Download this article as a

Winston-Salem’s curb market

In order to bring in cash during the spring and summer in the 1940s and 1950s, we did truck farming along with tobacco farming. On Fridays we spent the day picking and shelling beans and peas, pulling corn, gathering tomatoes, packing up the butter churned that week, and picking out which chickens would be sold from the flock.

Early Saturday morning about 4 a.m., Dad would load up the produce and chicken crates, along with the child whose turn it was to go with him, and head for Winston-Salem. Outside the old City Market, farmers from miles around tried to find a spot along the street or sidewalk to show their wares. We waited for customers, equipped with hanging scales for weighing chickens and tomatoes, pint and quart measuring cups for shelled beans and peas, and brown paper bags.

Prospective buyers felt the chickens to be sure they were fat enough. If they bought one, its feet were tied, a hole was torn in the bottom corner of a paper bag for the head to go through, and the chicken was stuffed in the poke. Feeling of the chicken before buying was OK, but it aggravated us when people pinched the tomatoes we had packed so carefully in layers in bushel baskets.

It was not unusual for customers to board city buses with chickens under their arms and black-eyed peas, roasting ears and fresh-churned butter in the shopping bags they had brought with them.
We children got the money for blackberries we had picked. But the rest of the money we earned at the curb market was used for necessities until the tobacco crop was sold in the fall.

Helen Everhart | Advance

top