CHILDREN WILL PLAY

My grandfather, Wye Plummer Pritt, was born in 1884. He grew up in a two-story log house that his father, John Hadden Pritt, built with the help of neighbors. For two years his father had been preparing logs. One day he and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Shiflett Pritt and their first three children, Lottie Lee, Elam Carper, and Guy McClung, arrived at the site. All their possessions plus the children were in a horse drawn wagon. Some chickens were in a crate, and a cow followed placidly behind the wagon. In one day my great-grandfather and his neighbors built a two-story log house. That night my great-grandfather, his wife, and the three children slept in their new home.

The second story was an unfinished attic with a partition in the center. The girls slept on one side and the boys slept on the other side. A hole in the floor on each side and two ladders provided both access and heat to the attic. In the winter, snow would come through chinks in the logs. Fifty years later, my grandfather remembered how the snow would tickle his nose when he was in bed.

Washing clothes was done in big kettles hanging over a wood fire. The agitator for their “washing machine” was the handle of a hoe, rake, or shovel. It was also used to transfer clothes from the pot of boiling soapy water to the pot of rinse water. The clothes were wrung out by hand.  

Altogether there were eight children. My grandfather was sixth. When he was born, his two older brothers, Carper and Guy, were twelve and ten years old. When he was seven years old, the youngest brother, Willard Jesse, was born. The four sisters were Lottie Lee, Amy Pearl, Tippie Jane, and Mabel Hannah. There was always a lot of work to be done. The children worked most of the day. There were sewing, washing, cooking, working in the farm fields, tending to the animals, and splitting firewood to be done.

Children will play. In their play they try to copy what they see adults doing. The girls made dolls from a variety of materials. There were corn husk dolls, hollyhock dancing girls, and dolls sewn from scraps of flour sacks which had been used to make skirts and blouses. They made necklaces, coronets, and bracelets from wildflowers.

The boys mowed the lawn using a scythe. This left piles of cut grass on the ground. The boys would pretend that they were a horse-drawn hay rake. Using their fingers spread like a rake, they went across the lawn in rows. They pushed sticks into the ground and made boy-sized hay stacks. Once, the oldest brother, Carper, hid soft cow pies under piles of grass. When the other brothers raked the grass, they got a handful of cow excrement. They remembered that, told that story, and laughed about it every time they came together visiting with their families or attending family reunions.

One day a crew of men stopped at the creek that ran near to the house. The men had a bar of soap (a valuable item at that time). They took off their shoes, socks, and shirts, and unbuttoned their long underwear so that they were bare to the waist. Then they all washed in the creek. When they washed their faces, they snorted loudly like horses. Washing in the creek became the favorite game of the brothers. My grandfather found a very smooth rock, shaped like a bar of soap. They never tired of their game of washing up.

Each time, when they were finished with that game, they carefully hid the rock. After they were grown men, every time they visited the “home place” they would look for that special rock, hold it like a relic, then carefully put it back in its secret hiding place. When they were all grown, had families of their own, their parents had died, and the place had passed into new owners, the special rock could not be found. It was like a death in the family. Whenever two or more of the brothers were together, one sure topic of conversation was, “Wonder what happened to our rock?”