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Growing Up On Muddy Creek:
Remembering Gates
By Perry Piper
Gates have been around for quite a spell, they have. Preacher Stubblefield used to tell us at Union Chapel about the Pearly Gates, and how old Samson used his God-given strength to push down the gate post in the temple and destroy a heap of non-believers, and I well remember a rip-roaring, fire-spitting evangelist that set up a tent at the Sumner Park and preached Hell Fire and Brimstone with accent on the Gates of Hell. Liked to have scared the daylights outta some of the listeners, too, he did.
Course the gates that I had personal attachment to were those on the farm that Dad hung from good, sturdy hedge posts on iron hinges that he fashioned from an old narrow wagon wheel rim. Why, the gate he made to the old red barn swung on it, and not a smidgen of give was ever seen. Dad took great pride in his gates. He used to say that a sure gauge of a fanner was in the way he kept up his fences, and how he hung his gates.
In today's society, with all the accent on getting every acre either in cash crops or under some government program, fence rows with their hideaways for prairie chickens and bluebirds have become an endangered species. When you don't have fences, you sure don't need gates.
Now in the days of my growing up on Muddy Creek, the gate was a real part of our lives. The garden gate was praised in song and verse, and the lane with its gate closure was an intricate part of rural living.
The garden gate that I best recall was a unique one that Dad put together from the slats from the buckboard when it was retired in favor of the Model T pickup. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship. Those five-foot-long, inch-square hickory slats with a ski-like curve on one end were set on end with the curve uppermost. They were spaced three inches apart, and bolted to a scrap iron frame that was hung from hinges.
How well I remember the day Dad bent that length of two-inch gas pipe, a discard from the oil field, into a curve for use as the gate posts. He and Uncle Walter wedged that pipe in a fork of the early June apple tree, and then Old Doll, with me aboard, was hitched to one end and I was told to stop her dead when the pipe was bent at the proper angle. That first curve was perfect. The nice rounded bend was a joy to behold. But now the trick was to get that second curve at just the right spot to match the first so that the gate would hang square and be of the proper size. Well, if you have ever tried bending pipe, you know that sometimes it has a mind of its own, and instead of that near perfect, even sensual, curve that came out in the first bend, the second one was more like an obtuse angle, for I couldn't get Old Doll to start with a steady pull, and instead, she lunged ahead to give that pipe gate frame a distinctive crimp that still stands, its feet locked in four feet of concrete, some three-quarters of a century later. The recycled buckboard gate, with its riveted hinges, still swings square and true although the fence is long gone.
During the Depression years, Dad augmented the farm's meager cash income by building wooden gates from native lumber cut nearby. The lumber was sawed into four-inch slats by the big sawmill he had traded a span of mules for. It was powered by a 20-horse Advance Rumely steam engine that he had dickered for, too.
Some of the logs were floated down the creek and pulled out at the mill site. The green lumber was stacked up to cure over the summer, and when the next fall came, Dad and Uncle Walter could bolt together a dozen or more 12-foot gates. Every one of those holes was "bored" with a brace and bit by hand, and if you think semi-green native timber is easy to saw and drill, you have another think acomin'.
About once a week they would hitch up the hayrack and load on as many of the gates as they could, and head over toward Millerville or Applegate or Kings to "peddle" the gates for $5 each to the oil lease pumpers who needed a gate for the fenced-in family cow.