itude of duties which already crowded the sunlight hours. Still, the
rewards were great: self-sufficiency, economy, and the enjoyment of the
earth's fresh bounty.

With the harvest over the farmer would fill the less hectic winter hours
with the unending minutia of the farm. Fence and equipment mendings,
cutting ice from ponds and rivers, chopping wood, and grubbing up trees
all had a part in his busy life. Another burst of activity occurred in
early winter when animals were butchered for the year's meat. Most farm
families bought their beef in Herndon, but nearly everyone kept hogs for
home consumption.[40] Neal Bailey, a veteran of many local butcherings,
described them in this particularly detailed manner:

Two to three meat hogs per year were raised and slaughtered, all
about Thanksgiving. Farmers used to do everything by the almanac.
Two men would grab a hog and throw it on its back and cut the
jugular vein with a butcher knife. The pig was thrown then into a
scalding trough--a metal trough with water placed over a wood fire
burning in a trench.... In the old days, the local farmers heated
rocks red hot and threw them in a big barrel of water. It was a
day's work to haul rocks for this. The hair was scalded and scraped
off. Then the hog was gutted. Old folks used to take the insides
and make chitlins out of them. I never ate them myself. The hogs
were hung up overnight in a shed or in a tree where dogs couldn't
get it, to let the carcasses cure. The skin was left on the
carcass, and next day, it was cut up and salted down in a box. It
was kept tight so flies and mice couldn't get in.... Anything that
was left in spring was smoked to preserve it through the
summer.[41]

[Illustration: A small orchard apiary kept to provide honey and aid
pollination of the fruit trees. Photo in Annual Report of County Agent
H. B. Derr, 1925, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

Each family preserved its own meat and as Emma Ellmore related,
"everybody had his own pet recipe ... for mixing the salt and the brown
sugar--and some smoked the meat and some didn't." Lard had to be
rendered for storage in the cellar, sausage hand-ground and canned or
frozen, the heads boiled until the meat left the bones, then chopped and
pressed into a pan with the pot liquor to make headcheese. Butchering
time seems to have been an especially unforget