Dad bought Mr. Hudgens homestead in Jackson County, Oklahoma. We found a note in the Mangum Star that said Mr. Hudgens didn't like the country and never did live on his farm. Mr. W.A. Wheeler, whom theMartin's had known in New Mexico, had already bought his farm and told Dad that Mr. Hudgens wanted to sell the quarter south of him. Dad bought it when they came back from New Mexico after the turn of the century. Mr. Hudgens must have built the old house, that we called the smokehouse, when he improved on the land. It was built with board and batten pine boards and sat on a rock foundation. We think he must have built the barn as part of his improvement on the homestead. From the looks of it, it had been there a long time.

The picture of old Dunn, a palomino gelding, makes me think of our old barn. He and old Rex were our workhorses. Old Dunn was Charley's riding horse on the weekends. We usually had four horses that we worked, but old Dunn was Charley's favorite to ride. The horses were kept in the mesquite pasture south of our house, but they were fed at the barn.

Ours was a weathered gray barn that never had a drop of paint in all its lifetime. No one expected the barn to be painted. It wasn't supposed to be pretty. It was a place for the farm animals. Anything that pertained to taking care of them was in the barn. Our barn sat on piles of flat, sun bleached, gyp rocks that were placed at each corner. A simple, unassuming structure, typical of western Oklahoma farmsteads at the turn of the century. It probably started as a two-room rectangle and over the years, lean-to sheds were built on the north and south. Inside these grayed walls was a repair shop for fixing the harness and a few veterinary medicines. It was a storehouse for feed and seed for the next year. There was a small lean-to chicken house on the east end. It was a natural place for all the wild creatures to find a place to live during the winter. The skunks and opossums lived underneath and the rats and mice lived in every little nook and cranny.

One of the best things that our barn was used for was for hide and seek games that were enjoyed by all the kids in the neighborhood. Sundays brought all our kin and friends to our house and we had one continuous hide and seek game. There were a million places to hide in the barn. Our barn was a storage house for our horses feed. We could drive a wagon loaded with feed through the middle section of the barn. The seed wheat and cottonseed went into bins to the north of the drive-through. You could unload the oats into the south bin for horse and cow feed. Dad used to close in the center section and make it into a pigpen to fatten the hogs that we butchered in the wintertime.

We had a little Rat Terrier dog that wasn't any bigger than your two fists and he hated rats. Cortis and I would take a crow bar and lift up the boards in the grain bin and say "Sik 'em". Like a flash he was under the floor and he would begin threshing rats. He'd clean out every rat he could find. We'd go to the other corner of the bin and raise the floor for him to find a new supply of rats. What he didn't catch he must have scared to death because we soon had all the rats out of there. After the little rat terrier was finished, we took tin cans, split them open, hammered them out flat and put them over the holes in the floor. You had to get down on all fours in a very uncomfortable position, with a hammer in one hand and the nails in your pocket. We nailed the shiny new tin cans over those rat holes. I'm sure many of you do not know what it sounds like to hear a rat trying to gnaw a hole in a board an inch thick. You would probably think it was impossible. But they must work in shifts and around the clock without ceasing for unless you scare them away from that hole they keep gnawing until they can squeeze their body through to the food. One of the frightening sounds you never forget from your childhood is that gnawing, grinding, grating sound of a rat eating through a board. It is an experience that will never leave you, not in a lifetime.

I always thought our work on those rat holes must have frustrated the rat population when they couldn't get to their food supply. Nature taught them to be very adaptable and resourceful. They just began an immediate attack on another knothole in the floor and ate at it until they had gained another entrance to their favorite food supply. After the rat holes were covered, Dad would say, "You boys go out there and clean out that seed bin." Cortis and I were the boys he was talking to. We took a hoe and broom and began working on that dirty bin. When we were through it was clean enough to use for a table. Dad inspected it and gave his approval or his disapproval. If he found it unacceptable we started all over. Dad voice was enough to persuade you to do it right.

As the days passed, the rabbits grew, became large, soft, cuddly and made very good pets. We were little boys and it was all we could do to pick them up in our arms. Their back legs would almost touch the floor. Our days began by watering and feeding the rabbits and ended with making sure the barn door was secure so that some critter wouldn't get in and eat them during the night. We spent many hours in the wheat bin petting and loving those rabbits. Then the terrible day of reality came. Dad came in from the field and said, "Boys the thresher is going to be here next week and you better clean that wheat bin out for our new seed wheat for next year". And in the same breath, as if there was no pain to it, "Those rabbits will have to go!" Dad had told us that there would come a time when we would have to let them go, we knew better than to ask him to let us keep them. In a very tearful ceremony, we took them out into the pasture and told them goodbye. They slowly hopped out of sight and went to live in the wild. In my childhood years, it never occurred to me that they would not survive, but we never saw them again. My adult knowledge tells me that they did not live through the night for there were all kinds of wild critters out hunting a rabbit for a meal. I'm glad that in my innocence I did not know that they could not survive after being pets, it would have been too painful for a six-year-old to bear. This ended our rabbit raising.

The men in the families did the fieldwork. Dad and the big brothers were always busy plowing, planting and harvesting the crops. They worked twelve-hour days cultivating the crops on our 160 acres of farmland with one and two row equipment. Dad, Herbie and Gilbert would run the plows and handle the horses. As I grew up, Herbie and Gilbert married and moved to their own homes. Charley and Clyde took their place in the field.

The harness room was on the east side of the barn and close to the lot. About head high, on the exposed two by fours, Dad had driven six-inch nails or hooks fastened to the board where we hung the horse collars. The harness was on nails about waist high so that you could walk up to the wall and take the harness in your arms to carry it out to the horses. If we plowed with two horses we used chain harness on Ole Dun and Rex. With four horses, Prince and a fourth horse would wear the breaching harness. All this harness was made from leather and steel fasteners. Keeping the harness repaired was winter work and Dad and the older brothers used gallons of linseed oil on the harness to keep it soft. In the winter he worked on the harness getting it ready for the next season of work. There was no money to buy harness and he was careful to make it last as long as he could. This frugal, laborious skill of repairing was passed on to his family. With his rough callused, leather brown hands, he touched all of his repair tools with loving care. Cleaning, rubbing, sharpening, oiling and carefully hanging them back in their place in the tool shed. He didn't raise a son who wasn't very careful to take meticulous care of their tools. Passing on his love for good tools and caring for them is a legacy I inherited from my Dad, and I hope I have passed it on to my son and grandsons. Most of the Martin's fixed and repaired everything that broke around the farm until there was not anything left to fix. These days we call it "do it yourself" skills. I'm glad my Dad taught me to make do, make it over and do without. It didn't make me a millionaire but it certainly made me proud of my work when I had finished a do it yourself job.

As he repaired the harness, he would make it over, put in new parts and replace the worn out pieces with new leather. One piece of harness that had to be replaced was the reins. They were long leather strips of tanned leather about one inche wide that hooked to the bridle and ran down the back of the horse to the hands of the driver. The driver pulled on the reins to turn the horses to the right and left.

There was never any doubt in our minds that she wasn't going to find a use for those worn out reins. She had raised six boys and never grew taller than five feet three, weighing less that one hundred and twenty five pounds, but she never had any trouble keeping us under control. I've always said, "Either Cortis or I, and most of the time both, got a spanking every day." Mother was the one who delivered the physical discipline, but Dad had a look that could burn you into the ground, and voice that sent pure terror up you spine. Yes, we knew what those old reins were going to be used for. What she couldn't convince us to do willingly those worn out harness reins could. There were other things inside the harness room. About head high, between the two by fours, Dad cut short lengths of boards and nailed them cross ways to make shelves. On these shelves he stored the horse liniment, turpentine and salve. He bought the horse medicine from the traveling salesman that brought his wares to our farm. We used those medicines to doctor the horses' shoulders that were rubbed raw from the hard work of pulling the plows.

Once you've smelled horse liniment, you never forget the odor. That was one of the smells of a farm that lives with you forever, and always the aroma brings back the same thoughts----someone's got the lid off the liniment. I can still smell that liniment and we haven't uncorked a bottle in sixty years that's how strong the smell was, I wish that each of you could smell horse lineament just once in your lifetime. There is nothing in modern days that matches that odor.

When the weather changed or a north wind blew in the mules would run the cows and bite them on the back. Dad would yell at Cortis and I, "You boys go out there and make those mules stop running the milk cows or we wont get a drop of milk tonight." We'd run the mules off to another section of the pasture. The next time a norther blew in, Ole Ben and Julie were back at their favorite past time, and our job began all over again. They ran those cows as long as we had them. Dad was the only Veterinarian that we ever had. He loved his horses and tenderly cared for them. He taught us that it was our responsibility to care for them for they could not care for themselves. His actions taught us to be caring and loving to the animals so that they would be able to work for us in return. Those old bottle medicines that my Dad bought from a traveling salesman were sitting on the two by four shelves when I left the farm. They weren't important to me in 1948 when I began to teach school and I left them there in the old barn. You can't imagine how many times I've wished I had kept those old horse medicine bottles.

There's one other experience that you have missed by not being raised on the farm and it pertains to the barn lot. Around the south and east side of the barn was a barb wire fence that made a lot for the horses. The farm animals all lived within the confines of this fenced lot when they were penned. A barnyard is comparable to the modern day compost pile, except the compost in the lot was waste from the animals and as it was rained on and rotted, it fermented. You prayed for the wind to blow from the north or west, away from the house. With a pigpen inside the open section of the barn and the horses on the outside, there was a smell that you could not escape.

Dad fixed foot scrapers at the edge of the porch to clean our shoes. Woe be unto you if you failed to use the foot scrapers when you finished your work at the barn. The minute you stepped inside the door, You could see Mother "sniff, sniff", raise her voice and say, "You go back outside and work on those barnyard shoes, again." And again. And again!!!!. You cleaned them off on the shoe scrappers and then you took your pocketknife and scraped off the soles. You had to pass Mothers sniff test everytime you entered that door. If she wasn't satisfied, you were banished outside until you did pass her sensitive nose test. Believe me, I don't miss that memory one bit!!!!! When we left the farm, the old barn was still standing. In the years that followed, it disappeared. I can't remember if it blew away or just fell down. It really doesn't matter, for it is just gone from sight, never can it be erased from my memory. As I think back over years and am asked to tell about the farmyard, the old grayed barn and the workhorses, I feel as though it was only yesterday and I'm still a little boy. When I look at these pictures I know there has been many years between them and today, but maybe I am still a little boy at heart and I want to enjoy the simple things of life a little while longer. Yes, memories are all that's left of the old barn.

Now, the time has come for you to build your own reservoir of remembrances. Cherish them, save them, love them, and pass them on to those you love. For there comes a time when your memories are all that's left------but don't be sad. Your cherished memories will bring joy to your heart as you remember the by gone days of your childhood------and those are the memories I want you to save, and share with your family.