Bicentennial Memories

Time flies, whether you are having fun or not.

Our nation’s 250th anniversary—really the 250th year since the Continental Congress agreed on the Declaration of Independence—stirred up my memories of our Bicentennial in 1976. I’m struggling with the idea that I have clear memories of something that happened fifty years ago, but that’s probably a topic for my therapist. I’m also struggling with how fifty years could have escaped that fast. But the Bicentennial was a huge event for my community.

In the mid-1970s, my hometown Madison was still an agriculture-centered community. Fortunes rose and fell with milk and beef and corn prices. Corn acreage was much greater than soybeans and wheat acreage, even though the price had been about $2.50 a bushel since the late 1940s, partially because most people fed cattle. Dad was doing corn on three farms by then, including ours. Neighbors thought Dad was a bit crazy because he was experimenting with a “sod planter.” That’s what people call “no-till” today, acting like it’s a new idea. Dad was trying to find ways to keep topsoil and fertilizer on Madison’s steep hills. And he was trying to reduce fertilizer and diesel use--the 1973 energy crisis pushed prices on both way up. He’d already transitioned away from chopping silage to shelling corn. He bought a used combine and a grain truck, and had grain bins built by the barn. He was eyeing soybeans when the prices went up in the early 1970s—they more than doubled in 1972-73—but changed his mind when President Nixon imposed an export embargo to put a lid on domestic soybean prices. That three-month embargo started our major export customers on a path toward developing other sources of beans.

Our family had an interesting division of responsibility. Dad had figured out early in his farming career that livestock were messy, so he told Mom, “If it has roots, it’s mine. If it can get up and walk, it’s yours.” This turned into a gender division, with me helping Mom on livestock and my brothers helping Dad on crops. We were out of pigs by then and I had not yet convinced my parents that we should try sheep, so leading into the Bicentennial we were mostly a cow-calf operation. We also had a feedlot operation from our farm’s start in 1965, finishing about a hundred steers a year on silage, but going into 1973, Mom and Dad started selling our weanling “feeders” to our neighbors instead of finishing them on our lot. I didn’t understand that decision. Beef prices were sky-high. I was also rather proud of our “finished” steers and practiced my cattle judging skills on them for 4-H competitions. I was deep into 4-H, including livestock and horse judging, as well as riding. On the other hand, no one missed feeding those steers twice a day every day with that cranky silage unloader.

I understood later that my parents tracked price trends and national news closely. They guessed that the sky-rocketing beef prices were not going to last as long as it would take to finish our 1972 calves to slaughter weight. Sure enough, in March 1973, President Nixon reacted to intense consumer pressure—including a nationwide “meat boycott”—by putting price controls on beef at the post-slaughter level. Farmers were supposed to be “exempt” from the price controls, but the packers and grocers weren’t going to give anything up. Farmers are price takers with a perishable product. Guess what happened next. Some of our neighbors bought weanlings at record-high prices and fed them all winter only to see the slaughter price plummet. They “lost their shirts,” as Dad would say. I wonder if they’d bought any of our feeder calves.

Shutting down the feedlot operation gave us more time to participate in the Bicentennial preparations. Our entire county started preparing for the Bicentennial years before the big day. We had special horse shows and extra-big summer 4-H and FFA fairs with competitions for all sorts of patriotic-themed stuff. In 1974-75, there was the County Seal art contest. Someone noticed that the County did not have an official “seal” and the race was on to submit designs. Our art class made several trips to the Courthouse to draw that most distinctive landmark in the county, as we figured the judges would be biased toward designs featuring it. Of course, my design had both the courthouse and a horse. Friends joked that I was incapable of drawing anything without putting a horse in it, and maybe that was true. Having had a years-long stage of wanting to be a veterinarian, as well as the livestock and horse judging, I knew my animal anatomy. That knowledge made up for my reputed lack of artistic talent. It also made me some money, painting the backs of farmers’ jackets with portraits of their prize stock and farm name. I recently found my seal contest entry as I was going through my parents’ stuff (yes, it can take years to finish sorting through whole lives). Mom had it framed professionally. I had drawn a 1776-era street scene on one side of the courthouse with horses and a 1976 street scene with cars on the other. In retrospect, it was too complicated for a windshield decal. The judges chose a much simpler rendition of our courthouse for the seal.

Somehow in all this, I managed to finish high school a year early. Funny thing, I hardly remember my graduation that year. It was cool to be in the Class of ‘76, but the reality was I was not one of the cool kids and I wanted out of there. I suppose the time I wasn’t spending at social milestones like the prom gave me more time on animals and art. My art seemed to be more in demand than I was. It’s ironic that I did most of the artwork for the prom (including the invitation design) and didn’t go.

So, my last years in high school were intertwined with Bicentennial preparation. We were even going to have a parade, and we started on that over a year in advance, Antique tractors got restored. Everyone who had a carriage or horse-drawn conveyance got it out and spruced it up and spent some time reminding a horse or two how to pull it.

I didn’t have a carriage, but my friend Holly did. We painted that carriage over quite a few nights in her family’s gas station and auto shop, while her father upgraded the wheel bearings and checked its hardware carefully. You have no idea how many spokes a nineteenth-century carriage wheel has until you must sand and paint each one. You also don’t understand how much there is to a harness until you must clean and oil every square inch of it.

I had done little driving, so Holly and her dad trained me along with Penelope, Holly’s big rangy bay mare. For weeks, we haunted the back roads near their gas station (which was also the Banco post office and their family home), with Penelope in the carriage shafts, getting all of us comfortable with both carriage and traffic. Looking back, Penelope was one mellow steed, one of those horses who made up in versatility what she lacked in looks. That horse had a big head and floppy ears just long enough to make you wonder who her dam kissed, but she could jump a five-foot fence as well as pull that carriage. Pretty is as pretty does, people would say, usually after seeing her jump.

I was also drafted to prepare the 4-H “float” for the parade. This was a basic “Prairie Schooner” wagon. My first thought when I first saw it was: It’s small! Well, it was not as big as I imagined for such a wagon when I read those “You Were There” books about the westward expansion. I remember thinking “Wow, people would put everything they needed for months-long journeys west in one of these things?” After the work began, I became quite glad it wasn’t bigger. Someone donated canvas to cover its bare hoops. That canvas was an unpromising shade of orange, but it was free.

I suspect Jerry, the county agent, and our vet were to blame for me getting this assignment, based on those livestock portraits. That wagon was parked in front of the vet’s clinic on the south side of town while I worked. Everyone drove by it on their way into town, so it was hardly a secret. I recall painting a 4-leaf clover and “Madison County 4-H Clubs” on the canvas. The green actually looked good on that orange. Funny how people who tell you for years that you don’t have enough art talent to make a career out of it are always asking you to do the “artsy stuff.” Fortunately, others painted most of the rest of that wagon. After helping Holly paint the carriage, I was quite tired of painting antique wagon wheels.

While I was wrestling with that canvas, others planned a street fair, quilt shows, craft displays, and colonial square dance demonstrations. It was fascinating that teens who had spent years pretending that we weren’t “country” suddenly got very good at being and looking “country” when it was presented as an opportunity to show off our community—and relieve visitors from the Big City of some cash. Sewing machines ran overtime. Beautiful quilts rolled out of homes. One girl found a quilt-sized but unfinished piece of embroidery in the attic, begun almost a century earlier by her great-grandmother. She learned embroidery and finished it for display. We also had emergency sessions creating costumes. Fortunately for my limited sewing skills, someone volunteered to help dress me for my various roles. Some classmates not only created costumes but polished up their dance skills to do line and square demonstrations.

On the big day, we were blessed with beautiful weather. I spent the early morning ferrying people who couldn’t walk to the Courthouse square with Penelope and Holly’s carriage, while Holly was playing in the band for the ceremonies. Then it was back to the veterinary hospital to get the wagon ready for the parade. I was more than a little apprehensive about the parade, because I had just been told only “just make it pretty, don’t worry about the rest, we have someone bringing mules.”

Well, “someone” did bring mules. Our muleteer unloaded eight from a string of stock trailers into the vet’s parking lot. They were the biggest mules I had ever seen: seventeen or eighteen hands and probably a ton each. I confess that my adolescent brain did spend a few minutes trying to figure out how a small donkey could be involved in procreating such big creatures. I was a horse person, and I hadn’t had enough experience to give mules the respect they deserve. My experience with donkeys had me biased, too, and not in the direction those mules deserved.

Amid a frenzy of harness and the muleteer shouting instructions, I figured out that four of the mules were going to pull a flatbed hay wagon that had shown up during the night. The other four mules would pull “my” wagon—I had come to think of it rather possessively after many days of putting the final touches on it by myself. The hitching was accompanied by much stomping and fidgeting and cussing by the muleteer, who took my offer of help with some skepticism. I was about 5 feet tall and had only cracked a hundred pounds that spring. I hadn’t yet crossed “jockey” off my list of possible careers. That morning I was also wearing a mashup of “pioneerish” skirts and petticoats cobbled together from square dancing and some hasty sewing sessions. With riding boots, braces, and glasses. Not an impressive picture, I suppose.

I mostly handed bits of harness to the muleteer and stayed out of the way of those huge hooves. I suppose the fact that I knew the names of the harness pieces he asked for may have helped overcome doubts about me. I wasn’t disappointed with a minor role, I recall, because my driving experience was limited to Penelope and Holly’s light carriage. I recall a sense of awe as the contents of several stock trailers and pickup trucks were transformed from something that looked like a few lots at an old farm auction into four quite respectable two-mule teams. The muleteer and his sidekick backed first one pair, then a second into position in front of the flatbed hay wagon. Then a bunch of bystanders unpacked musical instruments and climbed onto the hay wagon. Turns out they had done this before.

Then it was our 4-H wagon’s turn. Hitching the wheel team was uneventful, but they were clearly not happy when the muleteer began bringing the lead pair into position in front of them. Mules can do “dirty looks” like no horse ever could, with enormous ears and roman noses to put exclamation points on their displeasure. One of the wheel team bared teeth at a leaders’ rump, only to be smacked and cussed by the muleteer.

“Does he usually do that?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he replied. “First time I’ve hitched these two teams together.”

I was beginning to wonder about my next role as brakeman on an ancient wagon rolling through a noisy crowd with four tons of mule with four possibly different ideas of what they should be doing. Or perhaps four identical ideas. I wasn’t sure which scenario was worse at that point. Suddenly that crude wagon brake—a big lever that brought a metal “shoe” against the metal rim of the right front wheel when pulled—seemed quite inadequate.

“Oh, they’ll settle down because they know I’ll kill them if they don’t,” he said as he noticed the look on my face. My expressions give me away every time. It’s a miracle that I ever win a poker game. “Besides, don’ they match,” he grinned with pride. “I thought they’d look great together.” They did match, all golden fawn-colored, and beautiful. Too bad we didn’t have cell-phone cameras in 1976.

The next fun was discovering that we were right behind that bluegrass band in the marching order. So, we had a four “heavy” mule hitch on their first time together pulling a wagon down Main Street through the biggest crowd Madison had ever seen… right behind a loud, enthusiastic bluegrass band on a hay wagon pulled by another hitch of four heavies. What could possibly go wrong?

I remember only the wagon brake and the driver’s instructions for that 1-mile journey, because I decided that I was going to be the best brakeman that muleteer and that wagon and that crowd had ever seen. I spent some of the journey thanking God that Madison’s Main Street is the flattest real estate in the county! Everything else was a blur. I don’t know if I succeeded in my goal of being the best brakeman ever, but I sure did focus. I can close my eyes and feel that brake handle five decades later. Looking back, I wonder if that fellow was worried about relying on a pip-squeak, inexperienced teenage girl to help him. His usual sidekicks were driving the bandwagon. But he knew his mules and he was a master at managing a four-in-hand. His mules trusted him and they did settle down as he said they would, flicking ears back as much to hear his voice as to express their displeasure at loud Bluegrass and the crowd.

Modern Americans who only see a four-in-hand going straight down a street never know what skill that hitch requires. While keeping control in a straight line is challenging, turning a wagon with that hitch in tight quarters and backing into position in a parade lineup is amazing to witness. Parallel parking is trivial compared to that. I didn’t mind missing all the speeches and ceremonies at the courthouse, to see that man drive.

But my day was only half over after the mules untacked and loaded for their trip home. I was to have a starring role in the evening’s celebration. I had won a forensics competition that spring, reading selections from the Constitution. To be honest, I entered the competition in pursuit of the $100 US Savings Bond, not because the winner was expected to read the Declaration of Independence as part of the Bicentennial celebration. I was hoping that Savings Bond would help me win some financial independence as I headed to college. The early 1970s had not been kind to farmers and I was on my own in paying for college. I didn’t know then that a US Savings Bond was not the same thing as cash.

I was pretty good at reading stuff in public by then. My training started very early in church. My enthusiasm in the children’s choir in the Christmas play was noticed—for the wrong reason. Apparently, I made up for my lack of musical talent with volume. To this day, I need a bucket to carry a tune, and even then, I will be off-key. I was too short to play Mary and not cute enough to suffer through another rendition of the play standing by the manger wearing foil-covered cardboard wings and a tinsel halo. That was an excruciatingly long hour and a half the first time they persuaded my mother to allow that torture.

Some wise soul decided that I could be one of the Christmas pageant narrators if I were taller. They solved my height problem by building a wooden box for me to stand on so that I could see and be seen over the podium. From around age nine on, I was one of the narrators at Rose Park Methodist’s annual Christmas Pageant, where women whose own drama dreams were sidelined by farm management and child-rearing chores inflicted them on the congregations’ children. I got lots of public reading practice as Nell, the director for decades, made us rehearse for hours. The problem of the cardboard angel wings was solved by discovering that they somehow prevented me from projecting my voice with them tied on. That box is still in use in that church nearly six decades later, giving many young people an opportunity to practice their public speaking skills. I wonder if any of them know that box was built to get me out of the children’s choir!

I also got a lot of practice in 4-H. We had to take turns giving “demonstrations” at our monthly livestock and horse club meetings. This might be a talk illustrated with posters, or it might be showing our fellow 4-Hers some skill while explaining it. I recall hoof-trimming, administering worming medication, and explaining lameness. Cleaning out the farmhouse, I discovered dozens of my hand-drawn posters illustrating all aspects of horse and livestock care. We took our best demonstrations and presentations to the yearly 4-H Congress at Virginia Tech, where we competed for state recognition by county.

Then there were livestock and horse judging contests. These judging contests went beyond just “placing” a class of four animals according to some standard. You had to stand before the official judges and state your “reasons” for your choices. I won a state horse-judging contest in that Bicentennial summer. I must not have slept much that year. Fifty years later, I can still recall that formulaic recitation: “I placed this class of (American Quarter horses/Angus Heifers/Suffolk Market Lambs/Hampshire Sows) 4-3-2-1. In first place, I chose 4 over 3 because…” You had to explain your decision pair-by-pair in so many minutes. The official judges scored you on your reasons as well as your decisions.

All this was a very good foundation for adulthood—and for forensics competitions. While a lot of opportunities in that community were pre-ordained by who your parents were and how long your family had been in the county, this particular forensics competition was not. All my experience showed. My first clue that I had won came from overhearing the local president of the Daughters of the American Revolution scolding her son in the school’s hallway. “How could you let that THAT GIRL beat you? Of all people…” Some folks would never forgive me or my parents for just showing up in 1965. The local “Big Fish” didn’t appreciate the mid-1960s invasion of the county by a bunch of WW2 veterans addressing their mid-life crises by taking up farming. And some resented the quiet but resolute role my parents played in overcoming “massive resistance” against integrating the schools.

I recall taking my place that evening on Madison’s Bicentennial stage, wondering if I could still trade places with that woman’s son. For this event, I struggled to manage a long colonial-style dress supplied by a volunteer seamstress. Compounding my stress was the fact that the ceremony was running late and I was soon to have to read the Declaration of Independence in the dark. I had practiced plenty and memorized sections of the document, but I got anxious and insisted that I had to have a flashlight before my turn came. Well, someone quickly found a flashlight, and I read the Declaration, only needing the flashlight for the last few sentences. I closed with a few sentences about the risk that document’s signers took and the fact that many signers did lose their fortunes and a few lost the lives they pledged that day. I asked the audience to pledge ourselves to support our Founders’ principles.

Sadly, I never asked my parents how they felt, listening to me read that document. I assumed that, like me, they were just relieved that I had not embarrassed myself. They had seen the 150^th as our nation recovered from the First World War, struggled through the Great Depression, and barely survived combat in the Second World War. And that was before the challenges our country faced in the 1960s.

Looking back, I realize that our huge Bicentennial effort was healing and uniting. Maybe that was the whole purpose of all those projects. In just my sixteen years, we’d floundered through a war, assassinations, racial tension, school integration, and political scandals. By 1976, I was optimistic that we were turning a corner. I was heading for a public university that had just been opened to women and racial minorities. I was going to join the US Army as it began offering scholarships to women and moved toward a vision where men and women would serve on the same level. And I was ready to leave that small town behind for the larger world, so that Bicentennial celebration was a kind of capstone event for my teenage years.

Here we are fifty years later, and farmers are still wondering if they can get through another year, trying to decide whether the risk is lower with beans or corn or a new crop or a new way to plant an old crop. Beef prices have shot up for the same old reasons, and soybean prices are down as our commodity export markets have been alienated in a trade war. Other crops aren’t doing much better, with production costs well above market prices. Fertilizer and diesel prices are again hitting new highs. We are politically divided again and dealing with presidential scandals and Constitutional crises and the scars of more questionable wars. But ordinary life still goes on with kids learning adulting in 4-H and church and school and parades. And Madison still has a yearly street festival based on our Bicentennial celebration, although it has migrated to cooler weather in September and there usually aren’t any speeches. Maybe the only major difference coming into our 250^th anniversary was the pandemic.

Fortunately, we can still read the Declaration of Independence. I recently re-read it, trying to get myself into a more celebratory mood. This time my audience was only plants, but those fifty intervening years have made this document mean a lot more to me. Perhaps it’s a career of service to this country that chokes me up. Or perhaps it’s just the last year and half which has cast a new light on its list of King George III’s transgressions. While I never took our freedom completely for granted—I would have made many different career choices if I had—I have never felt the fragility of freedom like I do now.

I ask you to read it again, if you haven’t already done so in your 250^th anniversary observance. And then choose something that you can do to preserve or advance its foundational principles—those first two paragraphs—no matter how small, and do it. The next fifty years aren’t likely to be easier. The Declaration still demands sacrifice in defense of its principles.

© Kristin A. Farry, 2026