times treated to a baked sweet potato after school;
she rode the family mule for recreation.[65] At Halloween, much secret
giggling went on as plans were afoot to take an outhouse and sit it on
the school porch, or sneak all of the milk cans out of the dairy and set
them outside.[66] Skating on the baptismal pond of Frying Pan Baptist
Church, and neighborhood events such as picnics, watermelon feasts and
oyster suppers also lent excitement to the child's life. Perhaps the
most pervasive enjoyment came from the ever-changing delights of the
countryside itself. Wrote one resident of the Herndon area: "We could
ramble through the woods, finding huckleberries, wild flowers, sassafras
roots and stems, chestnuts and lovely mosses."[67]

* * * * *

Although children provided a great deal of supplemental labor on the
county's small farms, the "hired hand" was also an important part of the
community's work force. One local resident estimated that approximately
half of the farms in the Herndon area used hired labor, and this figure
is collaborated by the agricultural census of 1940. Other evidence shows
that the largest single expense (about 38% of total farm expenditures)
for the owner of thirty or more acres was hired help.[68] In Fairfax
County, as in most of the South, this hired labor was composed almost
entirely of the community's black residents, though occasionally a
family would employ a white man. The Ellmore family, who often had a
white man as their hired help, was such an exception.[69]

[Illustration: A homemade sled used for hauling manure to the fields.
Note the two young boys who, by driving the sled, shared the family's
responsibility for the farm. Photo in Annual Report of County Agent H.
B. Derr, 1925, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

Extra help was engaged in several ways. Larger farms frequently kept one
or two men throughout the year, sometimes supplying them with a house
and their noon meal as well as a salary.[70] On most farms, however,
extra help would be hired at particularly busy seasons by the day or
the week. "In the summertime you'd get seasonal help, gather them up
here and there, wherever you could," stated Holden Harrison. "If you
could carry those men, at least the best ones, over the winter, then
you'd have a good force that you could depend on for your summer work,
your planting and harvesting."[71] In some cases the hired man would