Ranching
has been the cornerstone of the Whitmore Community since people first entered the area
during the mid-eighteen hundreds. The meadows above Whitmore brought the "down
below" ranchers up to Whitmore for summer grazing. When the area was opened to
homesteading, some of these settlers were the first ranchers.
Other settlers were the men who came to California for the gold rush, but decided that
they would rather farm, and found their way to Whitmore. When Whitmore was first settled,
everyone ran their cattle together, and raised a lot of hogs. Many survived on deer meat.
In 1885, about twenty-nine German families were enticed by promises of established farms
and farmland. The land they had purchased turned out to be virgin timber, not farmland, as
promised. They had to clear the land and build homes. Water was a problem, so they built
ditches to redirect streams. Dry beans, hops, and apples were early cash crops. They also
raised sheep, hogs, and cattle.
Matilda [Tillie] Cochran was the daughter of the Buszdiekers, members of the German group.
She wrote:
In 1885,
Henry Buszdieker and his family, then consisting of his wife, Katherine, and seven
children, arrived at the site of the Eudora Colony, three and one-half miles east of the
present Whitmore Store.
This was raw land, and for the next ten years Henry and his family worked hard to clear
the land of rocks, trees, and stumps to make this virgin land arable. In 1893, the
youngest child, Matilda [the person telling this story], was born to the Henry
Buszdiekers. By then about forty acres of the land had been cleared, and irrigation
brought in from Cow Creek. By the time Tillie was five, the family was well-established,
with more of their ground cleared, several pieces of farm equipment, and sheds, a barn,
and a comfortable house.
An all-inclusive list of farm tasks is not in order, but it does seem appropriate to
indicate those most important or interesting, or those which the reader might not
associate with farm life at Whitmore near the turn of the century.
For example, carding and spinning of wool into yarn might be associated with an earlier
period in American history. However, Katherine [Matilda's mother] did both the carding and
spinning, and knitted the yarn into socks and gloves. Some of the farm operations required
much labor and effort, as one might guess.
At hog killing time, it was common to kill twelve or thirteen hogs. When the hogs were
killed, scalded, scraped, and cut up, the work was half done, for there was no
refrigeration as we know it now. The meat was taken care of immediately. From here on the
women did most of the work. They fell to, putting most of the meat to cure in brine. They
also made head cheese, rendered fat into lard, and ground the scraps into sausage. The men
again lent their labor when the meat was being smoked.
Certain operations demanded more labor than the immediate family could provide. Therefore,
it was the practice in the community to trade labor at haying and threshing time.
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