If you have found a bit of time on your hands and need a worthwhile effort to explore, check out the Grant County Historical Society. The monthly board meeting is coming up next week followed by the Heritage Meeting. The public is invited and encouraged to attend both meetings. Read on.

The Grant County Historical Society will have their monthly board meeting Tuesday, Feb. 14, at 10:30 am at the Ephrata American Legion, 276 8th Ave NW, Ephrata. The Heritage Meeting and lunch will follow at noon with guest speaker Grant County Sheriff, Tom Jones.

Sheriff Jones will give a presentation on the "Present and Future" of any new and current programs that affect the citizens of Grant County as well as the State of Washington.

All members and guests are encouraged to attend. If you wish to have lunch, please call the American Legion at 509-754-2761, so they will an approximate as to the number having the meal.

If you have questions, call Rita Mayrant at 509-750-4555.

Slim Jolly remembers open range and then fenced farming

The Grant County Historical Society has compiled several volumes of Grant County history. The books are available for purchase at the Historical Society Museum gift shop in Ephrata.

I bought the series in 2009 and secured permission to relay some of the history through this column.

Memories of Grant County, compiled from taped interviews by the Grant County Historical Society.

Today we begin the story of Coulee City, by C.K. "Slim" Jolly, recorded July 13, 1976:

My father was Willis Jolly, and my uncle was Floyd Jolly. They came to Coulee City, when my father was 19 and my uncle was 18. That was 80 years ago.

Up until this March my father lived in Coulee City, by himself, but in March he had an illness and had to go to the hospital, so at the present time is in the extended care unit at Soap Lake.

He has been real sharp, up until just lately, and at times right now we can talk to him and I can find out a few things. I am sorry that over the years we didn't write down more of the dates when things happened in the history at that time.

I can partially remember back until 1915 or a little before my early school years, 1911 and 1912, but the things that would be real important I think Homer Trefry has a better record of than I do.

My parents, I mentioned above, my father Willis and Uncle Floyd, homesteaded between Leahy and Delrio, just a little north and west of Delrio, and they were going to go in to the cattle business. It was all open range, no problem there, grass was knee high all over the country. They homesteaded and before very long people started fencing up the country, so that ended their dream of becoming big cattle barons.

They started breaking up the country and farming, so that is what they had to do. In those early years farming wasn't real easy as Art Allen, I am sure, knows. But they started breaking out the sod and raising grain crops along with the cattle, and in those early years everyone had milk cows. That was the main way they could live.

I can remember as soon as I got old enough to milk a cow, they didn't have these milking machines to make it easy like they have now, they would milk the cow and run the milk through a separator and get the cream, feed the skim milk to the hogs and put the cream in these five- or 10-gallon cans and send it parcel post. A five-gallon can would weigh about 35 to 40 pounds.

Anyway they sent them parcel post, but postage was quite reasonable at that time, about 25 cents to send a can of cream to the dairy and you got probably from $3 to $6 a can, the price depending on how badly butter was needed at the time, for a five gallon can of cream.

I tried to remember where the cream was sent, but probably to Wenatchee, I don't know. Inez Kriete says they had a creamery in Coulee City, but I remember these cans went on the mail stage.

That check was real important because the $3 to $5 a week was your flour, sugar and the way they lived. The early farming was done by horsepower and mule power. It was quite a chore to get up before breakfast to harness those horses and feed them and then come in and eat breakfast and get out in the field at about 6 o'clock in the morning with the horses. Then you'd have to bring them in and untangle them all at noon and feed them and get back out in the afternoon and do the same thing in the evening.

I know one guy got a job from a farmer up there. He worked about a week and he quit. Somebody asked him, "How come?" He said, "That farmer said I'd have steady work when I went there, but all I had was from 11 o'clock at night until three in the morning off."

I can remember that we had a lot of food, home canned meat and vegetables. That was the only way of preserving it, because we didn't have refrigeration. This I can't just remember exactly, but I know my mother would grind wheat and make whole wheat bread and I don't remember if she used a coffee grinder, or if she had a special grinder to grind the wheat. It was pretty tasty, too.

Of course, you could cure pork, but beef had to be canned in order to keep it. Of course in the winter time it would keep quite some time, outside in the cold. We ate a lot of chicken, because you could have one of those for a meal and you didn't have to store it.

We ate jackrabbits and groundhogs, which are not bad. A groundhog is just as good as eating a rabbit. They are vegetarians, so when you get a young one they were not that bad.

The method of harvesting at that time, they would head with a header. It took quite a crew of men. You had, depending on the size of the crop, to have boxes and box drivers. This header went along and dumped the headings into the box and then you later stacked them. Later in the fall if someone had a threshing machine they would go around and thresh all those stacks for many different farmers. That is the way they got their harvesting done.

The grain was sacked. They had a sack sewer, to sew the sacks. The grain was all sacked at that time. Later they would haul the sacks in early times to Bridgeport and it went on the boat down the river. I can't remember the year the railroad came  into Mansfield, but after that time, they hauled it to Mansfield because it could be shipped by rail.

They would have six horses on two wagons. One driver would take two days to make the round trip, going in one day, unload the wheat, and come back the next day. Incidentlly, our farm at that time was six miles north of Leahy.

Later years they got combines and bulk grain. Of course, combines to begin with, had sacked grain. You'd sew the sacks on the combine and dump them off on the ground, and later go around and pick them up and stack and haul them to town.

I am wondering how many people remember King Kennedy with Punch and Judy. That was a real treat to get to go to one of those shows. He was a ventriloquist and with these two dummies sitting one on each knee and he'd talk to them.

He also had a moving picture and screen and an eight-millimeter film, and that picture would jump all over the wall, an old time movie, and you had a hard time reading it, but boy! It was really great. I really enjoyed that. My brother and I would get on our saddle horse and go to one of these and that was really great.

You know you didn't have any money for recreation. We didn't need any because we didn't have time. In those days you didn't have time for recreation because you worked for a living.

It was real hard if a couple of members of the family had to be gone. You tried not to, because it made a hardship on the others, because you had those cows to milk night and morning. So it was kind of hard to get away. Before I was 16, I probably wouldn't go to town more than once a year, and the town would be Mansfield or Bridgeport, which probably had 300 or 400 people, or less.

Then in 1919 we moved to just about 10 miles out of Coulee City in the Mold and St. Andrews area, and farmed there. I went to school at Mold for two or three years, and then my Dad rented a ranch at St. Andrews right across from the schoolhouse. This was quite a treat, because I had never walked less than two miles to school and here we could go right across the road to school. It was a real treat.

Continued next week