Here are two views of the farm house in which I first remember living.  It's located near Fairfield in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on Borden Grant Trail--I think I saw it called Plank Road in an old census record.  These pictures were taken in the early 1900s, but it pretty much looked like this in the 1950s. 

My father's parents lived in this house when he was born.  And his father's parents also lived there.  When Mom & Dad moved back to Fairfield from Roanoke in 1954, we lived in this house.  Dad worked the farm and was a teacher at Fairfield School, which housed 1st through 12th grades.  He taught shop and 8th grade science and was the faculty sponsor for the Future Farmers of America.

In my earliest memories, we always had a huge garden--bigger than the yard around the house.  There were grapevines to the left of the house and an apple tree in the back yard.  We had a couple of milk cows, maybe half a dozen chickens, a couple of geese, five to ten pigs (hogs?), and some sheep.

I was never old enough to milk the cows, but my sister was.  I thought that seemed like a fun job but I'm not sure she agreed.  In fact, I'm pretty sure she doesn't.  I recall her saying that one of them stepped on her foot one time. 

I was, however, old enough to collect the eggs from the hens in the chicken house. That was a chore I shared with my brother. Rather than go through the people door, we would crawl up the small ramp through the hole that the chickens used to get to their nests. Chicken poop did not deter us.  There was one feisty hen that would stay on her eggs & peck at us when we tried to collect them.  I dreaded dealing with her.

The geese would usually leave us alone unless they perceived that we were too close to their nest.  Then they would make quite a racket and run after us.  And let me tell you, when you're a little kid, geese look pretty big!  So, we ran from them. Fast.

I remember Dad calling "Sooey!" to the pigs when he fed them.  They would come running.  (Later on, after we had moved to the city, we would yell that to call everyone to dinner at home.  Hey, it worked.) 

One year, my brother, sister, & I each had a lamb to raise.  I called mine Stripey because it had three stripes on its forehead and I didn't have much of an imagination.  (I never had a cat called anything but Kitty, either). We fed them bottles of milk using what looked like huge baby bottles.  After they had grown up a little, someone came to take them away.  It was a long time after that before I realized they had been taken to a slaughter house. 

We also had a long, single-level barn in which we raised piglets for a couple of years and chickens for several years.  I remember the chickens better.  My dad built or had someone build low, wooden, table-like structures that ran the length of the barn.  Spaced evenly underneath them were light bulbs that stayed on all the time to provide heat for the chicks.  Then there were feeders placed a foot or so away from the wooden structures.  The feeders were jars that held either food or water.  You would fill them upright, screw on a lid and flip it upside down.  The lids had troughs built into them.  The whole setup was surrounded by a short fence--I can't remember what it was made of, but it kept the baby chicks in.

We would get shipments of hundreds of baby chicks and take care of them until they were grown up enough to be sold.  There were both yellow and black chicks, but many more yellow ones than black ones.  My brother & I had the job of filling the feeders. We also had to crawl under the wooden structure and pull out any dead chicks.  They would crowd around the light bulbs to stay warm and sometimes would crowd in so tight that one would get smothered. It was kind of sad, but not too much because there were so many chicks!

I have lots of memories of the farm and these are just a few.