Winter Produce in Arkansas?

[AZReenactor]

What types of produce would be put up for winter storage in Arkansas?

Next week I'll be doing my first event as a civilian refugee and have been pondering the dietary differences when Uncle Sam or Cousin Silas isn't supplying the daily fare.

While this particular event takes place in CA the scenario places us in Southeast Arkansas in February 1862. Now I know a little about the food might be available in Arizona and California at that time of year, I'm not as clear on what would be available in Arkansas, especially in February.

What crops were being grown and stored in that part of the country for winter that might be stumbled across by refugees or hungry soldiers?

[kylethebrass]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Unfortunately you would not be harvesting any unprotected crops during February in Arkansas. I used this link as a reference

http://www.pickyourown.org/ARharvestcalendar.htm

Although preserved vegetables would be available (canned), they would not be easily carried. Mostly likely vegetables would be placed in cool storage (root cellar) upon harvest in late Fall. One could have access to carrots, cabbage, potatoes, onions and parsnips.

Your other option of course is dried veggies

I hope this helps?

[AZReenactor]

In the book Hill folks by Brook Blevins it notes that one family (in the 1870’s stored Cabbages lettuce, turnips, potatoes, and beets through the winter in straw lined holes four feet deep. The family’s primary meet was razorback hogs fattened on corn in late fall and butchered in the winter.

This same storage method was used by the Mormon's in Utah and a nice write up can be found in the February 2000 Lewiston-North Cache Valley Historical Board's report.

Some of the crops I've uncovered references to being harvested before the war include corn, irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, surgham, rye, cow peas, carrots turnupps, cabbage, lettuce, beets, melons, peaches, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, apples (senator) walnuts, hickory nuts, pecans, milk, butter, honey, and also cotton and tobacco. The most common smokehouse foods included hogs and wild game. Beef was frequently bred , but usually for dairy or as a cash crop, with the yearlings being sold off for fattening outside Arkansas). Chickens were raised for eggs mainly. Likewise mutton was raised but more frequently for wool than for food.

I also found a nice write up about Arkansas that included crop yields in The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge (1859)

[AZReenactor]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Kyle, thank you for the info and the link.

I didn't think we'd be harvesting anything other than the possible wayward hog, hen, or egg. I'm mainly interested in what crops (and varieties) farmers would likely be growing in Arkansas and have put into their root cellars to still have available for borrowing in February. ;-)

[AZReenactor]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

I also stumbled across a 1918 publication that goes along with the subject of winter vegetables: War Vegetable Gardening and the Home Storage of Vegetables published by the National War Garden Commission.

It is byond our era but appears to have been written to teach the WWI generation how they used to do things and those forms a good bridge in knowledge for us less knowledgeable modern folks.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

The storage method of straw-lined pits shows up in a wide variety of places. For those who aren't aware of the "whys" behind the "hows"... Basically, all you're trying to do is keep biannuals (cabbage, root crops) in a condition that they're naturally designed to survive in, while also making them easy to access.

It works with crops where the natural growth pattern is to store nourishment the first year, winter over, and go to seed the next year, but most of our usual biannual food crops can't winter over if left in the ground because freezing will kill them. Parsnips and salsify are exceptions; they can stand pretty cold temperatures. Onions like it dry, so are better above-ground with air circulation.

But the natural warmth of the ground, whether in a cellar or pits, keeps them from freezing, and the moisture and darkness keep them from drying out and discourage premature sprouting. Potatoes, beets, carrots, etc. are alive, like lobsters, until you drop them in boiling water. :D If they "die" in the root cellar over the winter, it's not a pretty sight.

For humans, that stored nourishment is the useful part, so the ideal is to harvest the crop, let it start wintering over, and then eat it before it starts growing and goes to seed again in the spring, unless you want to plant out a few cabbages or beets or whatever to collect seed from, if you can keep them from crossing.

As a side note... I'd like to know more about the term "root cellar." In the period, it's easy to document it as the name of the large cellar connected with the barn, where roots were stored for cattle. There was a movement to encourage feeding of livestock with beets or other root crops over the winter like in Europe, as we were groping for the solution that silage would soon provide.

But how commonly was it used for the cellar under the house or in a hillside next to the house, where you kept butter, let your cream rise, had some apples or pears, as well as potatoes, carrots, that you used for your normal human-food storage? Today, if there's food kept there, it's most often called a "root cellar," but in the period it seems more common to call it just the "cellar," with "root cellar" more often referring to a place were only roots were kept, often for livestock.

Anyone else noticed that distinction? How common was "root cellar" used to refer to a cellar for human food storage?

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[Iceman]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Troy,

Very quickly, I have come across referances to venison being a main staple. Also, for some reason the farmers who grew corn would leave the ears of corn on the stalk and in the husk all winter. Both Union and Confederate soldiers not from the area made referances to this odd farming practice, so it's something that was unique to the area. So, soldiers on the march, etc., would have come across fields of standing corn from the previous year. Wheat was also a crop, and tons of apples. We think of Washington State as the main producers of apples, but before the war there were over 50 different varieties of apples that were grown in Arkansas. A bug, or something, had wiped out the tobacco crop in Arkansas, so the farmers were turning to fruit for cash crops. Apples and peaches were being grown within the Pea Ridge Colony pre-war.

[kylethebrass]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Nice input guys! Hank, I had wondered what root cellar meant as a child so I asked my grandfather. Grandpa said that his father called it a root cellar because crops stored were generally root crops (beets, potatoes, carrots,turnips and such)

I have been lucky enough to actually use a root cellar. I grew up on a farm and learned how to preserve sow, bovine and grow my own vegetables. I miss learning things from grandpa......

[J. Donaldson]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

As corn was used mainly as a staple for wintering livestock and farmers did not face a rapidly swinging commodity market for the crop, farmers in the Midwest, and from my research on Iowa, normally left their corn standing in the field to harvest when other tasks were not pressing. Additionally, Allan Bogue notes in From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century that depending upon how farmers fed their cattle, corn could be left standing in the field and fed to stock directly on the stalk, referenced as the "Kentucky" or "Virginia" system. (Pg. 133) This practice held on well into the twentieth century.

From my reading and research, this is the time of year that hog slaughtering took place in the upper Midwest. While I am not personally familiar with the conditions in Arkansas this time of year, if schedules ran along a similiar path and they also slaughtered hogs, fresh pork would definitely be an option as viable food stuffs for an impression congruent with this period of the agricultural calendar.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Grandpa said that his father called it a root cellar because crops stored were generally root crops (beets, potatoes, carrots,turnips and such).

Did he make a distinction between a separate cellar used only for roots either for human or livestock use, and a cellar under a house used for general human food storage? Just estimating, if your father was born in the 1930s-1940s, and your grandfather was born in the 1910s, and his father was born in the 1880s-1890s, he would have lived within the period when I agree that "root cellar" was indeed a common term for all food storage cellars, with no distinction. My grandmother, born 1894, also used it that way for any food storage cellar.

What I'm curious about, though, is the 1860s usage, a couple generations earlier. I was surprised not to see root cellar used more often in period sources. But in fifty years, language can change.

For example, from The Frugal Housewife, 1841 edition: "By no means let them be in the cellar after March ; they will sprout and spoil." ... "Parsnips should be kept down cellar, covered up in sand."

Haskell's Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, 1861, uses the term "root cellar" once, but more commonly speaks about storing roots in just "the cellar." And that seems to fit with other similar sources.

So I've tried to train myself to call it just a cellar in the period, unless I want to emphasize it's a separate large cellar built only for storing roots, despite the fact that "everybody knows" that people back in the old days always talked about root cellars, like my grandmother. :) But I'm curious what others have found about the usage and context of cellar vs. root cellar in the period.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[Parault]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Troy,

Your question hits close to home for me.

There was so little, if any, fighting in southeast Arkansas, especially during the time to which you refer, this area was fruitful.

Referencing "Victoria's Home Companion", By Victoria R. Rumble: pp 235-264

Artichokes "...were native to hot clilmates so they grew well in the South. They were prepared by stripping the bottom coars leave, washing well, and placing in a pot of boiling, salted water, stem side up...They were [also] pickled."

Jerusalem artichoke "...by 1860 it had been cultivated for two centuries...they were peeled, ...stewed with butter and wine...harvest[ed] from October through April. In November they could be stored in earth or sand for winter use."

Beets "began to mature in July and from then until October could be harvested fresh."

Carrots were another choice. I am not sure of the particular species that would have been predominate since there are several such as early horn, Flanders, long pale scarlet, & others.

Of course corn, potatoes & beans would have been plentiful. There were no food shortages in that part of Arkansas, as a matter of fact, from 62 on into 63 even after Arkansas Post and the fall of Little Rock.
There were no "refugees" or hungry soldiers in the early part of 62 in that part of the state. The only soldiers in that area during that time frame were home guard.

[MrsArmstrong]

Re: Winter Produce/ Cellar's

Did he make a distinction between a separate cellar used only for roots either for human or livestock use, and a cellar under a house used for general human food storage?

What I'm curious about, though, is the 1860s usage, a couple generations earlier. I was surprised not to see root cellar used more often in period sources. But in fifty years, language can change.

For example, from The Frugal Housewife, 1841 edition: "By no means let them be in the cellar after March ; they will sprout and spoil." ... "Parsnips should be kept down cellar, covered up in sand."

Haskell's Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, 1861, uses the term "root cellar" once, but more commonly speaks about storing roots in just "the cellar." And that seems to fit with other similar sources.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

You got me lookin...so I too did a search for "in the root cellar" and root cellar and found this description:

The New England Farmer 1856
"We recently spent a few days at the house of a friend who glories in being a tiller of the soil. His barn was well filled with hay and grain-underneath was a large root-cellar, clean, ventilated, and lighted, and still another, new and warm where his fat porkers…&c. , &c.; his house cellar was amply stored with as fine a lot of potatoes, apples, turnips, and other of the products of his land" (pg 10)

I also found vegetable cellar in a number of books. On page 133 of Haskell's Housekeeper's Encyclopedia lists a vegetable cellar. Funny thing though it didn't show up when I searched for "vegetable cellar" on books.google...go figure!
Susan Armstrong

[AZReenactor]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Oops, that should have said Northwest Arkansas. Prelude to Elkhorn Tavern.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Winter Produce/ Cellar's

The New England Farmer 1856
"We recently spent a few days at the house of a friend who glories in being a tiller of the soil. His barn was well filled with hay and grain-underneath was a large root-cellar, clean, ventilated, and lighted, and still another, new and warm where his fat porkers…&c. , &c.; his house cellar was amply stored with as fine a lot of potatoes, apples, turnips, and other of the products of his land" (pg 10)

Yep, that's exactly the distinction I've often seen. The root cellar's under the barn, the cellar is under the house. It's not a 100% distinction in the period by any means, but it's also not a distinction I've ever heard a living person make.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[Parault]

Re: Winter Produce in Arkansas?

Oops, that should have said Northwest Arkansas. Prelude to Elkhorn Tavern.

Thats is ok Troy.....it is just up the road.