Cedar Park resident describes life growing up

Cedar Park resident describes life growing up

Written by Betty Henry Wednesday, 07 February 2007

Excerpts from a presentation to the Cedar Park Historical Society, Feb. 2.

I was born Sept. 19, 1929, about a mile and a half east of US 183 on what is now FM 1431.

Most early residents of Cedar Park either worked at the rock quarry or the railroad. Others made a living chopping cedar. No chainsaws were available, just a double-bitted axe. The jags of cedar post were sold at one of the two cedar yards. There were no large farms, but owners of small plots rented their land to share croppers. When the crop was harvested, the owner received one-fourth of the profits and the sharecropper, three-fourths. My parents were sharecroppers.

We raised vegetables and canned everything we could. Any excess was swapped with the neighbors.

Coffee, sugar, tea and flour were bought at the grocery store in Leander. Corn was taken to the Leander mill to be ground for cornmeal. The miller kept a share of the cornmeal for the cost of milling the corn. The grocery store let us trade on the credit from one crop until the next.

Everyone had a milk cow or two, so we had plenty of milk and butter. Extra butter was molded into wooden molds, wrapped and traded at the convenience store for bought bread or penny cookies.

Most families had chickens, so we had lots of eggs and raised extra chickens for meat. Extra eggs were also traded at the store. These chickens were fed chicken scratch that came in 50 lb. sacks. We traded or swapped these sacks until we had enough printed sacks that matched to make dresses, blouses, aprons and skirts. Plain white ones were bleached and used for underwear and cup towels. It often took several weeks to get enough to match.

After the first cold spell, we killed a hog or two. The lard was cooked (rendered) in a large black pot. The meat was cut off and cured with a rub in a smoke house. A small fire was kept going for days to cure the meat that was hung by binder twine on the rafters. Sausage was ground and stuffed into guts and also smoked.

Old grease from the hog was saved and once a year, it was boiled with several cans of lye to make soap. Once cooled, it was cut into bars for washing clothes.

Bathrooms as we know them today were non-existent. A small house with one or two holes sawed in a board was located away from the house. It was cleaned regularly with lime. All families had an old Sears & Roebuck catalog and these pages were used for toilet paper.

Baths were taken in a metal washtub placed near the wood kitchen stove. Water was heated on this stove.

There were no swimming pools, but we swam in a gravel pit located about 500 feet south of the intersection of Cypress Creek Road and US 183. Sometimes we swam in Brushy Creek, which was inhabited with leeches and snakes, but we swam anyway and just brushed the leeches off.

Life centered around family, church and school. Church socials were a major entertainment and while grownups visited, ate homemade ice cream and played Forty-two (a domino game), the kids played ring games such as Flying Dutchman, Kick-the-Can, Old Joe Clark, Dancing Josie and Post Office.

Dinner was held once a month on the church grounds on long picnic tables located beneath some oak trees between the New Hope church and cemetery. Food was combined and shared by all. This treat followed the Sunday sermon that seemed to last a long time.

There were no backhoes, so when someone died who was to be buried at New Hope or Cedar Park cemetery, men in the community dug the grave using shovels, picks and crowbars. Sometimes dynamite was needed since all ground around Cedar Park is very rocky. Out of respect to the family of the deceased, since the body was retained at home, someone sat with it all the time until the funeral service.