Farm kids certainly learned to do hard work in earlier decades, and to contribute to the family when they were young. Here are Donald and Delbert riding a machine pulled by a team of horses. You can be sure that their dad, Clabe Wilson, rigged up the horses for them.
He would have been a patient teacher about turning the horses at the end of a row and watching the field to make sure the weeder didn’t tear out any of the precious corn plants.
Check the photos for the boys’ doing fieldwork barefoot!
But I’ll bet that Clabe Wilson kept an eye on his sons as they weeded the corn, then helped them unhitch the horses and taught them how to tend to the hot and sweaty horses.
I’m going through Leora Wilson’s memoirs, which she wrote decades later. She told about chores when she was a child. Like Delbert, she was the oldest of several children.
Her brothers Merl and Wayne plowed corn when they were 6 and 7, even younger than Delbert and Donald. Wayne drove the team while Merl handled the plow to cultivate corn, she said. “We were all taught to work early in life–a good thing, and we took pride in it.”
Can you imagine kids these days doing much more than mowing the lawn and caring for a pet?