The Mennonite Produce Auction

The Mennonite community at South Fork in Liberty, Kentucky has an interesting array of shops.

[I have posted before on several trips we have made to the area.]

A produce auction is held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from mid-spring through October.

We went today hoping to buy freshly harvested apples.

To our surprise there were none for sale among the varied items laid out for inspection.

I over-heard a Mennonite gentleman grumbling likewise that his sole purpose in being there was to buy apples.

He was consoling himself with a sugared donut from the concession stand.

We met the woman above with her horse and buckboard just after we turned onto route 910 which leads into the hilly area of South Fork.

Curves in the South Fork road.

This horse didn't appear pleased with being hitched to the bulldozer to wait out the auction.

Pick-up trucks were parked on the road-facing end of the building which was open on three sides.

The fourth side enclosed offices, restrooms and an area where some of the help had parked bicycles.

This John Deere tractor had the standard rubber tires replaced with wheels made from three layers of heavy belting, steel cross-pads bolted on and finished with steel treads welded to the cross-pads.

J. thinks this would be a hard-riding rig!

This Mennonite family was carefully sorting an offering of green tomatoes.

The chubby little girls were cute with rosey cheeks, dark red dresses and checked bonnets.

I would have liked to take a close-up photo of them but didn't want to offend.

We were surprised to find pallets of beautiful mums.  The bidding was lively on these.  The format on the bids is for the auctioneer to announce how many items to a pallet, so the top bidder pays $2.50 x 6, for example.

Most of the mums went from 1.76 to 2.75.  At the greenhouse and produce sales just up the road we saw them for $6.50 per plant.

Another view of the John Deere tractor.

The huge gourds are dried and holes bored into the sides.  They are strung on a line or fastened to a pole as bird houses.

Smaller ornamental gourds for autumn decorations.

A close up of a bird house to be.

There were vintage varieties of some pumpkins and squash.

These were labeled "warted pumpkins."

In an auction crowd which included quite a few "Englishers" this woman of a "certain age" and style was most conspicuous!

The man seen behind the table is one of the auction managers.

As produce was brought in this man was one of several who arranged the pallets in place on the auction floor.  He used a hand-operated hydraulic jack to move the pallets, then climbed onto it and pushed it like an old-fashioned "scooter" to whiz around the area.

A pale cream-yellow mum in full bloom.

A pallet of ornamental kale.

Bundles of "fodder corn" to be sold as ornamentals.

Full view of the shocks of corn.

Pint baskets of chestnuts arranged on a tray.

This was not a calm buggy horse. When the ample lady had stowed her bundles in the wagon, the assistant manager held the horse's head while she climbed aboard.  They departed the grounds with the horse chomping at the bit.

Several small boys milled about. I suppose their mothers had some idea of their where-abouts.

One small thin boy leaned against his mother during much of the auction. She bundled her apron around him.

He was bare-armed and there was a cool breeze sweeping in the open-sided auction arena.

These two sturdy little fellows scampered around the edges of the floor, hopped down to chase each other through the soft dirt of the loading area.

They watched me with wide eyes, seeing my camera, so I waited to snap this until their backs were turned.

Just beyond the auction house several men were loading bundles of sorghum.

There is a nearby sorghum mill.

A very small boy was steering the tractor which must have had an automatic transmission.

A man ["Englisher"] who seemed to be there for the purpose of watching the auction proceedings said to me that the boy was probably only five years old.

"They teach them to work real young," was his comment.

A close-up of the sorghum heads.

We came home with four boxes of tomatoes--nice quality and at half the price of the ones I bought for canning a month ago.

J. also bid in a half bushel of green peppers at $4.50.

We shall have stuffed peppers coming out our ears!

Two of the three aucioneers had voices that interested me.

They did their sing-song chants in an almost musical pitch which at moments reminded me of old recordings of the shape-note singing which was popular here in the rural south-east of the U.S.

I found myself several times humming a note to try and determine what "key" they were chanting.

An Old and Dishonorable Profession

Several years ago in Wyoming after a concert by local musicians, The Prickly Pair, we talked for a few moments with fiddler, Les Hamilton.

I mentioned how many of the cowboy/campfire tunes have such similarity to old Scottish ballads.

Les told us how his family is descended from Scots who homesteaded in South Dakota and Wyoming, bringing with them their old tunes and their fiddles.

Laughingly he reminded me that Celtic music was not the only thing the Scots brought with them to the New World.

"Cattle rustling," he commented, "was well known and practiced in the Highlands, and there were those settlers who took it up in the American West."

We've all seen the B Westerns where the "bad guys" are rounding up and "rustling" the cattle of the honest struggling ranchers and must be brought to justice by the "good guy" in the white hat.

Cattle round-ups are still part of the western scene--spring and fall we watched herds on the move, controled by experienced horsemen and women, aided by a few savvy cow-dogs.

Rustling, I supposed, was a thing of the past and not a practive we would encounter in Kentucky.

Since moving here our only "neighbors" visible to the south have been a herd of cattle. Sometimes they are just beyond the boundary fence, calves skipping, bucking and bawling behind their mothers, the bulls pacing ponderously, keeping a bullish eye on their domain.

The pasture, rented to the owner of the cattle, runs along the curving road, takes in the derelict yard of an abandoned farmhouse, with its southern-most boundary at a creeper-covered empty house and barn surrounded by overgrown weeds and uncut hay.

When the cattle have been grazing on this end of their territory they have sometimes raised bovine heads to stare at our activities in the lower garden.  They watched on Tuesday evening as I yanked out unworthy tomato plants and uprooted raddled bean bushes.

Last evening, after a short but vehement burst of rain, J. resumed bush-hogging the pasture, mowing the stretch across the road from our good neighbor, D.H.

D.H. was working in his yard and true to the code of southern manners, J. stopped the tractor and crossed the road to "be neighborly."

J. came home with the astounding news that 22 of the resident cattle had been stolen, rustled, driven away a week or so ago, and the thieves have not been apprehended!

It has been rumored that the remaining cattle from that group have been sold or moved;

tonight as we went about gathering some produce in the relative cool of the evening, we looked up to see some familiar forms moving slowly down the pasture.

Perhaps the thieves are "lying low" or perhaps someone is "riding night herd" in the traditional way.

This is the brief notice which I found in the on-line edition of the local paper:

Reward offered in case of cattle theft at Gradyville, KY

Offering a $5,000.00 cash reward for the Arrest and Conviction involving the theft of 22 Black Angus Beef Cattle in the Gradyville community. Also, along with the $5,000.00 cash reward a person(s) can pick the best cow out of the herd to keep for the Arrest and Conviction involving the theft. Any information please contact the KSP Post in Columbia, KY.

This notice was followed by the names and phone numbers of the cattle owners.

I was interested enough to Google "cattle rustling" and was amazed to find that the ancient practice has been revived in the past few years and is quite a flourishing crime, particularly in the south-western United States.

A cattle thief was nabbed recently in the nearby state of Tennessee when he attempted to sell 11 head of cattle out of his trailer in a large parking lot. The prospective buyer suspected something amiss and phoned the sheriff.

J. and D.H. speculate that the thieves here must have laid their plans well ahead.  The territory of the old barns and buildings lie in an S-curve of the creek with no neighbors over-looking the farther pastures.  A rough track leads from the road up behind a ramshackle barn.

Having had exasperating experiences with cattle who didn't wish to be rounded up, driven, penned or loaded, I can marvel at the enormity of the cunning and luck involved in moving 22 head without a chance passer-by taking note.

Perhaps they planned to do their dirty work by the light of the waxing moon.

We all hope the deed was done by outsiders, not a local group.

We hope that the "good guys" in the white hats bring justice to the hills and hollers of Kentucky.

[As a side note, if you would like to read more about Les Hamilton the fiddler and his wife, Locke,

here's the link to their website. ]

http://www.thepricklypair.com/about.html