Fall is my favorite time of the year. What’s not to love about it? Bright colors, crunchy leaves, fire pits, apple cider… It signals the holiday season is right around the corner!

​This year, I was able to go with my parents to the annual cornshucking at Horne Creek Farm in Pinnacle, North Carolina. It was quite the experience!

​My grandpa used to tell me of going to cornshuckings when he was a boy. He said the men would gather all the corn in a pile, shuck it, then put it in the corncribs to have food for the animals through the winter. The women would quilt, and somebody would play some old-time music. It sounded like quite the get-together. He used to recall that the boys would have to go to the creek or well and draw water for all the folks. All the boys would have to help, except for the boy that could jig the best to the old-time music. My grandpa used to smile and proudly say he never one time had to fetch water.

I can believe he was quite the flat footer, because he would try to teach me and my sister how to do it when we were little girls. It would shake the old house so bad, the dishes would clank in the old cabinets and Gramma would holler, “Tom, knock it off and take it outside!” “Aw, Billie, the dirt just don’t sound as good as a hard floor!” He’d sit and wait a while, then wink at us and up he’d go again, clanking away.

If you ain’t got a clue as to what I’m talking about, here’s a little video sampling of old-time flatfooting, buck dancing, clogging… it’s all pretty much the same thing:

After my grandpa was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we decided to go to the Apple Butter Festival up at Mabry Mill in Virginia. He was sick pretty bad with it by then, but he was enjoying the day with his family. They had old-time bluegrass players and dancers up on a stage, and when one particularly upbeat fiddle tune started, up went my grandpa and he started dancing just as good as he ever did right there in the open field where everyone was gathered. He was so good, in fact, that I remember the folks up on the stage seeing him in the crowd. They tried to get him to come up and dance a jig so all the folks could see him and hear him, but by then he was too tuckered out because of the cancer. I wish we had filmed it.

​This is a just a taste of one of those old cornshuckings. If you want to see a living history farm straight out of the late 1800s, you need to visit this place! I was amazed, and felt right at home. There’s something about the sight of an old farmhouse, open fields, the smell of curing tobacco, and old bluegrass music that I just can’t describe. It’s like going home.

Turn-of-the-Century surprise birthday party for the lady of the house

The farmhouse dining table doubles as a workspace. Here, dough for the apple fritters was being rolled and filled.

Oh, to find one of these wood stoves for the McCuistion House!

Fresh fried apple fritter

Our family has farmed tobacco since Bennett’s Welcome Plantation in Jamestown, Virginia, around 1624. My mom is the last of 300+ years of our family to work on a tobacco farm. I am the last of the generations to see it firsthand.

If you want to get a first-hand look at a working late-1800s farm, you really need to visit this place, especially during the annual cornshucking.

​The house was built somewhere close to the time that the McCuiston House was built, although its exact age isn’t known.
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​On the day we were there they were curing a small amount of tobacco and opened the door to allow the visitors to see just what goes on inside a tobacco barn. Here’s a quick tour for you by me, with added commentary by my mom at the end: