed it with a bit more molasses, and baked it in one of their mother’s baking pans (while she was occupied in another part of the house). The result was a still-chewy, brown, slightly sticky block that they had to chisel out of the ungreased pan.

They reached the road just as the neighbor was handing over the roller to their father and his team of draft horses. Riding high up on the seat as the horses began to pull through the deep snow, the boys began spitting into the snowbanks until my grandfather demanded an explanation. And there he stood, nonplussed, trying hard to be stern while also trying hard not to laugh before once again clucking the horses forward to the next neighbor’s house along his sons’ own Tobacco Road.[1]

My father would never tell me, though, just what his mother said about her ruined baking pan.

Note

[1] With apologies to Erskine Caldwell!