The following article is part of the Diamond Club Member group that began in the January 7, 1943, issue of the Rock County Star Herald. Members of this group consist of persons of age 75 and older.
The following appeared in The Rock County Herald on October 14, 1943.
This may sound funny, but Mrs. Anna Varah, Hardwick, swears it’s the truth. She owes her life to maple syrup water.
Born in Clayton county, Iowa, Dec. 25, 1869, the daughter of William and Rosella Ostreich, she was a mere baby when she became very ill. The physician from Elkader, who was called to care for her, prescribed maple syrup water as her only medicine. She eventually recovered, after she had once been considered dead. She was so ill that she lay motionless and cold, and was given up by the family. However, when they began to bathe her with warm water, she began showing signs of life, and she is still lively to this day. Because of her illness, she was unable to walk until she was three years old.
Her family lived on the Big Turkey river, in Clayton county, and she recalls that the river often provided them with fish for the family table. One catfish her father landed, she relates, touched the ground and he was carrying it over his shoulder.
She attended public school but little, because she was third oldest of a family of 12, and her help was required at home. “I got some schooling,” she states, “but I forgot about everything I did learn, which wasn’t much.”
As a girl she helped her father with the farm work. When he cut the small grain with a “cradle,” her brother raked it together, her mother bound it into bundles, and she would gather the bundles together and would set them in a shock.
She had planted corn, dropping three kernels at a time by hand. In those days, no one thought of using a cultivator, she states. All the corn was kept clean with a hoe, and a hoe was also used in planting and covering the corn.
Their farm was a clearing in a wooded area. The settlers had no money to buy wire fencing so they made rail fences from the available timber, to keep the cattle from going into the fields. “Sometimes the cows would get smart,” said Mrs. Varah, “and they’d learn the crotches in the posts. Then they’d get into the fields, and we’d have a lot of trouble.”
One cow in each herd, she added, would always have a bell so that the cattle could be located in the timber land where they were pastured.
Local sugar shortages are considered a joke by Mrs. Varah. “Why, we’d go a year at a time, and even more, without seeing a grain of white sugar,” she stated. “Father raised sorghum, and we’d tap the maple trees in the spring and get maple sugar and that’s all.”
Farmers raised a few hogs, and in the early days, they butchered them out during the winter time. She recalls neighbors would have “regular slaughtering bees” at which time, several farmers worked together killing several head of hogs. These would be stored in huge coolers for some time, until they were frozen solid, and then would be hauled like cordwood to town from where they were shipped to the market.
Later, when more hogs were being raised, the farmers would get together and drive them to the stockyard in their town from where they would be shipped to the packers. Mrs. Varah remembers how much trouble the men often had in driving them across the bridge across the Big Turkey river. Many times, they would have to make them swim across, when they would start across the plank flooring of the bridge. Mrs. Varah pointed out that making a hog swim is dangerous, as they are naturally poor swimmers, and often cut their own throats with the hooves on their front feet.