Life On The Farm Water & Electricity

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My grandparents Heber & Effie Murdock, aken from Memories Of The Farm in Heber, Utah 1916-1930. Uncle Mort Murdock says:

“I’ll tell you when we first moved out there I can remember there was no water. We had to get the water out of the irrigation ditch and my poor mother had to get it and heat it up on the stove, and scrub the clothes by hand on an old scrubbing board.  The kitchen was the bathroom too.  Mother used to put the tub up on two chairs up out of the draft of the floor because there was plenty of draft on the floor, and she’d get us up on there and give us a good scrubbin’ boy oh boy.

 

Oh we can’t forget the washstand. It had a comb case and a mirror hanging there above the washstand so you could see how you looked. It served as the bathroom.

I’ll tell you one of the main things that happened to us was getting electric lights.  All it was was one wire hanging down in the middle of the room with a little bulb in it. Boy oh boy we sure thought that was something great.

 Inside the farm house
Inside the old farm house

Oh I wanted to say something about the ceiling. I don’t know what it was made of, but it fell down, it didn’t break off, so dad got a pole with a board on it to prop it up and so we had a pole in the middle of the floor, it was kinda fun.  Mother didn’t like it one little bit, but us kids thought it was pretty good because we could swing around the pole, run around the pole and have a good time.

 

Mother would scrub those clothes on the washboard and I remember there was no place to hang them but in the kitchen. I remember how cold the house was. The water bucket would freeze, that was some old house. Father would get up and build a fire and you’d think he was tearing the stove clear apart, you’d think he was beating the stove instead of building a fire. I think he was just trying to wake us all up.”

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