Delmont Little
I was born on a farm located on the Back Road, a few miles from Harvey Station. My parents were Lottie (Coburn) and Pembroke Little. There were five children in my family. I was the third child in a family of four boys and one girl.
My father raised dairy cattle. However, during the winter months, he worked as a plumber in Montreal or Saint John.
We grew a couple of acres of turnips each year which were fed to the cattle. The turnips were stored in the basement of our house. Each day before going to school, one of us would carry a bag of turnips to the barn. At noon, Mother would go to the barn and feed them to the cattle. For water, we drove the cattle a quarter of a mile to a spring in the woods.
In order to have a large herd of cattle, it was necessary to harvest more hay than our farm would yield. We hayed several of the meadows that were located in our area. The meadows we hayed were the Tommy Sessford Meadow, the Angus Swan Meadow, the Sammy Davis Meadow and the Stacks Meadow.
There was a barn located in the Stacks Meadow. I can remember driving a horse and mower to this meadow and staying overnight. The next morning, Father arrived with food for the next day. Very often we would spend a week in this meadow. Every day father would bring our food. We would put the hay in stacks or in the barn. This was hauled out by sleigh during the winter. It was harder to get the hay out on a wagon; you could also haul a larger load on a sleigh.
For entertainment, we used to attend house parties where we danced or played cards. Usually there was someone in our crowd who could play a fiddle, the piano, or a guitar. Some of the games we played were Drop the Handkerchief, Musical Chairs, My Little Dog Won't Bite You, and Hunt the Buffalo. In the summer we would travel by horse and wagon to the party; whereas in the winter we travelled by horse drawn bobsleds. One trip, I can remember driving a horse drawn bobsled with side racks. There were twenty-three of us on the sled, having picked up party-goers along the way. At one in the morning, after a fun-filled evening of song and dance, we travelled slowly homeward, usually a distance of several miles.