Stained with the passage of time.
It is strange to mull over, consider and ponder,
That the hands that helped form it were mine.
In 1969 we moved to the Conklin house just north of the Junction Hill Church. Dad had also bought what we called "The Six Acres" just west of the church and across the dirt road. As I recall, there was no fence or a very poor fence around "The Six Acres", where the roads were, on the east and south sides. For some reason or other, Dad abandoned the normal process of large wooden corner posts and decided to put in large concrete corner posts. To be more precise and technical, these were ginormous, colossal, honkin' big, monstrositous corner posts. And here's the "skinny" on how they were put in.
Dad built some forms out of corrugated steel pipes or as he called them..."Whistles". These are the pipes that you put in a road ditch and cover with gravel so you can drive across it and the water in the ditch goes through the pipe. He took a piece of the pipe about six foot long and fourteen inches in diameter and cut it in half lengthwise. Then he bolted angle iron to the edges of each piece where he could put the pipe back together by bolting the angle irons on each piece together. We would set the form over a post hole that was slightly bigger than the pipe in diameter and about three to four feet deep. I'm not sure how Dad braced the pipe to keep it from falling in the hole but he did and then leveled it where the post would be straight.
The post hole?...Yes....the post hole. How do you dig a post hole? Dad started with a spud bar. Now some people, I have learned, call it a crow bar, a pry bar or even a punch bar but I'll just stick with spud bar since I'm spinnin' this yarn. It was a solid steel bar, usually five to six feet long with the handle end about an inch diameter and the business end a couple of inches in diameter and I'd say it weighed in at twelve to fifteen pounds. The business end had a chisel point and you used it to break up the dirt (and rocks...and more rocks.....and even more rocks) so they could be dipped out with the post hole diggers (affectionately called PHD's).
The PHD's had two handles that were attached by a hinge to curved metal blades that kinda had the appearance of crawdad pinchers (that's crayfish for all y'all north of the Mason/Dixon). You squeezed the handles together, which held the pinchers apart and jammed them into dirt and rocks that were broken up with the spud bar. Then, you pulled the handles apart (which squeezed the dirt in the pinchers), lifted the dirt "load" out of the post hole and set it where you wanted to pile the dirt, squeezed the handles back together, the dirt fell out on the pile and you went back for another "load"! I know this is real complicated for some of y'all but try to stay with me here... After you got all the dirt out that you could with the PHD's, you stepped back and let the "Spudder" spud for awhile, then used the PHD's, then the spud bar, then the PHD's until you got the post hole big and deep enough.
After the pipe form was set over the post hole and braced, it was time for the concrete. I asked Ralph about this but he didn't remember either..."Did we mix the concrete to fill the posts? I did some ciphering and come up with a half to three-quarters of a yard of concrete per post. Now this was doable with a portable mixer but it seems like I remember Dad having two sets of forms and if he did, a concrete truck would make a trip for that much concrete.
After the concrete set up, we pulled the forms off and you had a concrete post, in the shape of the pipe that was solid in the ground!
If you drive west, past the Junction Hill Church, through the crossroad, about two or three hundred feet past, you'll see the corner post pictured above on the right or north side of the road. If you take a right at the crossroad, go up the little hill, there will be a couple of these corner posts on your left or west.
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