Interview by Deanna Rommel-Noland
March 17,1991
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Please state your name, when you were born and where you were born.
Cecil Rommel - I, I wasn't there. Who am I? You said where and when?
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Yeah.
Cecil Rommel - Cecil Rommel, born in Garfield county, 1920.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - On the home place, right? Was that the old house or did they have the big house built by then?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah, the big house was first.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And your father/s name was Fred Clay, and your mother's name was Gertrude.
Cecil Rommel - Fred and Gertrude.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Your dad was born at the home place, too, wasn't he?
Cecil Rommel - No, that was the old place over the hill, about a half a mile.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Towards the river?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah, about a half a mile.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So he would have been born there?
Cecil Rommel - I'm not sure if it was there or down on another place that my mom's folks were involved in.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - OK, give me a description of where the farm is.
Cecil Rommel - From here it would be north of Pomeroy.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - It's on the Ping Gulch Road, right?
Cecil Rommel - Ping Gulch Road.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Did you ever measure how far up it is from the river?
Cecil Rommel - No, but by the section lines it would be a little over a mile and a half.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - How old were you when your dad converted from horses to completely gas powered machines, for the farm work?
Cecil Rommel - It would have been about 1936.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So you would have been about 16?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah. But I wasn't involved with the horses. They were a little longer converting than some of the others were, they didn't do it all at once. They traded horses in on the first tractor.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Is that right? What year, 1936?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - How many horses did they give for it?
Cecil Rommel - Well it was just partial.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Down payment?
Cecil Rommel - I don't remember how many they let got at that time. They had to keep some for pets for years..
Deanna Rommel-Noland - What was an average day like caring for the horses when you weren't in harvest? When did your dad have to get up?
Cecil Rommel - From what I can recall, they usually got up at four in the morning, in the dark, to feed them and wake them up, eating their breakfast, and harness them up. Go back to the house at five for breakfast and into the field by six.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Didn't Rob tell me that a lot of the bigger cutting machines you'd run two different teams of horses? Run one team of horses in the morning and a new one in the afternoon?
Cecil Rommel - I don't recall any complete team exchanges, but a lot of times you'd have some horses that couldn't stand the whole day. Not too many, but you'd have a terrible time if one of them got sick or give up. There's a lot of energy in a bale of hay.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Yeah. How many horses id your dad keep, most of the time?
Cecil Rommel - Around thirty head.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And were most of them the big heavy Percherons, or mixes?
Cecil Rommel - I wasn't all that familiar with the breeds, but a lot of crosses, I think the Percheron was the basic one. There were some Belgians but what the mixes were?
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Did he keep any riding horses, or buggy horses?
Cecil Rommel - No, they kept a saddle horse, but if they needed another horse they'd just use an old work horse.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Probably thought he had it easy too.
Cecil Rommel - They didn't even have to pull, just all that walking.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Now you started to go to school at the Ping Gulch school?
Cecil Rommel - Ping Gulch.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Any you started when you were what, six?
Cecil Rommel - Six. And they consolidated and the school bus started running into the High School.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - That would have been what, in about 1934?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah. 34.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So you went to Pomeroy to finish High School?
Cecil Rommel - yeah. I hit a spot where I was boarded in town, stayed in town and went to school before that bus started running.
Cecil Rommel - Who'd you stay with?
Cecil Rommel - Thompson's were their name.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Any of them still around?
Cecil Rommel - Not that I know of. The first school teacher that was there (Ping Gulch) that was her parents that I stayed at. When I was in the first grade.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So what year did you graduate, 1938?
Cecil Rommel - 38.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Then you went straight into farming full-time?
Cecil Rommel - Oh it was two or three years before one of the partners was dead.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Would you please repeat for me the story of Oscar Miller' mule train down the Ilia Grade.
Cecil Rommel - It was quite common when they was hauling grain to have one trail wagon and him and the man he had working for him at the time thought why not have two trail wagons. The problems that they could see was getting the wagons to follow the trail on those switch backs. Then they got to that point they had to train some mules to step across the chains and help make the swing. It was really quite simple once they got it perfected.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So how many mules did he use to pull those three wagons?
Cecil Rommel - As near as I can recall it was eight. course it didn't take any power to pull them downhill.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So from the lead mules nose to the last wagon how many feet are we talking?
Cecil Rommel - Oh boy! That's a question. Well you're talking about three wagons, probably sixteen foot bed with tongue, probably twenty four feet per wagon. And four pairs of mules strung down the road. How longs a mule?
Deanna Rommel-Noland - I've known some pretty big mules.
Cecil Rommel - I imagine the mules and the hitch between them they'd use up ten feet.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Yeah.
Cecil Rommel - So there's forty feet.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Your talking 120 feet!
Cecil Rommel - Yeah, 120 feet before they'd all gone past you.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Now those wagons were they set up with individual brakes on each wagon? Did they each have a brake man?
Cecil Rommel - No, they had a brake but they controlled it with a rope.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - To the head wagon?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah. The trick was just to hang onto it.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And hope you didn't lose the rope, right?
Cecil Rommel - Actually I never seen it on the road, I seen it when they had it loaded. I was pretty little kid then.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Now you said going to the Mayview Tramway was like a trip to Spokane today. How long would it take for your dad to make a round trip?
Cecil Rommel - Probably wouldn't be that bad, but from the ranch at home it's about twenty miles.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Could you make that round trip in one day?
Cecil Rommel - Of course that was, they didn't haul from the home place to the Tramway.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Oh they didn't did they haul down to Central Ferry?
Cecil Rommel - No they hauled to Rice Bar Grade tot the warehouse there, where the steamboat took it off down there. They hauled it to the river. There was other tramways down.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - There was no real grade anywhere around Mayview at the time to get it down. Well there was that.
Cecil Rommel - The old Ilia Grade, that the Oscar Miller wagons went down. They didn't go to the Tramway at all.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Of course it was another couple of miles upriver.
Cecil Rommel - Yeah.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - There wasn't any old grade roads down right there at Mayview, was there?
Cecil Rommel - Well there was a road down Casey Creek.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Was there.
Cecil Rommel - But it was narrow and twisty.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Yeah.
Cecil Rommel - And there was the Wawawai Grade.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Which side of the Tramway would it be on, upriver or down?
Cecil Rommel - Upriver. Wait a minute, no Wawawai was downriver from Mayview, And the road was very narrow, the whole way.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Well when you think about it the main reason they came up with the tramways was because hauling down those grade was not fun. So you made a few trips to the Tramway when it was still operating?
Cecil Rommel - I was never there when it was still operating. I've been there when the cars were there and the wheat stacks. You could look at it and see what they'd done. What the operation was and what they had to do. It took a lot of man power. If people had to work like that now days they'd to you to go away.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Very rudely too, probably. Do you remember hearing about the big accident on the Tramway?
Cecil Rommel - No. Just from the old-timers stories. Later on and now but at then times I didn't know.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - How many hired men did your dad keep around?
Cecil Rommel - Usually in winter time they would get down to one sometimes two full time. That was through the winter. They'd spend their time patching harness and tending horses. And when they got rid of horses they started doing cattle.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - so they still kept the hired men through the winter. How many hired men would he have for the harvest crew?
Cecil Rommel - Well take a head count on that one. He had basically your machine and your machine man to tend it, then you sack sewer, and a sack jig, and two forkmen on the hay table, and there was one for just common roustabout who did whatever he was called to do, and four header boxes each with a man, and a loader man to load the header boxes on the go. That was the common harvest crew. It'd take a lot of taters.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - The cook had quite a job.
Cecil Rommel - That's true and make their own bread.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And chop their own wood most of the time too.
Cecil Rommel - Well sometimes they'd get a woodshed piled up in the winter and on rainy days. I helped chop wood, it all had to be chopped up into cook-stove size.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Oh yeah. Did your dad have a kitchen wagon?
Cecil Rommel - No. I think all of it was where they'd come in. Especially with the horses, they'd come in for their noon rest.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - They wouldn't unharness them when they'd come in would they? Just water them and ...
Cecil Rommel - Water them and give them their oats.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - So they'd fed them in the morning, at noon and then again at night?
Cecil Rommel - Well hay and grain in the morning, only grain at noon cause they didn't have time to eat a bale of hay at noon and then at night they had all the hay they wanted. I don't recall if they got grain at night, probably did only half rations.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - That's an awful lot of oats. And then they'd run usually four horses on a wagon?
Cecil Rommel - Four on a wagon, six on the header, and two at the dump to dump the wagons on the derrick. The wagons had a canvas laid in them and then they was loaded on top of that.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - What to keep the grain from falling down through the boards?
Cecil Rommel - Grain, straw, everything. Then there was a hole in one side with a yoke hooked on it to hook to the derrick that one team would pull the cable hooked to the derrick to dump the whole load.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Was the table kind of slanted then down to the thresher?
Cecil Rommel - Very little, there was two men on it with hoe down forks that would feed it into the machine.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Now what I read that they would sack about two sacks a minute. Or is it slower than that or faster than that?
Cecil Rommel - Two sacks a minute sounds about right.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And they'd only have one sack jig?
Cecil Rommel - Yeah, one jig and one to sew and pack them to the pile.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Wow.
Cecil Rommel - For years, they had a tough old guy out there that sewed and jigged his-self.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Two sacks a minute?
Cecil Rommel - That's an estimate now, two sacks seems an awful lot. It could be, it sounds right. I don't recall how many sacks a day, I know on the pull machines when we got to that if the sewer and jig put out 500 sacks a day they were moving right along.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - And the sacks would weigh what?
Cecil Rommel - About 140 pounds.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - That's big, that's a good size sack of grain. Well, since your dad ran the farm with partners, you didn't really help with the farming part of it.
Cecil Rommel - Now, not till later.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - so you just did chores.
Cecil Rommel - His dad and him were partners on the farm before that. I don't remember what year grandpa dies but it was after that I went in partners.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - I guess I've always had this picture of farm life on a family farm; everybody is always doing things to helped the farming process along. It's a little different from the myth you get with Hollywood movies and things like that. Well I can't think of anything else I needed to ask you right now. But if you think of anything else you just let me know.
Cecil Rommel - So if I start telling you a story, you'll just have to listen.
Deanna Rommel-Noland - Yeah, you'll have a captive audience.
Interview ended.
Return to Interviews
Orlie Arn Hannas • Clarence Kohler
Cecil Rommel • Norma and Walter Wills
Introduction
Geography
• Farming
• Transportation
• Grain Chutes
• Mayview Tramway
Bulk Handling
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Oral Interviews
• Maps
• Illustrations
Acknowledgements
• Comments
