Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are one of my favorite foods. When I was growing up it was a good thing that I liked them, because almost every day when I arrived home from school and made a beeline to the kitchen for something to eat, most times there would be a pan filled with warm baked sweet potatoes. Mom would have them ready for us kids to eat when we arrived home. She knew that we would always be hungry.

I guess my dad, W. H. Bill Emerson, was the Sweet Potato King of the county. We always had beds in the early spring to grow the sweet potato slips. We raised them for sale and for our own use. Everyone who wanted to plant sweet potatoes would come to buy their supply. My memory is that there were always four to six long beds that grew these.

On our farm, we planted acres of sweet potatoes. Dad built a sweet potato setter that was like a sled, pulled by a team of mules. A person could sit on each side of the sled and put the slips in the trench. This trench was laid out by a small plowshare that dug the trench as the sled was pulled. The persons sitting on the sled would alternate putting a slip in the trench. A watering can was mounted just above the trench to water the slips and then the trench was closed by a pair of wheels from a planter that pressed the soil together to close the trench. The person driving the mules walked immediately behind the sled. This was an ingenious operation and many a row could be planted in this manner.

We planted many acres each year and harvested bushels of sweet potatoes to fill a contract with the Griffin Grocery Company in Muskogee. When the potatoes were harvested, Dad would haul them to the wholesale house.

Each year we also planted many acres of sorghum cane. We had a sorghum mill and made the syrup in the fall. Dad’s aim was to make sorghum that looked and tasted like honey. He also sold this to the Griffin Grocery Company.

There was a small shed near the sorghum mill where the gallon buckets were stored. During the Depression of the 1930’s, many people came to the farm to ask for food. When the black eyed peas were being threshed and they asked for food, Dad would tell them to go get a bucket from the shed, and it would be fi lled with peas for them. In later years, many people told us they would have starved if it had not been for the food they could gleam from our farm. Most remembered were those black eyed peas.

Another thing they remembered were the potatoes they were allowed to pick up. At harvest time, Dad would tell us not to gather any of the potatoes what had cuts on them. As soon as we finished a section, Dad would wave to those people standing outside the fence and tell them to come on in and they would gather up were left on the rows. This was another source of food for many people during those Depression years, when work was so scarce.

Those sorghum buckets were used for many kinds of food taken away from our farm during those years.