Cold Potatoes, Corn Bread and Mush

Anderson County, Tennessee. October, nineteen thirty-three. Lewis Hine follows a mule around a sorghum mill on the Stooksberry homestead — land the government had just bought.

On the Fred Hatmaker farm, what Hine called the up-to-date method of making molasses. His caption adds that the farm "will be under water when the Norris Dam reservoir fills."

The boiling, on the same farm. It was the last season for this ground.

The men building the dam ate outside. Lunch time at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp: the crowd at the cook tent is being served.

The lunch counter is lumber — set aside, the caption notes, to build their winter barracks.

And at the new town of Norris, a temporary kitchen fed the cafeteria. The government was now in the cooking business.

Racine, West Virginia. September, nineteen thirty-eight. This farmer makes molasses to sell.

Marion Post Wolcott photographed the skimming —

— and the vat, where the cane juice runs section to section until it comes out molasses at the far end.

The coal towns bought their sweets. Miners at Pursglove wait for the bus, eating popsicles.

At Osage, payday: a miner walks the rail line home with flour and groceries.

At the Tygart Valley homestead project, the government built the store itself.

And a night-shift man at Westover starts his breakfast when he gets home in the morning. Wolcott noted the household: he is Polish, his wife Hungarian.

Brethit County, Kentucky. September, nineteen forty. Cane cutting, on the road between Jackson and Campton.

The same rite Hine had photographed in Tennessee seven years earlier, and Wolcott in West Virginia two years before: ginning the cane.

The boiler pit is homebuilt, mud and rocks. The man who does the cooking goes farm to farm, and takes a share of the syrup for his work.

Then the pouring off, through a cloth strainer, at what the caption calls a "syruping off."

A schoolboy's lunch that fall, in the photographer's inventory: cold potatoes, corn bread and mush.

Store food came home however the road allowed. A sack of meal, by mule.

Or across the swinging bridge at Jackson, in paper bags.

What was not bought was put up. S.H. Castle's storage house near Barbourville, November: canned goods on the shelves, vegetables below.

And in Josh Calahan's smokehouse, the winter's meat, home-raised.

When these counties cooked at scale, it was for each other. Near Bardstown, a church is giving a benefit supper.

Beef and lamb, barbecued in open kettles over a wood fire.

Parishioners peeled the potatoes together.

An apple was peeled while the tables filled.

The food committee set the tables in the churchyard.

At Campton, on court day, dinner was served in the courthouse yard — for the benefit of the church.

And at Quicksand school, a pie and box supper. Each pie auctioned to the highest bidder — usually the girl's boyfriend, who then had the privilege of eating it with her.

Granville County, North Carolina. November sixteenth, nineteen thirty-nine. Corn-shucking day at the Wilkins place, and the kitchen is making biscuits for the crew.

The men sat down to a table where the cake was passed by hand.

Dinner was the pay. The Wilkins men ate first.

The Black tenants and neighbors who had shucked the same corn ate after the white men had finished. The photographer wrote that order into her caption.

Then the women, who had cooked all of it, washed all of it.

The same month, in the same settlement: Rosa Wilkins churning butter by the kitchen stove.

Her son milked in the evening.

In Wake County, Zollie Lyon came home from the field at noon to eat with his family.

At Penderlea, winter began with hog killing. A homesteader and his neighbor work one hog between them.

In Orange County, a portable cane mill worked Wes Chris's tobacco farm, in what the file calls a prosperous Black settlement. The mill's owner took every sixth gallon.

A neighbor watched the syrup come, dipping snuff.

In Durham, outside the tobacco warehouse, the caption reads like a ledger: farmers eat a lot of ice cream and drink lots of beer while waiting to be paid.

And on opening day of the tobacco market at Mebbin, the Parent Teachers Association sold Brunswick stew by the bowl — to build the school a gymnasium.

Not everyone had a kitchen. A Florida migrant's supper at Belcross: cold baked beans, bread, and a bottle of pop.

At the Camden railroad crossing, another man's supper was a nickel pie and a glass of milk.

The same crews sorted cabbages at the Webster Canning Company at Cheriton, Virginia —

— where the cans went into boxes made on the spot. Food, from here on, was also an industry.

Change came unevenly. A twelve-year-old girl, one of nine in her family, cooks the meal in an open lean-to in a field off a Tennessee highway.

A few years and a power line away, a farm wife in Knox County, Tennessee, in what the agency called her electric kitchen.

In Knoxville, refrigeration arrived as a public room: a community locker plant, a rented drawer of cold for families without a refrigerator.

Nineteen forty-six. After a national coal strike, the government surveyed the coal camps, and Russell Lee's camera kept walking into kitchens. Here: potatoes, stored under the table.

The Davis family of Arjay, Kentucky, at dinner in their two-room house.

Andrew Broughton, with some of the three hundred fifteen quarts of fruit and vegetables his wife canned that summer.

Mrs. Gillie Treadway takes the milk in through the kitchen window. The caption records why: no refrigeration in the house.

The Eldridge family kept a garden, a cow, chickens and hogs. Supper, at Four Mile, Kentucky.

The mine at Four Mile had been sealed after an explosion the winter before. Lunch on the schoolhouse grounds stayed.

At Kenvir, groceries came on wheels — a private traveling store working the company housing rows.

Bobbie Jean Sergent, at the kitchen window at Lejunior.

Her brother and sister at breakfast.

And a neighbor feeding the hog that the caption says would supply the family's lard and meat for the winter.

In West Virginia, the day still started with the lunch bucket, filled at the kitchen table.

At Kopperston, the Jasper family ate dinner in the kitchen —

— and so did the family of P.C. Goins, a section foreman, one street over.

The company store sold the meat.

Joshua Spradley, who lived alone in a garage house, cooked for himself. Ten dollars sixty a month, electricity included — the rent is in the caption.

The Blaney family at supper. Twenty-four years with the company.

The Mayo family bought milk from a neighboring miner. Lee's caption is an inspection report: cows untested, milk sold raw, the buckets washed in a little lukewarm water.

Mrs. Bill Daniels canned pears at Panther —

— and at Bradshaw, the children washed the jars.

At a family reunion in Hensley Hollow, the orphaned children of a miner ate ice cream.

In Virginia, at Raven, Mrs. Tudor Circo kept her canning under the house, on shelves built into the foundation.

Her neighbor James Wheeler mended the fence of his chicken yard, his boy watching through the palings.

And at Wheelwright — the model camp, the one with the golf course — miners took their coffee at a soda fountain.

At lunchtime, the town restaurant filled with schoolchildren.

Nineteen seventy-four. The government photographed these mountains once more — this time on color film. A miner near Richlands, Virginia, spreads his lunch on a bench in the shower room.

From here on, no machine estimated anything. Gary McKenny, five, eats a green apple at Rhodell, West Virginia.

Near Charleston, Paul Davis was still building a log smokehouse — the same winter arithmetic as nineteen forty.

Near Gruetli, Tennessee, a miner's two sons stand by the refrigerator. Their father kept cows, pigs and chickens anyway — the caption says, to give his boys something to do.

At the Tennessee Consolidated coal company's first annual picnic, Alvin Elledge sat with his son — barbecue, sports, and a talk on retirement benefits.

A woman went home from that picnic with a dishwasher. Forty-one years earlier, Hine had photographed a mule turning a cane mill. Every meal in this film sat somewhere on the road between those two machines.

The government photographed the whole road. If your people fed a family from a garden, a smokehouse, or a company store, the comments are open.