Have you ever wondered about the Bean Pickers’ Dance, celebrated every year about this time at the Polish Home? It’s a celebration of the largely Polish heritage of working the harvest. Years ago, the migrant farmworkers were Eastern European.
For many of us old-time Baltimoreans, springtime in Baltimore meant going down to the country—bean country, that is. Row bosses got busy rounding up Polish, Czech, Ukrainian or Lithuanian immigrant families who moved to the farms from June to September.
There were four crops to harvest, asparagus, peas, beans and tomatoes, at farms in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The notable farms were in Finksburg, Galena, Glen Burnie, Hickory Westminster-Benson and Gatchelville, Md., and Hanover, High Rock, Hungerford, New Freedom, Red Lion, Shrewsbury, Stewartstown and Woodbine, Pa., and Dover, Del.
The row bosses were usually older men and women who could speak Eastern European languages and English fluently. They hunted for families with lots of children who could work the bean fields. Many families went to the farms in early June to harvest asparagus and peas, but most of the bean-picking families left town after July 4.
Large stake-bed trucks loaded up the families’ belongings for the trip to the farm. Families packed their trunks and also took cabinets, dishes, pots and pans, a water bucket, food, clothing, straw mattresses (also called ticks) and blankets, or pierzynas.
Another stake-bed truck loaded up with people, and a convoy of sorts headed for the farm.
Once at the farm, each family was assigned a shack. It was usually one room with two racks for sleeping and a wood-burning stove for cooking. The roof was corrugated tin, and there were electric lights.
The farmer supplied the wood, but the pickers had to chop the wood into manageable sizes for the wood stove. Most families brought along an axe or a hatchet. Water was pumped by hand from the well.
They also brought along a new metal trash can, which they weighted with rocks and put in a cooling house to keep their food. Lunch for the bean fields was packed into an old, clean lard can. Families would take a loaf of bread, cans of Spam, cake, cookies, a tablecloth or blanket for the ground and a thermos of Kool-Aid. Lunch was usually eaten under a shade tree.
The day began at 5:30 a.m., when the farmers’ trucks would roll up and begin loading people to take to the fields. The bean fields were wet with dew, and your clothing and shoes would be soaked early in the day. You had to wear a hat or scarf to help shade the sun. Bean pickers were in the field from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and the row boss would blow a whistle to end the day.
The farmer would bring a large empty truck to the bean field with a scale, burlap pags and a roll of twine to tie the bags. The row boss would assign the row of beans that a family would pick. He would call a family by number and if that family had four pickers, it would get four rows to pick. One row per picker was the rule.
The choice rows were in the middle, not the end of the field. The middle rows always had more beans to pick than the rows at the edges of the field. Also, the beans did not grow well next to trees.
Each picker filled a basket, then emptied it into a burlap bag. When the bag was filled it was tied off with twine and carried to the scale, weighed and recorded with the family’s number.
German prisoners of war also picked beans in 1947.
The burlap bags were loaded onto the truck and carted off to the canneries for processing. Some people worked in the canneries after 12 hours in the field.
At the end of the day everyone would get on the truck and sing Polish songs on the trip home. For the mothers, it was time to cook supper, and for the young people this was fun time. They would get together and walk two miles to the country store for ice cream and goodies.
Pickers were paid two cents a pound, and all the families were paid in cash on Fridays.
After all the farm fields—the asparagus, peas, beans, tomatoes and corn, were harvested, many families moved along to Charleston, S.C., and Biloxi, Miss., to shuck oysters.
And that is “goin’ down the country,” the tradition that is celebrated every year at the Polish Home with the Bean Pickers’ Dance.
This year’s dance is Sunday, August 9, 1-6 p.m. at the Polish Home, 510 S. Broadway in Fells Point. Joy of Maryland is playing the polka music, and the menu includes green beans, of course, and fried bologna.
—by Steve Lesniewski, Joe Jachimski and Joe Sufczynski
