Growing Up on Shipley Farms: Haylofts, Creeks and Cousins

The buildings on a working farm are not built for children, which is exactly why children like them. A hayloft is a climbing frame nobody designed. A creek is a laboratory.

What a day actually looked like

Out after breakfast, back when somebody called. In between: the barn, the creek, whichever cousins were around, and a general awareness that you should not be anywhere the tractor was going.

There was no schedule and no supervision in the modern sense. There was a boundary, a set of rules about machinery and animals, and the understanding that the rules were not negotiable.

Work was not separate from it

“Another thing is tell people three things that granddad really cared about was agriculture, education, and agricultural education. And so other than family, those were his passions and he, uh, loved to have people out to the farm to learn, uh, and teach and help and work and all of that.”

Gray Shipley

Agriculture, education and agricultural education were granddad's three subjects, and growing up here meant all three were the same thing. You learned by being handed a job slightly beyond you and then being left to do it.

Summer evenings

The light lasts late in these mountains in July. Dinner outside, games in the yard, adults talking at the table long after the food was gone, children circling the edges of it until somebody decided it was time.

“Um, and so that, you know, my appreciation for food stems from the care that my grandmother always took in feeding the whole family when we came together for Christmas and came together for holidays.”

Gray Shipley

What it gave you

“Well, you know, traditionally, uh, on a farm, AI means artificial insemination. Uh, that's what my granddad would talk about, uh, AI around the dinner table, because that was a, you know, part of farm life in reality.”

Gray Shipley

That is the kind of thing a farm childhood leaves you with. A word means something different at your dinner table than it does everywhere else, and you do not find out until you are grown.

Why we write it down

Because it is one generation from being lost. The haylofts are still there and the creek has not moved, but the particular kind of unsupervised, useful, slightly dangerous childhood that went with them is not something you can decide to recreate.

The one that rewards a slow afternoon

SB Dry-Aged Chuck Roast, Boneless

Dry-aged boneless chuck roast. In early, left alone, and it will be the thing people remember.

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More of the family record is in Shipley Farms since 1872 and granddad's notebook. The table those evenings turned into is in the Christmas dinner guide.