EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the 10th installment in our year-long examination of the adventures of Knox County farmer Harvey Devoe, who kept a diary for the year 1861, which has been annotated and published by historian Alan Borer and is available through online retailers. The series began on Jan. 4. It continued on Feb. 1, March 7, April 4, May 2, June 6, July 4, Aug. 1 and Sept. 5. Harvey’s spelling and punctuation have been left as they originally appear in the diary.
With the bulk of the harvest done on his Berlin Township farm by the end of September, Harvey Devoe had only to finish tying up his shocks of corn before moving on to fall activities. One of those activities was stripping the leaves off his stalks of sorghum and pressing the stalks to make sorghum molasses, a common sweetener of the time.
The resulting dark liquid is sweet but very tangy, quite distinctive in flavor. I recall from my time as a reporter at the Mount Vernon News talking to a farmer at the summer farmer’s market on the square in Mount Vernon who raised and processed sorghum one year.
He ended up deciding that it was a lot of work for a relatively small product of something that not many people wanted, so he didn’t plan on pursuing it. I do remember the flavor, though. It would be good as a sweetener for certain baked goods such as cookies and pies.
On Oct. 7, Harvey plowed up his now empty sorghum field (“my cane patch,” as he called it) and sowed rye grass seeds by harrowing: he strewed rye seeds across the newly plowed ground, then dragged a large rake across it to push some of the tiny seeds into the ground where they would root.
Harvey also spent some time this month hunting squirrels (“Killed three squirrels, missed once”) and gathering hickory nuts with his friend Elijah Wheeler (“got a ½ bushel after considerable trouble”). The prime entertainment of the month came on Oct. 10, when Harvey and his friend David Willets went to the Knox County Fair in Mount Vernon and watched a race horse run a lap with the swift time of 2:42.
Though horse racing still has a following today, it was huge in the 1800s. Devoe diary editor Alan Borer notes that it was THE principal attraction of county fairs in those days, so it’s no surprise Harvey and friends made the trek. Though the fair has been at its current location for nearly 100 years, in 1861, it would have been centered around the Knox County Courthouse, very close to nearby agricultural lands covered now by residential housing. I wonder if any of those house owners know that their living rooms or kitchens were once a racetrack!
Though it comes from a little later, a good example of the popularity of horse-racing in the U.S. in the 19th century is the song “Molly and Tenbrooks.” It was most famously recorded by Bluegrass musician Bill Monroe in 1947, though it was already an old song by then. It recounts a nationally covered horse race that took place in Louisville, Kentucky, at what is now Churchill Downs, in 1878, before a crowd of 30,000 people. A big Kentucky bay horse named Ten Broeck defeated California’s famous mare Mollie McCarty to win a $5000 bet. The song is a bit exaggerated, but it captures the sense of excitement and celebration that came with a good race.
Perhaps a song of Harvey’s day that he might actually have known was Stephen Foster’s popular minstrel song about the Camptown Races:
The Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah,
The Camptown Racetrack’s five miles long, oh-de-doo-dah day.
Goin’ to run all night, goin’ to run all day
Bet my money on the bobtail nag, somebody bet on the bay.
Since Harvey Devoe was meticulous about noting his expenses in the back of his diary, there’s no evidence that he bet anything on the county fair horse race.
One source of income that Harvey noted for that October was a payment of $5 from David Willets. That came to him because of the time he spent working at Willets’ sawmill. Whether this was an actual mill building or a portable saw machine, we don’t know. But we do know from Harvey’s diary that they had constant trouble with breakdowns and repairs. One day, the saw blade broke and Harvey had to take it to the blacksmith for welding.
“Bothered a considerable with our mashinery to day,” Harvey lamented.
Another day, they “tore the driving belt clean in too.” Harvey was as excited as he ever gets in his laconic diary on October 19, when nothing went wrong: “had no bad luck to day, for a wonder” (Harvey’s underlined emphasis).
Harvey still kept in touch with his brother Ed, who had been transferred from Camp Chase in Columbus to Camp King in Covington, Kentucky, another step closer to the action. Kentucky remained in the Union during the Civil War, but had many Confederate sympathizers and considerable raiding and skirmishing, in addition to some larger battles.
Harvey also mentions paying a doctor bill of $5 (not a small sum in those days) to Dr. Potter. That would almost certainly be Dr. Samuel Bryant Potter, who lived behind the shops on the corner of North Main and Donation Streets in Fredericktown. Today, that’s the corner of North Main and College Streets. Potter was a prominent physician in Fredericktown until his death in 1903.
As the month wound down and frost became a frequent visitor, Harvey Devoe began settling down for the season, preparing for the quiet days to come as fall deepened.
