Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1894 — HOP PICKING IN KENT. [ARTICLE]

HOP PICKING IN KENT.

Women Are Better at It than Men, but Their Far Is Small. The working day in the Kent hopyard begins with full daylight, says the National Review. By « o’clock the barns let loose their inmates, and a procession of the pickers wends its way through the meadows and orchards towards the field of labor. There is plenty of water for them if they like to wash: but they are quite content with evening ablutions, and for the most part -tep from under the sackcloth blankets provided by the farmer, stretch themselves, yawn, grumble a little at they scarcely know what, and set off. The women incumber themselves with pots, kettles, provisions and babies. After an hour or two of picking fires are lit among the stripped blue-stalks and a score of simple breakfasts are prepared. The pay they get Is not magnificent It averages twopence a bushel of cleanly picked hops, and the person who can pick twelve bushels in the day Is reckoned a skillful and practiced hand. Women, as one would expect, are better at it than, men. They strip a cluster of the cones in the time it takes the inexperienced man to detach three or four cones only. They talk and sing, too, all the while, in a manner that is highly irritating to certain of the men.

There are all sorts and conditions in the hop garden, so that, while on the one hand you may hear girls chanting improper music hall catches, you have only to listen with the other ear to be charmed by ; the hymns of Moody and Sankey and tho Salvation Army. The men, as I have hinted, work more silently and with a certain moroseness. It is with them that the customary strike initiates in the middle of the picking. Either the hops are too small or the pay Is too little —the pretext is readily found. During the strike the farmer and his family may well be anxious, but the difficulty soon arranges itself, and the men set to again with a few hearty oaths as a relief to their feelings. Among the local agricultural hands In the hop garden one often hears very forcible accounts of the ferocity of the pickers. “They’d as soon stick a knife into you as look at you,” is a iemark that was offered to me from several of them. Yet if they are left to themselves and theh own ways, in so far as these do not affect the well-being of their neighbors and the property of the farmer, they seem sufficiently inoffensive.