Walnut harvest time in the Ozarks


Grandpa Homer Roberts’ old 8N Ford tractor still sits on the family farm in Elijah. The tractor was purchased new in Gainesville in the 1950s, and has hauled tons of black walnuts over the years. Times photo/Bruce Roberts.

It’s October in the Ozarks, and the crisp mornings and gentle breezes are ushering in fall colors. 

I suspect the lack of rain may hinder a splendorous fall foliage display this fall as it has in past years, but there’s one tree that always looked like money to a poor family during the Jimmy Carter years in Elijah.

The walnut tree.

I spent most of my growing up years learning to work on a small farm that my grandparents owned on upper Bridges Creek in Elijah.

We weren’t coddled when I was a kid. 

I was eight years old when grandpa showed me how to split wood with a double-bitted axe. 

I still have my feet, both my arms and all my fingers and toes. So, needless to say, I survived.

I wasn’t strong enough to swing the splitting maul at first, but as I worked, my biceps swelled, and my work ethic grew.

Back to the walnuts.

Every fall, Grandpa and Grandma would summon me and my sisters to the field. Well, really just to the edge of the field where the big walnut trees grew.

The day would begin early with what seemed like a hayride on a flatbed trailer being pulled by Grandpa’s old 8N Ford tractor. The trailer was piled high with gunny sacks, buckets and kids with the last name of Roberts.

We’d make our rounds around the edge of the hayfield under the walnut trees, where some years it was hard to stand because the walnuts on the ground were so plentiful.

We’d fill up bucket after bucket and carry them to the trailer, where we’d pile them into gunny sacks — barely leaving room to tie them.

Sometimes we would find an arrowhead in the field. 

Those days seem like a million years ago. 

It was so much work, but the days were laid back. Grandpa and Grandma always made it fun. What I wouldn’t give for one more trip to the walnut trees with my grandparents and my sisters Shawnna and Teresa — all who have passed on.

Back then, walnut buyers were advertising “$4 a hundred.” 

At the end of the harvest Grandpa and I would make several trips to Caulfield next to the Burl Jarvis rock store, a store my grandpa used to operate before I was born.

I was certain we would be rich with all the sacks of walnuts we were delivering. I soon realized that the “$4 a hundred” didn’t mean $4 for a hundred walnuts. Its was $4 for a hundred pounds. 

“OK,” I thought. “That’s still not bad … we have a TON!” 

Then I was taken down another notch or two when I learned that the price was after the walnuts were hulled! I was even more disgusted when I realized that the hull of a walnut is the heaviest part!

Our mountain of walnuts was reduced to a few little mesh bags. 

“Here’s your money,” the buyer said, and he handed Grandpa a few bills (that didn’t contain any hundos, no fiddys and only one twenty).

“You mean I worked all week and have permanent walnut stains on my hands and on the knees of six pairs of jeans for THAT?!?

“No,” Grandpa said. “We have to split this with your sisters.” 

Ugh.

I remember one year after we had finished the harvest, Grandpa pulled the tractor and trailer up by the house and eased the old 8N’s front bumper up against a tree because the brakes didn’t work on the tractor. Then we all went inside for some ice cold lemonade. 

When our break was over, Grandpa was going to take the load down to the barn to house them until it was time to haul the walnuts to the buyer.

Loaded down with several gunny sacks full of walnuts and Grandma riding on the back of the trailer, Grandpa started down the steep old rugged road to the barn. He had the old Ford in first gear to keep it low and slow down the old rocky road, but somewhere mid-hill his knee hit the gear shift, knocking it into neutral.

With no brakes on the tractor and Grandma’s bare feet digging into the road bed (which wasn’t really helping - and neither was her screaming), the tractor reach a new Elijah speed record of 7.3 miles per hour and hit the corner post of the barn lot, scaring a banty rooster off his perch.

Grandma fell off the trailer about halfway down the hill, and with her went about 10 bags of walnuts. The bags couldn’t contain the nuts with such an impact, and walnuts shot out everywhere - into the road, the ditch and all the weeds alongside the road.

Surprisingly, Grandma wasn’t hurt. But it did activate her nag-cycle, turning it up to YELL. By the end of the month, new brakes had been installed on the tractor.

Us kids got the worst end of the deal, because we had to pick up the same walnuts twice that year! To add insult to injury we were late getting the walnuts to the buyer, so the harvest price had dropped to $3 a hundred.

It was then, at the age of 10, that I decided I wasn’t going to have a career in raising walnuts.

Another challenge we faced harvesting the walnuts was that it always seemed the trees wouldn’t shed their black gold until later in the season when the price would drop.

When I was a teenager and got my first truck, an old Jeep J10 that had a back bumper that weighed as much as the truck, I learned a harvesting technique that I loved but Grandma didn’t care for. I would back up to the walnut trees and give them a (usually) gentle nudge with my bumper. Most of the walnuts would fall into the bed of the truck. I’d pick up the others and haul them off to Caulfield.

Grandma always said she didn’t like me “skinning up my trees.” I thought of it as payback for the walnut stains still on my hands.

Our walnut-harvesting prowess must have been the talk of the neighborhood, because some of our neighbors started offering us their walnuts.

A close neighbor, Mrs. Hale, who taught us kids how to find pretty rocks a few years earlier, offered the bounty of three supersized walnut trees in her yard. We agreed because, well, picking up walnuts and picking blackberries and pawpaws were the only way us kids ever got any money, except for what we’d get when we took glass soda bottles we’d find to the store for the 10-cent refund.

Can you imagine that today? Kids working hard all week for just a few dollars? Kids picking up soda bottles out of the ditches and picking blackberries for pocket change? Can you imagine giving an 8-year-old boy a double-bitted axe and sending him out in the cold to split firewood?

I may not have liked it at the time, but looking back now, I believe that poor, hard-working upbringing was the best. They are some of the best memories of my life.

Now if I can just figure out how to get these walnut stains off my hands!

Ozark County Times

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PO Box 188
Gainesville, MO 65655

Phone: (417) 679-4641
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