Fall on the farm is when the corn crop has to be brought in. For my father, that meant either getting out the corn picker, which would pluck off the ears, or the corn chopper, which would make silage. We could talk a long time about silage, but for now let’s look more closely at those ears of corn and their stalks.
When Columbus landed down in the Caribbean, he saw that the native Tainos were growing something they called “mahiz,” a grain that was key to their survival. The Spanish took it up as “maize,” still the usual word throughout Europe. One 130 years later, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, they found the same plant with a different name: “weeâchumun” in Wampanoag, and here in New Hampshire the Abenaki called it “skamon.” We could be calling it that now, but in English and Germanic languages “corn” is used as a general term for “grain,” or for whatever the main grain of the region is. So in England it means wheat or sometimes barley or rye, and in Scotland it means oats. That famous folksong “John Barleycorn” tips us off about the meaning as “grain” or “kernel” (notice that all three words – corn, kernel, grain – have similar consonants and derive from the same ancient root word). Naturally, the Pilgrims called this new grain “Indian corn” or just plain “corn.”
I grew up next to the Onondaga Indian reservation where every fall they held a “Green Corn Festival.” Even among the colorful ears of Indian corn, I never saw any that were green, so I always thought that a strange name. Until a fateful evening, when my mother cooked a supper of corn on the cob. In an attempt to be sensitive to my grandfather and his dentures, she offered to slice off the kernels for him, to which he replied a bit peevishly, “I have no trouble eatin’ green corn!” Then it clicked that the Green Corn Festival was referring to sweet corn – corn in its tender young milky state. “Green corn” as a term survived in New England and the Great Lakes region up to the mid-20th century, but is most likely forgotten today except in the green-corn ceremonies held by Native Americans throughout North America.
Corn comes in several types, including popcorn, sweet corn, field corn (cow corn), and flint corn – also called Indian corn – with a hard, smooth kernel. I only ever saw this kind of corn hanging in bunches on doors as decorations, but now I grow it every other year and grind it up for cornmeal as needed. Come spring, a few dozen kernels in the ground start the cycle over again — if you can keep the raccoons out.
Before the coming of the picker and chopper, field corn was cut by hand with a special knife or sickle. It was often a community event. My grandfather proudly told me that when he was a teenager, nobody could keep up with him cutting corn. The cutters would be followed by someone who gathered up the stalks, bound them into “stooks” (usually rhyming with dukes, but occasionally with books), and propped them up in the field. After they dried out, these stooks would be loaded into wagons and carried to the barn. Later on in the fall, they would have a party called a husking bee where the whole neighborhood would gather to help strip the ears, with the added enticement that whoever found a red ear could go over and kiss whoever they wanted. Lots of red faces to go with the red ears.
“Stooks” was only found in northern New England, northern New York and Michigan. In the Dutch settlement area around the Hudson, they were called “stouts,” and the more general word in the USA was “shocks.” As so often happens with words (and plants), when two similar types come together, hybrids are generated, so in New England there were also those who called them “shooks.”
No one calls them anything anymore. In New York State, farmland has been transformed into truly gargantuan fields of corn waiting for the machines to gobble them up. On a trip to Wisconsin last spring, we saw cornfields everywhere disappearing under the advance of row upon row of solar panels. Not much opportunity for communal life around the corn harvest these days — unless you count the corn mazes.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.