Guess it has been a bit since my last post. It's been a real nice two days, but really not all that much going on to write about. Don't get me wrong, they were pleasant days, warm, sunny, yesterday was filled with hikes and book reading while today had a trip to a state park. So still a lot of fun, just not a lot to write about when most of the time is spent enjoying life and letting it wash over you.

    So today was maybe a bit more interesting to an outsider. A pleasant morning listening to the 'Car Guys' on NPR while eating breakfast and reading the comics. Stayed around camp until after lunch when I loaded up the truck and headed over to Dudley State Park. It is an old homestead that still has most of the old buildings and fields it had back in the 1800's. Today they were doing their big 'cane pressing' day, where they have a lot of volunteers on site dressed up in period clothing and doing some of the things people would of been doing back before electricity and tractor's. Besides cane pressing and boiling they had a blacksmith and a couple people stripping corn cobs and hand cranking a corn grinder. There were also people cooking, quilting, making brooms and buckets and washing clothes. It's always a lot of fun to see some of these trades being preserved and I really get a kick out of the kids who sometimes try their hand at some chore or other. I also managed to get most of the rest of my Christmas shopping done today. One thing I can be real sure of is that everything I bought today not only went to a good cause, but they were also all made in the U.S.A. Below are a few photo's from the day.

Dudley Farm State Park, Florida - Dec 1, 2012

 

The original farm house. Simple plain sawn pine board and batten construction. It is still in remarkable condition for it's age.

The back porch with steps leading down and out to the outdoor kitchen building.

A few of the rocking chairs on the back porch. It would be a nice place to spend a Sunday afternoon sipping fresh made lemonade sweetened with newly made cane sugar. I like the hand woven grass fans.

I know I've seen this flower somewhere before... just can't remember where or what it is.

The kitchen building. This building was where all of the cooking for the farm was done so as to keep the rest of the house cool in the summer as well as protect it from catching on fire. There was also a separate dining area here where the family or field hands would sometimes eat.

 

The had 3 turkeys on the farm this year. It was fun to see how the tom would react every time I'd let out a little hen yelp. They are so predictable.

I am so glad that there are no longer 8' tall dinosaur-birds running around hunting and eating everything they could run down and kill.

One of two tobacco drying sheds on the grounds.

Inside they even had a few leaves of tobacco they had grown this year hanging up to dry.

There were two guys there today that were hand hewing a couple of logs into nice square beams. They were still doing some of the roughing out work with an axe, but this one was getting close to where they could switch to a draw knife and smoothing plane if they needed a more finished product. Note the bare feet.

They had two cane grinding areas going at the farm today. Here they have their Missouri mule, Jake, ready to hook up to the pole on the cane press.

Here you can see the 'single tree' where the mule is hooked up to the turning pole. This type and brand of cane press must of been pretty common as I have seen quite a few of these scattered through out the south.

 

 

Here you see the results of all that cane pressing being boiled down into a thick syrup. The whole process takes 6-8 hrs to boil most of the water out of it. It smells wonderful by the way. Here at the Park they bottle it and sell it as pancake syrup. Back in an earlier day it would of continued to be heated and worked into a course raw brown sugar and molasses's from which rum could then be distilled. Rum was a very universal form of money that was easier to transport and which never lost it's value. Doesn't taste all that bad either.

A closer look at Jake. The guy running him has now had him for 4 years and says he keeps getting better every year. My dad always talked fondly about Missouri mules for some reason, not sure what the reason was. This one sure looks like he could work all day with out breaking a sweat.

The park garden had a small patch of 'tall' cotton that was blooming. You can see by the 5 spurs on each pod that it would not be fun spending all day picking this stuff by hand.

They had quite a few more chickens this year, both for their egg laying and to put away later for cooking demonstrations. These girls are all Barred Rocks, a good dual purpose chicken. I still miss having chickens around. There is just something about watching their comical waddle and hearing their happy cooing noises that just make your blood pressure go down.

This guy was here at the park last year with his cedar shingle cutting mill. The cutting is done by a horizontally positioned circular saw blade. Once a cedar block is squared up it is put on a moving table and pushed into the saw blade at a slight angle to create a shingle with a tapered profile. The operator then throws a lever and the table tilts in the other direction for the next shingle. I very cool machine and a lot quicker than splitting them all out by hand. Of course the original machine would of been run by either steam or water power.

A nice barn yard scene.

Another tobacco drying barn. I also really like the split rail fences they have around a lot of the farm.