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.