Foley family farm life

Perhaps the story of Tom and Jaybird Foley and family near Martin City during the 1940s and 1950s was enticing to me as it was so different from my own.

My only exposure to country life during my childhood was visiting relatives in Bad Rock and attending Bad Rock Busy Bees Club meetings with my mother and grandmother. I lived in

Kalispell until moving to Columbia Falls in 1946.

Once again, my thanks to Marion Foley for sharing her family’s lifestyle and experiences.

Marion wrote the following paragraphs:

Of special note was the endless work and effort Jay put into raising us kids. For several years Tom was up the South Fork logging from Monday through Friday. During this time Mom drove herself to the hospital to give birth.

On Monday, regardless of the snow and 30 below zero, we hauled water from a tap or the creek, heated it on a wood stove in the bare-walled wash room. The day was spent washing diapers and all the other clothes in a wringer washer, hanging them to dry or freeze dry outside.

Summer meant canning alongside washing. Fall meant dressing out meat. Winter consisted of rendering lard on the stove for candles and soap. All of Monday we lived in the wash room some 20 feet from the house. Tuesday bread was made; the rest of the week sewing, knitting, gardening. Mixed into this was milking a cow; raising chickens and pigs; and as the farm grew, fencing and farming.

Mom did most all of the hay cutting and lots of field work, including changing irrigation pipe twice a day. At night she read and did the accounting. On Friday Dad came home from the woods, the place was spotless as possible; on Saturday everyone worked. Saturday night, with few exceptions, Mom and Dad went dancing. Sundays, we all piled in to go to St. Richard’s Catholic Church in Columbia Falls.

In Mom’s later years, after Tom died, she did travel and went to Panama, China and many places in the United States. At the age of 80 she bought a computer and learned Quick Books, helping run the current family business, Abbott Valley Homestead.

This is the final gigi column in the Foley series.

Gladys Shay is a longtime resident and columnist for the Hungry Horse News