Living Off the Land

Earl Sherwood and his wife Laura truly lived and raised their family off the land.  They lived with their five children—Fred, Julia, Wallace, Robert, and Henrietta—on the northeastern end of what is now Sherwood Street in Oswayo.  They had a few acres on the side hill where they always had a large garden that they worked together, growing, harvesting, and canning or drying the produce.  There was no freezer, so they needed to preserve food in this way.  They picked all kinds of berries, apples, nuts, etc. that grew wild in the countryside. The family ate leeks, dandelions, and other weeds such as red root, milkweed, pigweed, mustard, and cowslips that grew everywhere.  Earl also dug wild ginseng root which brought a good price when he sold it for medicine.

   

Earl kept 40 to 50 hives of honeybees and sold the honey.  Many of the hives had been taken from bee trees in the woods.  He would find a bee tree and keep watch all summer.  Then he would cut it in the fall to take the honey and sell it.  If he saw a honeybee in the wild, Earl would use a little honey in a small box and when the bee entered the box in his hand, he would place a small amount of flour on the bee and let it loose.  He would follow it as far as he could see, sit down and wait until the bee returned for more honey, then follow it again until he located the bee tree.  Later he would cut the tree and gather the bees and honey.  As you can imagine, this was time-consuming and took great patience.

Earl usually had a horse which he used to work and fit the ground to plant, cultivate, etc.  He would cut trees and skid them, cutting them up by hand for firewood.  They got milk and butter from a cow he would keep.  For meat, he raised a calf, as well as a pig or two each year.  He would also keep a flock of chickens for eggs and meat. 

Besides raising his meat, Earl was a great hunter, trapper, and fisherman.  The family was known to eat squirrel, grouse, woodchuck, pheasant, raccoon, and venison.

Earl always had a foxhound, and sometimes a coon hound. One year when I was in the 7^th or 8^th grade, his foxhound died.  Since he didn’t have money or time to buy and train a foxhound, he used three of his children as foxhounds.  He’d take one at a time out of school to track foxes, having the child stay on the trail “barking” while he positioned himself ahead where he figured the fox would come through.   He hunted fox to sell the hides.

I never knew Earl to have a car.  He always walked or hired someone to take him to Olean.  He would always walk to other towns or bum rides.  The family members were good neighbors and honest.  Laura was active in the United Brethren Church in Christ at Oswayo, always attending the Ladies Aide the first and third Thursday of each month.  All of the family that I knew have been dead for many years, but I still remember how they lived off the land with such resourcefulness.

--Darell