Monday, October 7, 2019

Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...

Linked in due to the reference to rail transportation, and in case I'm wrong on that and can otherwise be corrected if so.



Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...:

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.


Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.



The Last Fresh Vegetable Month



I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.



And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).



No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.



On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.



Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".



Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.





Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.



My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.



Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.



That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.



"Modern Street Market", 1920s.


And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.



Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.







Let's consider the humble cabbage.



Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.



So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.



You can't keep it after that.



And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.



Well what about after that?



Just truck it in, right?



Well, not so much.



In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.



Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.



If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.



So no vegetables in the winter?



No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".



1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.



Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.



Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.


I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.



This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.



Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.



So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?



Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.



But that's only part of the story.

Friday, October 4, 2019

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Union Pacific No. 535, Laramie Wyoming.


Union Pacific No. 535 is a 1903 vintage Baldwin steam engine that's on display in Laramie, next to the Union Pacific's Laramie depot.  People who have long associations with Laramie or who lived in the city prior to February 2011 will recall the engine being in LaBonte Park, where it was part of a nicely maintained display.



In 2011 this engine was moved to its current location at Railroad Heritage Park, the park that surrounds the Union Pacific depot.  At some point following my residence in Laramie during most of the 1980s, this engine fell into a fairly poor looking state and its been vandalized with graffiti.  


535 is a small steam engine that was built as a coal burning engine and then converted in its later years to oil, as many steam engines were.  In its current location its mocked up with a retired Union Pacific wedge snowplow.


Oddly the railroad yard facing side of 535 is in much poorer appearance than the street side.  Hopefully the condition of this display is addressed at some point in the near future.


Sunday, May 19, 2019

Union Pacific 4014 "Big Boy" and 844, Laramie Wyoming, May 17, 2019


The Union Pacific 4014 is one of the twenty five legendary "Big Boy" locomotives built by the American Locomotive Company for the Union Pacific between 1941 and 1944.  They were the largest steam engines ever built.  4014 is one of 4884-1 class engines, that being the first class, the second being the 4884-2 class.  Only eight of the twenty five Big Boys remain and only this one, 4014, built in 1941, is in running condition.


It wasn't always.  Up until this year, none of the Big Boys, retired in 1959, were operational.  4014 in fact had been donated by the Union Pacific to a museum upon its retirement. But the UP reacquired the giant engine a few years ago and rebuilt it, and has returned it to excursion service.  Its first run in that role took place last week on a trip to Utah, and we photographed here in the Union Pacific rail yard in Laramie where it was on a day off before its anticipated return to its home in Cheyenne which will take place today, May 19, 2019. 


The massive articulated train is truly a legend.


The 4014 was built as a coal fired train, with the difficult hilly terrain of the Union Pacific in Wyoming in mind.  The conversion, however, restores to steam service, but as a fuel oil burning engine.  Indeed, that type of conversion was common for steam engines in their later years.


The 4014 is a four cylinder engine that was designed to have a stable speed of up to 80 mph, although it was most efficient at 35 mph.  It was designed for freight service.



The Big Boy was traveling with two other engines in its train, one being the Union Pacific 844, and the other being a diesel engine.  I'm not certain why the 844 was part of the train, but the diesel engine was likely in it in case something broke down.  Nothing did, and the maiden run of the restored locomotive was a success.


The 844 is a Northern type engine built in 1944.  The FEF-3 class engine was one of ten that were built by the American Locomotive Company. While used for everything, the FEF series were designed for high speed passenger operations and were designed to run as fast as 120 mph.


The 844 was in service all the way until 1960. During its final years it was a fast freight locomotive.  844 never left service and after being rebuilt in 1960 it went into excursion service for the Union Pacific.






On its maiden run, the UP had a variety of class late rail cars pulled by the train, each of which is named.


















Sunday, May 5, 2019

Ah Crud, I'd hoped to see this . . .

The Great Race to Ogden – No. 844 and No. 4014

But I'm not going to make it.  I'd have to drive all the way to Rock Springs today, and that's not in the offering.

Well maybe on the way back.


Union Pacific 4019 in Echo Canyon, Utah.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Union Pacific Depot, Rock Springs, Wyoming

Classic, retired, Union Pacific Depot in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Same depot, photographed on a snowier day, from the other side of the tracks.

Union Pacific freight station, Rock Springs.

For some reason, when I took the photographs above on August 6, 2015, I failed to take photos of the other railroad displays at the park where the depot is located.

I did that recently, although the weather was obviously not nearly as nice.





Monday, April 8, 2019

Today In Wyoming's History: A Monument To The Union Pacific No. 1 Mine.

Today In Wyoming's History: A Monument To The Union Pacific No. 1 Mine.:



A Monument To The Union Pacific No. 1 Mine.


A monument, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to the first mine in that district.

The mine was, not too surprisingly, a Union Pacific mine. Started in 1868, the coal fueled the transcontinental railroad.

Saturday, December 22, 2018