A typical day in Whitmore, before there was electricity in the area, began with a member of the family lighting a lantern and starting the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The lantern was probably an Aladdin kerosine lantern. They brought their kindling and wood in at night because they had to get the fire going to have any heat. One man told what it was like to get up in the morning for school:

Cold. There were no rugs on the floor, and the stove was allowed to burn down at night.

While Mother fixed breakfast, cooking on the wood stove winter and summer, her husband (if he was not away working) or older boys got water from the well or ditch. The older girls helped the younger children wash up and dress.

The children in Whitmore NEVER complained about being bored or having nothing to do at home. Children considered school a lot easier and a lot more fun than helping out at home. The animals were usually taken care of before breakfast: a cow or two, and barnyard animals: goats; pigs; chickens; ducks; turkeys; and horses. Up until about nineteen-hundred some families had an ox. There was always a kitchen garden to be weeded.

There were always chores to do the first thing you got up in the morning. Milk the cows, feed the horses. When I was really young, the folks had a dairy here [in Whitmore]. They went out and milked the cows first, and while Dad was finishing up on that, Mother would come and fix breakfast. Most of the time we just put the cows in the barn in the morning. I can remember a few times when it was really bad weather and we'd leave the cows in the barn at night, and then I had a nice job cleaning the barn the next day.

Mollie Cochran St. John, who grew up in Whitmore, said that they had a big garden. They usually had one or two milk cows, and there were pigs down the hill in the pig pen:

One of the ways I earned money when I was kid, there were oak trees there in the lawn, and my dad would pay me a nickel a bucket to pick up acorns [the pigs ate them]. And if you don't think it takes a lot of acorns to get a bucketful, it takes a lot of acorns to get a bucketful.

Jim Bogue said:

We got up early to do chores, and it took two hours by bus to get to high school. Two hours back from school, then things to do, not too much idle time. We had a lamp to do homework by. We didn't have TV, we had chores.

We'd get calves, and we'd feed them with goat milk. We milked the cows, and we had a separator we ran it through. We had no refrigeration, because we didn't have electricity.

We had a little cooler in the house where they kept the butter. In the middle of summer it wasn't very efficient. The garden had lots of potatoes and beans. We'd grow our own meat and eggs.

Some of the Whitmore men ranched or farmed their property. However, many men, probably about 40 percent, worked off the farm. Several women interviewees said that their husbands worked in the lumber industry in the Eureka area or Oregon. These men were usually home in the winter. One man said that his father went to his local road job at two or three in the morning, and then came home about nine or ten in the morning. Then father and son would go off on horses to take care of the cows.