Submitter’s note: The story we share with you today are the childhood memories of living in Brown County, as written by Harold T. Adams. A little history about Harold Thurston Adams: Harold was born March 16, 1896, to Hugh Thomas and Wilhelmina Deist Adams, 12 days before his mother’s 19th birthday. Harold married on March 2, 1919, Miss Grace E. Strahl, born Sept. 12, 1901, daughter of James W. and Minnie Skinner Strahl. James Strahl owned the property where Strahl Lake is located in Brown County State Park. Mr. Adams died Nov. 16, 1961. Mrs. Grace Adams died Aug. 20, 1956.

The summer of 1896, my father rented a small farm with a two-room house and a makeshift barn. My father and mother were launched on their first venture at farming. Dad was 27 years old, and his savings, at $1 a day, since released from home to work on his own, had enabled him to acquire two aged horses, and one aged cow, and an aged sow with pigs born in March, same as me. My mother had received a dozen hens as her dowry.

So the farming began. Mother cared for the new baby, the house, the milking, slopping the sow, and raising the garden, mostly with an ancient hoe. She canned and persevered the garden harvest. Dad set out to grow the corn, oats and hay.

Mom got along pretty well but Dad ran into real trouble keeping the corn ahead of the weeds. There was no way but to cut the weeds out of the corn rows with a hoe. It was too much for him. So nothing was more natural than Mom should do what she had done all her life. She had no choice but to spend several hours a day hoeing corn.

But there was no baby-sitter for me. I had to go to the field with Mother. She knew just how to handle this — just as pioneer wives had always done. She took me to the field with her.

What did she do with me there? Just what her mother had done for her. She found an old horse collar in the barn and two burlap bags. She laid one burlap bag on the grass beneath a shade tree at the edge of the field, laid the horse collar on the bag and made a little nest inside the horse collar and placed me in my cradle. I was safe and comfortable. She gave me a few clothespins to play with.

Then she hoed corn. At intervals she did three things at once. She sat on the grass and rested. She took me in one arm and let me nurse. With her other hand and her long dress tail she mopped the perspiration from all parts of her body she could reach.

At the age of 3 months I was inaugurated into some of the trials and tribulations of farming. It hardly seems logical from such an initiation, but I grew up loving the farm and farm life more and more through my 86 years.

We don’t’ generally think of the 1890s as being an extension of pioneer environment in Indiana. But when one recalls Brown County was only opened for settlers in the 1820s, the county had been inhabited for considerably less than a century in the 1890s.

Life in the hills has been quite slow in its progress from frontier life to more modern living. By now more than half the people lived in log houses. Nashville had no electricity, possibly half a dozen telephones, no running water or inside plumbing, and no railroad. Every road in Brown County was dirt.

The Indians had moved on and much of the hill land was still wild. Wolves were reported and wildlife was in abundance.

Civilization had made but little imprint on the snake population. Most of them were harmless except the deadly copperheads and rattlesnakes.

My parents began at an early age to teach me about the snakes and the precautions to be taken especially with the poisonous snakes.

As a toddler my mother would send me with a jug of cold water or buttermilk or cider to my father working in the fields. Constantly they continued to warn me to watch for snakes, and not to try to kill them but I should circle as far around them as possible. Over and over they repeated, “If you see a snake, stay far away from it and go far around it.”

They were so sure that I understand the danger and how to avoid it that they worried little about my quarter-of-a-mile journey to bring my dad his refreshing drink in mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

One day my grandmother was visiting when I started with my refreshments — a barefooted little fellow, 4 years old. Casually, she asked me, “What would you do if you saw a big snake coiled up in the path ahead of you?”

Without hesitation, I proudly replied, “I’d get a big stick and beat on it.” Poor Dad and Mom! Is their little boy dumb or brave? Perhaps this accounts for their never ending efforts to teach me right from wrong — for which I am everlastingly grateful to them and honor their memory and great love and care for me.

— Submitted by Pauline Hoover, Brown County Historical Society