BY JANE BLOODWORTH ROWE
PUNGO — Potatoes were a huge cash crop in mid-20th century Princess Anne County, when during the early summer trainloads of potatoes left Downtown Pungo daily en route to the produce hungry Northeast.
The potato harvest brought income to local farmers after the long winter, but growing potatoes was time-consuming and labor intensive. That’s why the mechanized Iron Age Potato Planter, which Frederick Burroughs bought in 1941 from a farm supply store in Norfolk, made such a huge difference in his life.
Eighty years later, his son, Joe Burroughs, still has the carefully preserved red and yellow potato planter stored in the barn on his Muddy Creek Road farm. The two-bin planter, which was pulled by a tractor, is about six feet long and could slice the whole seed potatoes, drop them into the plowed earth, and cover and fertilize them.
“It could do it all in one trip,” Burroughs told me.
With the planter, Frederick Burroughs could plant a 20 – or 30-acre field in a few days if he had good luck and the weather held. The potatoes were usually planted in late January or early February, but it was impossible to plant if the ground was frozen or extremely muddy.
The fertilizer was placed in the planter’s front bin, and the seed potatoes were placed in the back. Large upright levers turned the gear to activate the blades. One person drove the tractor, and at least one other – ideally two – stood on a rear platform to control the levers. The heavy work of loading large bags of potatoes and 100-pound or 200-pound bags of fertilizer into the planter also required at least a couple of people. The planter could go through a load of potatoes and fertilizer quickly.
Compared to today’s high tech farm equipment, the potato planter still seems a little cumbersome and labor intensive, and Burroughs concedes that standing on a platform on a moving tractor is potentially dangerous. Still, this equipment made a huge difference in life for farmers in the 1940s.
“It was like the difference between morning and night compared to planting them by hand,” Burroughs said, “and I never heard of anyone being hurt by it, although someone could have been.”
Potatoes were harvested in late spring or early summer, and one variety, the cobbler, was particularly popular among local farmers because it would mature in only 90 days. Once harvested, the potatoes would be taken to Pungo to be graded and shipped.
The potato harvest was a joyous time because it often brought the first income of the season, and Burroughs remembers that so many potatoes were raised that 100 box cars loaded with 100-pound bags would leave Pungo daily during that time of the year.
Scrap potatoes, or those too small or inferior to sell, would be salvaged to feed the hogs, and, of course, farmers would put some potatoes aside for their own family. Then, they’d plant soybeans in the newly harvested field “so they could get in two crops a year,” Burroughs said.
Burroughs remembers that, as a child, he liked to watch the workers plant the potatoes. As a young man, he used the planter for a while. It still looks as if it’s in good condition, though it has not been used in decades.
“It never has sat out in the weather, so it’s not rusty,” Burroughs said. “If you left it out, it would get so rusty within a few years that you couldn’t use it.”
Caring for the equipment, expensive by the standards of the time, was important. Burroughs said that they sold for about $600 or $700 during the early 1940s, and today he still cares for it because he treasures this and other antique farm equipment that he owns.
“It was kind of primitive in a way,” Burroughs said, “but it looked good.”
The author is a contributor to The Independent News. Her journalism has also appeared in The Virginian-Pilot.
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