Opinion & Comment

Piles of junk around farmesteads pawned today's yard sale frenzy

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

Appalachians invented yard sales.

Anyone wanting to argue this point either hasn’t lived in the Appalachian Region or has forgotten how our ancestors existed due to economic and social circumstances.

Maybe your part of Appalachia always had zoning ordinances, subdivision covenants, and building codes, but mine didn’t. Where my folks and family grew up, front yards were “brush-broomed” bare dirt; chickens were free-range; and old clapboard, roof-sagging farmhouses had junk piles, outdoor latrines, and garbage pits nearby.

Because my antecedents lived through the Great Depression, they loathed to discard anything, even when it broke and couldn’t be fixed. Let’s say, a leather mule collar finally disintegrated due to age, use, and the gnawing of rats. Rather than trashing the collar, true Appalachians would hang it in the barn on a rusty nail. There it would remain for decades, long after the mules were dead and the farm had gone through a progression of tractors.

The tractors, in fact, joined the mule collar after succumbing to mechanical problems. The metal hulks quietly rusted in weed-grown barn lots, while the mule collar fossilized on its square-headed nail.

I can take you to an old family homestead and show, in this 21st Century, a moldering mule collar and a collection of vine-covered farm equipment as proof.

So it was that Appalachians held on to possessions long after they had outlived their original use. Ingrained in their nature were thrift and an abhorrence of waste. There might be future uses for a cracked churn or a leaky chamber pot. A set of broken bedsprings might lay in the yard for years, but you daren’t throw it away. Your mother-in-law might need a place to sleep, and don’t tiger lilies look good growing through the rusty metal?

It should come as no surprise that every homestead became, over the course of years, a perpetual yard sale. Piles of worn-out material -- wooden, fabric, iron, and glass -- accumulated. Pieces of derelict furniture, moth-eaten and mildewed, decorated porches. Tree trunks became leaning places for broken hoes and shovels, rolls of rusty barbed wire, and termite-eaten fence posts. Oh, and let’s not forget the antique cars and trucks held aloft on concrete blocks. A 1944 Ford sedan could become storage for an amazing amount of old clothing, newspapers, and magazines.

These were the first yard sales. Neighbors weren’t offended by the junk around people’s houses, not that they lived close enough to be bothered. Down the hollow or up the cove, you knew other folks lived a hard-scrabble existence: growing cotton or tobacco, running a few skinny milk cows, cutting timber, stacking firewood, hunting and fishing, and subsisting on beans and cornbread during the lean times.

The fact that they didn’t cut the pokeberry stalks around their outhouse didn’t make them better or worse than you. The debris of generations of living around the farmstead was an accepted fact of Appalachian society. Why waste money on a lawnmower when a goat would do the same job, plus give milk, and yield meat for a barbecue or stew? The same attitude prevailed concerning landscaping and housekeeping. People were, bottom line, practical.

In far-flung rural communities, tied together by narrow mountain roads or railroad tracks, neighbors knew the names of each other’s dogs; so they certainly were aware of what you had in your junk piles. I’ve seen my uncles working on a well pump suddenly discover they needed a fitting.

“Shoot, fire!” said Uncle Talmadge Oden. “We’ll have to go all the way to town to get it.”

“Maybe not,” said Uncle Harvey, who thought he remembered an old well pump shaft rolled under the porch at Doc Peck’s farm. I was sent on my bike to swap or buy a fitting from the shaft assembly. A three-mile ride along the dusty gravel road brought me to the neighbor’s house. Indeed, the shaft held a fitting.

“Take the kit-and-kaboodle,” said Doc Peck’s wife. “I’m proud to get shut of the rusty thing.”

It took me an hour to get halfway back. Dragging a section of steel well shaft behind a bicycle is not an easy task. My uncles found me struggling up a steep grade. They’d been sampling homemade plum wine and decided to form a search party. The three of them boarded a John Deere tractor and steered a wobbly path down the mountain until they located me, dust-covered, with my tongue hanging out.

“Got the fitting, I reckon,” observed Uncle Harvey in an exhalation of wine fumes that made me dizzy. “Now, then… How do we get it off the shaft? We ain’t got a tool that’ll fit.”

Uncle Dude Johnston, their brother-in-law, recalled that Cousin Edsel Ford possessed an ancient monkey wrench which he used to crack hickory nuts and walnuts: “Got it from a coal miner, and most times it’s laying in the weeds under the mail box.”

They turned to me: “Go see if Cousin Edsel will part with his wrench.”

As I peddled off, I heard plum wine sloshing in half-empty jugs.

I reflected – and today remember – that it was a good thing to be nosy about what your neighbors had in their junk piles and vice versa. This was how yard sales were born and how country folks existed before the proliferation of hardware stores. However, geographic isolation, in-bred Appalachian conservatism, and too many jugs of homemade wine or corn liquor probably kept us from reaping our just financial windfall from the yard sale phenomenon.

We let those Ozark folks from Arkansas get the jump on us. They had junk piles around their farmsteads, too, but they had the good sense to take it to the ultimate level: Wal-Mart.