Fess

In remembering the incidents taking place in my peaceful valley located between two creeks, namely Salt Creek and Pike Run in Vinton County, Ohio, I must not forget to mention a few of the experiences with animals on our farm which stand out boldly in my recollection. 

When I was quite small my father traded a black mare, who had a habit of biting the hand that fed her, to a band of gypsies* passing by along the narrow township road in front of our home. The gypsies were warned of this nasty habit of Julie’s, but they only laughed and said they would trade her away or sell her and they cared not at all. So Julie was traded for an iron gray horse hitched to one of their colorful rigs, and my father was told the horse had been used to pull circus wagons theretofore.

A few days later, my father came to dinner and announced that he had named the new horse “Professor” and that he was most intelligent, sensing each move expected of him when being hitched and unhitched to and from various pieces of farm machinery, without having to be ordered.

Two or three years passed by with Fess (to which his name had been shortened) working the usual routine of a draft horse on our small farm. Decoration Day of 1914 dawned sunny and quite warm, and my mother was lamenting the fact that our usual peonies had bloomed and gone, and there was not much left to decorate the graves in the cemetery but mock orange blossoms.

While she was arranging the flowers, my father announced that our buggy horse had colic and Fess would have to be used as a substitute. The hills were re-echoing the call of “Pharaoh” from the hoards of locust plaguing the valley as they did every 17 years, except that people were shaking their heads at the severity of the scourge, the hills being almost brown from the multitude of their invasion. Naturally the topic of conversation at all social gatherings was World War I, which was at our door, and the plague of the locusts which were known at times to attack horses and cattle.

Fess hated them with a passion and he made a point of letting everyone know, by stamping his feet, shaking his body, and tossing his head from side to side, even to the point of trying to run away from the area where they were. Old timers would vouch for the fact that these locust shells always had a “W” for war or a “P” for peace on their backs. This was the logic of the old Quaker neighborhood where I grew up near Londonderry, Ohio. The letter “W” was there alright, but having lived through so many wars in my lifetime, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the old adage.

Our five-mile trip proceeded without incident until we started to enter the village, where the local band was just starting to play for the Memorial Day celebration. The minute the music started, Fess began to dance just like the circus horses do when going around the ring, and I can remember what a spectacle we made of ourselves driving into the village with a buggy full of mock orange blossoms and a performing horse. I was quite young at the time and thought it very funny, but my father was, of course, taken by surprise and very embarrassed by it all.

Fess served us long and faithfully for many years, but he must have longed for the circus music every day he was with us, since he did not ever get to hear it again.

* Editor’s note: Today, the people known as gypsies would properly be called Roma or Romani. There are various documented accounts of their travels in the Dayton and Youngstown areas, as well as in Cleveland, Ohio.