Hunting Arrowheads

When I go hunting for arrowheads I know what I am looking for and I expect to find something. I will stop and examine a piece of flint; a mere chip from an arrowhead that is several thousand years old and has been on the ground on this spot for ages. Finding a chip is the first clue that most beginners miss.


I always look for a unique color when I go onto an old cornfield or a one that was plowed and rained on. The colors on the ground in our part of the country are always in the brownish range — some dark and some light with lots of in-between shades of earth colors. If something black pops out at me it is almost always an arrowhead.

The next thing I want to see are small objects with at least one straight side. A straight line doesn't exist in Nature and if you see one it has been made straight by a human being. So arrowheads have at least two straight lines that are the edges of the blade.

The blades are made of flint, often traded but seldom found locally in the rough. Local Indians traveled great distances to obtain new flint stones they obtained by trading. Or, they might set down along what is now called Flint Ridge in Ohio, (a natural outcropping of flint used by Native Americans for as long as anyone can remember) and strike off some promising flakes that are easier to carry home than a chunk of stone.

If you go to Flint Ridge, be prepared to walk on mountains of flint shards that people flaked-off over the centuries. I was astonished the first time I visited the place — astonished that people often at war, could travel such distances and work side by side in peace, fashioning stone implements of war sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, and leave without harming each other.

But the next day, on the way through the woods, to their homes, they would easily put one of those new flints through your head or rib cage and cut off your scalp to add color and excitement to their adventure told around a campfire back home.

The arrowheads we find and pick up and stick in our mouths to get some of the dirt off, were used and not discarded. We could easily be sticking a flint point that killed a young settler, up from Kentucky, in our mouth and never know if they died instantly or suffered through the night before they died.

I remember, in a cornfield, just northwest of Brookville, finding two, nearly identical arrowheads, where the cornstalks grew up out of the ground. Finding two, like that, tells me that the arrows were shot into a human being or an animal that escaped and died, alone, somewhere in the forest.

Since arrowheads are so valuable they were always retrieved from the prey and identified by the markings on the shafts and returned to their owners. It is possible that both arrows were shot into a human being who ended up hiding in the forest where he died and over the centuries the only thing left was the two stone arrowheads that I found.

Hunting Deer

Shawnee State Forest

© by Abraham Lincoln

I used to be a pretty good shot with a bow and arrow. I bought a new bow in Greenville and this gently recurved bow sent many an arrow into the bullseye on targets. I didn’t go for the much-hyped “Bear”archery branded bows but I did buy a new “Root”bow and it was my choice when I hunted deer. I am proud to say that my arrows never killed anything but just getting ready was part of my life experience — going to the forest and finding deer and their trails and leaving without being detected.

Long before I had any hope of killing a deer with my bow and arrow I spent lots of Saturday mornings driving to Shawnee State Forest looking for deer and was finally successful in finding the saddle where a small herd crossed over each morning. My idea was to be there on that ridge when the deer came up and crossed over to the other side. I did it because of visions in my head of killing a deer that would be fresh meat for the family.

Once I had learned where I had to be to be able to shoot at a deer, I would leave home very early in the morning and arrive at the forest, park my car, and be on the ridge, waiting on deer by 5:00 AM. If it happened to be raining that was so much better as it is a lot easier to move through a wet woods without making any sounds than it is when it has been dry for a spell.

I had visions of a deer tied on my car before I left that day. It was those visions that kept me going to Shawnee State Forest to hunt deer. I always imagined myself coming back home, in Gordon, Ohio with a deer strapped on the car. I wondered what the people back home would say? Seeing me with a smile on my face, coming back into town; my car loaded with fresh meat — and a new skin to work into leather.

Life was different getting ready for the hunt — no sex, no smoking and no perfumes. Instead, I wore apple-stained clothes; and had no sex and quit smoking for a week before the hunt. None of this is made-up by me to tell here; it was old-timer's advice from long ago.

Smearing rotten apples on your clothes and abstaining from sex and smoking is what you learned to do if you didn’t want the deer to smell you in the woods. Deer are also attracted to the smell of rotten apples on the ground and that smell will attract them to the tree where they can eat apples. So smearing yourself with apples was a smart thing to do.

I notched the arrow that would do the deed and drew the string and left it go. But, just the sound of that arrow as it slid over the wood spooked my deer. It jumped up and came down and was gone without a trace and without a sound. I stood there in defeated silence and heard the birds start singing again. I smelled like rotten apples all the way back home.

Shucking Corn

Shucking Corn
© By Abraham Lincoln

Nowadays the fields are still planted with corn and soybeans. The corn is field corn and not sweet corn. Sweet corn is the kind you roast and slather with butter, sprinkle with salt and bite-in filling the space between teeth with bits off the cob.

Field corn is the kind fed to farm animals. During the war years my mom would sometimes reach through the rusty wire fence and pull off several ears of field corn and drop them in a pot of boiling water.

Field corn doesn’t taste anything like sweet corn but we got used to the taste and it broke the cycle of having a pan of green beans for dinner— and leftovers for supper.


Back in the day, the fields were sometimes planted by a check method whereby a corn planter was filled with seed corn and every foot or two over, ran a wire from one side of the field to the other and there were knots tied in the wire.

The planter would be tripped as it ran across the field with the knotted wire and dropped one, two or three kernels of corn into a fresh row that the machine made and then covered up before it dropped another kernel or two in the same furrow a foot or farther from the first kernels dropped. It was called, “checked”corn.

I think the same machine, pulled by a team of horses, was used to plant tomato and tobacco plants.

If, in rabbit hunting season, you could get into a field of standing corn that was brown and the ears were ripe and ready to fall off, you could stop anywhere in the field and see a straight row in any direction—even on the diagonal.

So fields of checked corn were ideal for hunting rabbits and pheasants. But the corn had to be removed from the corn stalk at harvest time and in most cases it was a labor intensity job.

The corn stalks would be cut and stacked up to form a kind of tipi in the field and each stalk had ears of corn still attached. The next step was to let the corn dry and then it would be pulled off the stalks and tossed into a wagon that was pulled by an older horse who had lots of experience in corn shucking and knew when to advance and when to stop.

We didn’t own a car but did go to town on Friday nights or Saturdays with the neighbor lady. On the way we would pass field after field filled with tipi-like stacks of cut off corn yet to have the ears removed.

When the corn harvest ended, the corn cribs up near the barn would be filled with corn on the cob and that would be fed to the farm animals. There was usually some corn left over in the corn crib in the spring but it would be empty and ready to refill come next fall.

Brookville Weather

Brookville Weather
© By Abraham Lincoln

A few weeks ago I stood at the window and watched it pour down 3 inches of rain in a short time. Once, we stood and watched the manhole covers bounce and water shoot-up about 2 feet. Our street looked like a mighty river and it was being fed by neighbor's yards that were flooded and spilling over sidewalks. My backyard looked like a running river. Water got up and flooded the library parking lot. It was an angry Wolf Creek that summer.

In 2002 we had a wet spring followed by a hot dry summer that melted into a cold and wet winter and lots of neighbors were shoveling and blowing snow. So in 2003 we started with a cool and wet spring and had a nice summer with more than enough rain to keep the grass a bright green into the middle of August. That may change now but my bet is that it is going to be a really nice winter and I might not get to use my new Toro snow blower.


Sometimes it is hot and humid and the air is loaded with pollutants plus ragweed. At other times it is cool and breezy and you look around thinking it is fall when it is just beginning summertime. Now and then some of us get to see a tornado.

Do you remember that a tornado took some of the roof off of Boose Chevrolet? Another time people got to see a tornado skipping along the ground and cross Arlington Road just north of where Interstate 70 is today.

People often talk about the blizzards that snowed us in. I remember the big one that found most people stranded along Wolf Creek Pike. Larry Gray's wife got stuck and spent a couple of days with others in a farmer's house on Wolf Creek Pike. I left work early that day and got as far as Heckathorn Road and got stuck. I had a new 1967 Ford. Eventually I was able to back up so I could turn down Heckathorn and followed it to Wellbaum Road. I took that all the way into Clayton and from there got on to I-70 and headed west at a crawl.

It was snowing big time and hard to see more than a few feet in front. But I got in behind a semi and followed it to the exit at Arlington Road and got off and drove on into home. The kids and my wife were watching at the window and were glad to see that I made it home.

That might be the year the trailer park east of town was snowed in. Someone died but the funeral home couldn't get there to pick up the body. They eventually got the dead man on a snowmobile and strapped him on the seat behind the driver. Do you remember that winter?

One winter the snow was so deep along the streets that you could only see little orange flags go past but you couldn't see what the flag was mounted on—a car, maybe a snowmobile.

I wonder what the year 2014 will be like?

August Vacations

© 2005-2013 – Abraham Lincoln. All rights reserved.

 The National Cash Register Company, where I worked after getting out of the US Army in 1957, shut down for vacations in August. The NCR complex remained open but most of the offices thinned-out and some factory departments closed for 2 weeks. Nearly every one had been employed there long enough to get two weeks of fully paid vacation each year and when I left, years later, I was getting 3 weeks.

There was a great exodus from Dayton and vicinity to places like Michigan and Canada. Long before drugstores stocked over-the-counter Benadryl a lot of families headed north for some relief from the Miami Valley Drip. Once you crossed the Sault Ste Marie International Bridge into Ontario, sinusitis disappeared. My father in law liked going to fish at Blind River for walleye and always brought home an ice chest or two packed with them.

Patty and I went past their spot on Blind River and ended up fishing in Kagawong Lake. An immigrant family, from England, owned the camp. Eager to please, they made our stay there a real pleasure. It was a primitive site with an outhouse or privy, and the water you bathed in or drank came straight out of the lake.

I never caught any walleye fish but then I only fished for something I could catch and eat right away and that was perch. I do remember taking my father in law out to my favorite fishing spot in the lake, beside an island and pointed out to him the monumental boulders you could see just a few feet below the surface. The water was crystal clear.

Minds do not work alike I am told but when I think about vacations my mind is flooded with memories of vacations and none so vivid as one to Lake of the Woods, Ontario. I went in a brand new 1958 Pontiac accompanied by a friend from work. We met at State Route 40 and 49 in the wee hours of the morning and Howard transferred his goods into the cavernous trunk of my new Pontiac and off we went.

We found a place in Canada where we could stay and get the use of a boat. The mosquitoes were horrible and forced us to move and camp on an island in the lake — a breeze kept the mosquitoes away. It was a nice place to fish and we caught enough to eat each day.

My wife and I had only been married since 1955 and I was overseas until 1957 so I was just getting to know my wife again when this fishing trip came up. All of a sudden I missed her more than I enjoyed fishing so I promptly announced I was going home the next morning.

My companion who had caught more fish than I did was disappointed but we came home after being gone one night and two days. It was the shortest vacation to Canada that I ever took.

Tobacco

The white eggs hatch inside the worm and eat it from the inside out

You are close to being my age if you can remember what a tobacco lath with a spear on the end looked like. I doubt that many alive today can pick out a true tobacco barn and if they did would they know why the sides had tall, narrow, doors that opened up and were hooked in the open position on each side.

Stepping inside one of these old tobacco barns the first thing you notice is the giant posts that hold the barn skeleton upright is crisscrossed with rails -- not just any rails but very strong and dried out tobacco rails. Depending on the size of your tobacco harvest those rails might have to be moved back and forth on two levels. The top most level and the one below nearest the bottom of the barn.

Those tobacco rails spanned the width of the barn and the tobacco lath that laid across them was filled with speared-on-the-lath tobacco leaves. And a whole lath about 6 feet long was enough to hold a dozen, or or less, freshly cut tobacco leaves. The whole lath with the leaves was hung up on or across those tobacco rails and left there to dry out.

The green leaf color turned to a cigar brown as it dried out. The tall narrow doors that stood open along the barn sides, circulated fresh air that came into the barn with old air among the leaves drying in the barn.

The only thing I didn’t mention was that tobacco had to have the blossom cut off the main stem to keep it from going to seed. And there were those fat tobacco worms that would ruin a considerable amount of tobacco by eating the leaves.

Some adult was always offering a little kid a quarter if they would just bite the head off the tobacco worm. Some did it and collected the quarter and some didn’t. I didn’t do it and got nothing but I have seen older boys do it without getting a mouth full of green slime.

At least once or twice the entire field was gone over with men carrying hoes and their job was to keep the hoe as sharp as a razor to cut off the many weeds that seemed to grow taller than the tobacco.

Machetes were used to cut the stalk of tobacco off close to the ground. The stalk was the part that was speared and was slid down to the bottom of the tobacco lath.

A wagon load of tobacco, on laths, was a job for a good team of horses to pull up to the tobacco barn where the speared tobacco on the laths was loaded on the tobacco rails in the barn.

The tobacco dried and in the winter, each lath was taken down, brought into the strip shed on the end of the barn — the tobacco was taken off the lath and the leaf was pulled off the stems. The stems were used like sticks of wood to keep the fire going in the little stove in the strip shed.

Leaves were packed in a large wooden box and sold to tobacco buyers who came around to appraise the tobacco farmers had grown on a specific allotted number of acres.

Fences

Bob Wright was the city manager when we moved to town. He was the person everyone called when they wanted to find out something. Shortly after we moved in, we began to meet our new neighbors. We had kids and were the youngest family in the block. The rest were older people—40s, 50s, and 60s.

Not long after we moved here I was sitting on my toilet in the utility room with the door wide open. And I hear the sliding screen door open but thought it was one of the kids— instead, in walks my new neighbor, Ruby Davis. She saw me on the toilet and said, “Hi neighbor.”

Lordy, I was embarrassed. I sat there and said, “Morning, Ruby; what’s up?” About that time, my wife, Pat, came from somewhere and laughed so hard she almost had an accident. Seeing what a predicament I was in, she moved Ruby away from the utility room door so I could get out of my bathroom.

I went to Sears and bought a roll of old-fashioned garden wire fence material—brought it home and began digging holes for the posts. Ruby watched the route to our house being cut off and came over to inquire about what kind of fence I was going to put up. She went on and on about this crappy fence I was putting in the yard instead of chain link.


I had to tell her that the neighbor’s young boy, still in diapers, had fallen into a hole that I had filled with water. The hole was for a bush I was planting and I had filled it with water so the ground would be saturated when I planted it. Patty had called me for lunch and I left the hole unattended when I went in the house for lunch.

We both heard this “Sploosh” sound and jumped up and looked and saw our neighbor boy, in a diaper, clinging to the side of the hole with muddy water running out of his diaper. Pat got him out of the hole and took him over to his mother.

I told Ruby about kids falling into holes filled with water and said I had to put up a fence. She didn’t like my fence and said she was going to call somebody about it. Before she had a chance to call, I called Bob Wright, then the city manager, and explained my problem with my neighbor.

He told me that I could put up any kind of fence, with any kind of wire, or boards (painted or unpainted), as long as it was in my backyard and on my side of the property line. And that’s what I did. The fence ended up being pretty nice and was replaced, when I had more money, with chain link and then with a wood fence that is still up. Times have changed. The last board fence I had put up was expensive. Ruby would have been pleased.

You're In The Army Now

Our Company Clerk class after basic training. I am on far right in front row

After 14 weary days at sea, the transport ship docked at Yokohama, and my company went to Camp Drake, Japan and as individual replacements were scattered throughout the Far East - some stayed in Japan but others went to Korea, Guam and the Philippines. Two days after landing at Camp Drake's 15th Replacement Company my orders shipped me to the Adjutant General Section (AG) at 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters, at Camp Crawford near Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan.  

Three camps were established outside Sapporo, the Islands capital city. 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters and the 7th Cavalry Regiment were stationed at Camp Crawford. The 5th Cavalry was stationed at Camp Chitose, Area I. The division had a huge training area of 155,000 acres. The mission of the division was to defend the Island of Hokkaido.

On 10 February 1953, the 5th Cavalry Regiment, 61st Field Artillery Battalion and Battery "A", 29th AAA AW Battalion, departed from Otaru, Japan for Pusan and Koje-do, Korea to relieve the 7th Cavalry who had previously rotated back to Korea. On 27 April, all elements of the 5th Cavalry, less the 3rd Battalion and Heavy Mortar Company, returned to Hokkaido. I joined this regiment in 1955 at Camp Schimmelpfennig shortened to Schimm.

Sapporo was the coldest place on earth. To me it was impossible to get warm and stay that way very long. We stood rifle inspections in blizzards that were so cold the rifle bolts froze in the open position and could not be slammed shut. Troops were towed about the complex on long ropes pulled by "cats." 

We wore skis and snowshoes and Mickey Mouse boots and often climbed up ladders to get out of our snowed under Quonset huts. It was not uncommon to see met walking across the roofs of their huts on their way to the mess hall.

My Army career began with the Carrier Company #2 as the Company Clerk, and I shared an office with the First Sergeant and Company Commander in the 1st Cavalry Division, and I was in the 1st Cavalry Division when my tour of duty ended in 1957. Four years, two months, 17 days of service to my country.