Palace in the Fields (Growing up on a Farm)

By Peter Hitt

PALACE IN THE FIELDS Growing up on a Farm is the firsthand recollections of the youngest member of a family of six, in an organized anecdotal style, who moved from suburbia to a tobacco farm in southern Maryland during a ten-year period in the 1940's and 1950's. The farmhouse turned out to be "Dent's Palace", a former colonial plantation manor that the parents restored to an elegant showplace. The author was six years old when the move occurred. Farm play and work activities as well as interaction with the unforgettable characters who were their parents, siblings, neighbors, acquaintances, and friends , provides a unique slice of Americana which probably does not exist anymore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Hitt
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301312962

Peter Hitt

Peter Hitt has worked on this book and other stories of his youth for a number of years. After graduating from military school, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and was commissioned as a U.S. Army Signal Corps officer during the Vietnam War. He and his newlywed wife spent a year in upcountry Thailand. After active duty, he worked as an aerosystems engineer in Ft. Worth, Texas while attending Texas Christian University at night. After obtaining an MBA degree, he spent several years building and managing cable television systems in Maine and Florida. Three grown married children have successful careers and have so far produced three healthy grandchildren. Peter currently lives in the Jacksonville, FL area with the same wife of 48 years who operate a Mom and Pop home inspection business.

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PALACE IN THE FIELDS

Growing Up on a Farm

PETER HITT

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Hitt

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife, Therese; to our three children, Lyle, Sabrina, and Bianca and to our three grandchildren, Justin, Eva, and Aidan.

This book is also dedicated in memoriam to my parents, Moultrie and Jonnie Lee Hitt; and to my three siblings, Moultrie Lee, Lucy, and Betsey, who wittingly or unwittingly provided most of the circumstances and material for this book.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

In 1947, my family moved from Bethesda, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., to a 271- acre farm in Charles County in the southern part of the state.

Motivations for this fairly radical move have been somewhat obscured by the passage of time, but one of these was the desire to get away from the 'bulls-eye should any serious confrontation with the USSR be in the offing since this was the beginning of the Cold War and the Soviets now had the atom bomb. My father had a history of over-reaction to world crises dating from the beginning of World War II in 1939 when the Nazis were taking over great chunks of Europe and the United States was ill-prepared to protect itself from invasion. He moved his young wife and family to a series of locations outside of Washington, D.C., a year in north Georgia, a year or so in Orlando, Florida, where I was born, and New Market, Virginia until it looked like the allies were getting the Germans and Japanese under control. Only then, did he consider it safe to move the family to Bethesda. Another motivation was to provide a more healthful" environment in which we four children could grow up with fresh air, homegrown vegetables, and unrestricted opportunity to have pets. The most practical motivation was the expectation the farm could be a self-sustaining enterprise by raising the main cash crop, tobacco, utilizing tenant farmers as sharecroppers. Southern Maryland tobacco is a very light tobacco that could only be raised successfully in this general region, presumably due to the soil conditions and was used to keep the blend with other tobaccos burning before chemicals took over some of this purpose.

My parents bought the property from the Swanns, a successful farm family, whose children were grown and the parents were ready to retire and go fishing. They lived in a huge old house, most of which was closed off since they did not need the room anymore. There was little indoor plumbing, a primitive electrical system, and wood stove heating. Water came from a hand pump on a well in the yard and a two-holer privy out behind the chicken house was the only bathroom. The house was a former plantation manor, built sometime between 1720 and 1750, in what is known as a telescopic style where different sections were built at different times. The original portion of the house is a modest one and a half story structure with a large kitchen with a massive open-hearth fireplace that had the original iron crane from which hung the iron kettles of colonial cooks. A room above the kitchen served as living quarters. As the owners became more prosperous, a second story more elaborate structure was built onto the original. Subsequently, an even larger three-story addition was added. The brick walls are two feet thick and the fireplaces in every room had been sealed shut for years. The Swanns had no clue as to the former grandeur of the place as the story emerged from my father's research.

The house is Dent's Palace, the ancestral home of the Dent family, still a prominent name in the area. Records show several Dents were officers in the American Revolution and were likely born there. As time rolled on, various Dents left the ancestral home and community and geographically scattered to start their own families. One descendant, Julia T. Dent, married a young Army officer in Missouri in 1848; the young man was Ulysses S. Grant. Martha Dent, who died in 1824, was the last of those bearing the family name to occupy the Palace. It then went to a son-in-law named Bean and finally passed out of the family.

Our family must have appeared to the locals as the proverbial city slickers, but we never experienced anything but acceptance and cooperation from the neighbors. My father was a Washington, D.C. attorney, who specialized in railroad law, dealing with the Interstate Commerce Commission and, on a couple of occasions, argued cases before the Supreme Court. He furnished pro bono legal advice for any of the neighbors who asked, to help repay the many favors we received from them. In moving to the farm, my father also sentenced himself to a twice-daily 30-mile commute; this was before the days of interstate highways or freeways. My mother was a registered nurse, but had her hands full initially raising children and subsequently dealing with the massive demands of life on a farm. Despite extreme cultural shock caused by moving from suburbia to the farm where the nearest neighbor, who was not a tenant, lived a mile away; we four city-bred kids adapted quickly to our new milieu. My brother, Moultrie, was about 12 years old at the time. My sister, Lucy, was about a year and a half younger and my sister, Betsey, was a year younger than Lucy. I was about 6 years old.

Immediately after purchasing the farm, my parents embarked on a mammoth renovation of the 12-room house. The old carbide gas light fixtures in the house were removed and the one or two bare bulb light fixtures that constituted the electrical system were superseded by wiring the whole house from top to bottom and installation of modern fuse panels. My father even had an intercom system installed that utilized vacuum tubes. Each room unit had to be turned on and allowed to warm up before it could be used, so the intercom system was of doubtful utility, but was a novelty and provided entertainment occasionally for us kids. An oil furnace was installed in the basement and radiators installed in every room except the two bedrooms on the third floor. The fireplaces, which were in almost every room, were uncovered and flue dampers installed. Three bathrooms and a downstairs powder room were installed and the kitchen upgraded. The filthy floorboards turned out to be six-inch wide heart pine that refinished to a beautiful color after sanding. The old crumbling horsehair plaster on the interior side of the exterior walls had to be removed since it was applied directly to the brick and rainwater would migrate through the brick and plaster surfaces. All the woodwork in the house was refinished. The result was an elegant showplace.

Chapter 1 - Tenants & Sharecroppers

At the time we moved to the farm, horses were rapidly being eliminated in favor of tractors for pulling farm machinery. Lewis Countus and his family occupied the tenant house on the property. Lewis had an arrangement with the Swanns to work the farm on a sharecropper basis and my father continued the practice. Lewis was a very good farmer, but persisted in working the crops with horses, specifically Prince and Kate, two huge Percherons, but even he had to admit he could significantly increase production by converting to tractor power. When my father agreed to purchase a Farmall Cub tractor, a small tractor mostly used to cultivate (i.e. keeping the weeds off balance between rows) the tobacco, all of the horse-drawn machinery was adapted to be pulled by tractors since there was already a Farmall H tractor on the premises to handle heavy pulling.

Lewis loaded Prince and Kate onto our two-ton flat bed farm truck and unsuccessfully attempted to sell the team to friends or neighbors. As a result of riding around the countryside in the cold, Prince and Kate developed pneumonia and promptly died. Lewis was heartbroken at the loss of his beloved workmates and their potential sale value. The glue factory was called to come haul away the carcasses.

Lewis had a son named Jerome, who was about a year younger than me. On the farm, playmates were few and far between, so Jerome and I would play together sometimes. We had two pairs of boxing gloves, which were originally purchased for Moultrie to take boxing lessons when we lived in Bethesda; apparently he had some problem with local bullies at the time. Anyway, I would persuade Jerome to box me, but he would not agree unless I stayed on my knees. Jerome was little, but fast and agile; he would dart in to pepper me in the face and I would attempt to level him with a haymaker before he could skip out of range. I never did land a punch of any account and I hated getting hit in the face, so I decided to give the boxing a miss after awhile.

I was fascinated, even at the age of six or seven, with firearms. My father would take us target shooting occasionally in the pasture below the house. Unsupervised use of firearms was strictly forbidden, but I would remove the single-shot .22 rifle from the closet and play with it at every opportunity. During one of these clandestine play sessions out by the detached garage, I spotted Lewis about a quarter of a mile up the road and swiftly stashed the rifle in a nook in the garage wall. Wearing my best innocent face, I greeted Lewis when he arrived. Never one to beat around the bush, Lewis said kindly, Lemme see the gun, I won't tell nobody. I immediately comprehended Lewis had obviously seen the rifle, so denial was not credible and maybe I could rely on his pledge to not apprise my parents. Here it is. I said, handing him the rifle, retrieved from the hiding place. Without another word, Lewis took the rifle, strode to our front door and knocked. When my mother came to the door, I watched in horror while Lewis explained the situation and turned over the rifle. The feeling of betrayal was excruciating. Never in my young life had I relied on the word of an adult and had that reliance immediately result in potential disaster. I was accustomed, as the youngest child in our family, to the perfidies of older siblings, but this was unconscionable.

My mother thanked Lewis for bringing this matter to her attention. After Lewis exited the scene of the crime, my mother immediately sent me out the hedge at the back of the house to cut a switch. She had been reading a book on child psychology lately which recommended this procedure as a means of making punishment more effective. My first thought was to run away and hide out until things blew over, but in a flash of genius born of desperation, I selected a long wicked-looking switch that I carefully partially broke at intervals. Delivering this defective instrument of punishment to my mother, I thought I detected a twitch at the corner of her mouth when it collapsed as I handed it to her. Feigning anger, she sent me back to the hedge for another switch. When the same scenario was repeated, we both dissolved in laughter,