What Will I Be When I Grow Up?

By: Marieanne Coursen, Agricultural Interpreter
While visiting with my mother recently, I was looking through old photographs and found this one:

That is me when I was twelve years old and on vacation with my family. I had never been that close to oxen before and never was again until I began working at The Farmers’ Museum.

Today I am the ox teamster for The Farmers’ Museum and have had the pleasure of training our team of oxen, Jiggs and Buckwheat, who were born here on the farm and are presently 4 ½ years old:

When I was asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grow up, my answer never was “An ox teamster!” You just never know!

Lippitt Farmstead in Winter: A New Experience for Jiggs and Buckwheat

By: Marieanne Coursen, Agricultural Interpreter

Our museum teachers include among their offerings, a tour based on the book, Ox Cart Man. 

I try to make sure I have Jiggs and Buckwheat, our team of oxen, hooked up to their cart when I know this tour is being given to enhance the children’s experience.  However, the book features a single ox pulling a cart, so it has been my hope for a long time to hook a single ox to a cart to go along with the story.  It looks like I will finally be able to make it happen.  This winter we bought a single ox yoke from Nathan Hine (www.thehinefamily.com) in Massachusetts.  After it arrived, I brought it to Pete, in our paint shop, and we selected an historical color blue. 

Next we needed a britchen.  We happened to have one that had been hanging in the barn for years.  The britchen is just a simple harness that is particularly helpful when using a single ox because it helps stabilize the yoke and also allows the ox to use his rump to hold the cart back on a hill or back it up by pushing into the britchen rather than using the back of his horns against the yoke.  We also needed to come up with a back pad with loops to hold the shafts of the cart up.  This we robbed from an old horse harness.  After lots of tweaking and hunting for bits of hardware and leather, Farmer Wayne and I were ready to do a test drive.  Jiggs was our guinea pig.  He is generally the more laid back of the two, so it seemed like a good idea to use him for our first try. 

He was a little nervous about these new sensations on new areas of his body, but he settled into it quickly.  So we headed out for a walk around the grounds.  

He did really well.  What was really interesting was how Jiggs responded when I asked him to back up.  Once he felt how it worked, he really seemed to like that he just had to lean back in the harness rather than push back with his head.  All in all, he did very well on his first solo.  Another day I will give Buckwheat a try.

This has been a fun winter project and it is great to add to the versatility of our team of oxen.  Besides complementing the Ox-cart Man tour, a single ox will be useful for cultivating the gardens where a team would be too wide and for other jobs where less power is required. 

We are getting ready!

By: Marieanne Coursen, Agricultural Interpreter

Jiggs and Buckwheat wait patiently while I unchain the pole we brought up from the drive shed. It will be the top of our nineteenth-century fire arch:

 
Cement block fire arch in progress:

Arches up, picnic tables in place, firewood stacked and covered:

Farmer Wayne tapping a maple tree on The Farmers’ Museum grounds along Route 80:

Farmer Wayne ready for me to ask Jiggs and Buckwheat to move the cart on to the next tree:

Sap dripping!

Barrels being filled daily with water to swell the wood so that they will hold the sap:

This Sunday starts Sugaring Off at The Farmers’ Museum!    I can’t wait to see all our old friends and meet lots of new folks, too.  As always, there is a great breakfast to be had in the Louis C. Jones Center in our main barn, our shops will be open, the schoolhouse will have fun activities, maple goodies will be baking in the More House oven, the blacksmiths will be banging their hammers, and of course we will be gathering and boiling sap and doling out jack wax.  Come dressed for mud and let’s talk maple!

Christmas and the Oxen

By: Marieanne Coursen, Agricultural Interpreter

When we think of Christmas the animals that usually come to mind are reindeer, but oxen play a part in the traditions of this holiday also.

In an article found in the Popular Educator, an educational magazine published by Harvard University in 1898, Ella M. Powers wrote:

“Fifty years ago in our own country, Christmas trees were rarely seen and the introduction of this Christmas custom is largely due to the Germans, for Germany is the home of the Christmas tree. The week before Christmas in 1851, a woodman of the Catskill mountains in New York filled two ox sleds with young shapely evergreen trees and drove over the rough snow-drifted roads to New York City. He selected a corner upon the sidewalk and here he displayed his choice Christmas goods from the woodland. The resinous aromatic odor attracted the passing crowds and eagerly the people purchased his sylvan bargains! He returned each year. This was the beginning of the Christmas sale of evergreens in America. Now those mountains of Rip Van Winkle’s long sleep furnish over two hundred thousand trees for the Christmas decorations. Other states furnish quantities and many a schooner laden with spruces from Maine may be seen in the harbors of our cities at the season of the Christmas festival.”

And this from a London journal in 1834: Singular Devonshire Customs on Christmas Eve

A superstitious notion prevails in the western parts of Devonshire that at twelve o’clock at night on Christmas Eve the oxen in their stalls are always found on their knees in an attitude of devotion and that which is still more singular since the alteration of the style, they contrive to do this only on the Eve of “old” Christmas Day. An honest countrymen living on the edge of St. Stephen’s Downs near Launceston, Cornwall, informed me on October 28th, 1790, that he once, with some others, made a trial of the truth of the above, and watching several oxen in their stalls at the above time at twelve o’clock at night they observed the two oldest oxen only, fall upon their knees and, as he expressed it in the idiom of the country, make a cruel moan like Christian creatures. I could not but with great difficulty keep my countenance; he saw and seemed angry that I gave so little credit to his tale and walking off in a pettish humour, seemed to marvel at my unbelief. There is an old print of the Nativity in which the oxen in the stable near the Virgin and Child are represented upon their knees as in a suppliant posture. This graphic representation has probably given rise to the above superstitious notion on this head.”

This legend continues in this poem published by Thomas Hardy in 1915: 
(by the way, “barton” means farmyard and “coomb” means valley)

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.


So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
I should go

Our own team of oxen, Jiggs and Buckwheat, will be a part of our holiday celebration on Saturday, December 11th. We will be out and about, dodging the teams of horses jingling their bells and pulling their wagons and will be found later snug in the “gloom” of the Marble barn on the day of that magical yearly tradition: Candlelight Evening. Hope you can come!