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AI: Well, that year, before the war started, can you give me kind of a picture of what the Japanese farming communities looked like? You know, what -- you had mentioned earlier that there were a couple of rows of Japanese farms in a row. Can you kind of paint me a picture of what these areas looked like?

TI: On Peterson Hill, I believe there were about seven families, and they all had about ten acres. And this row that they built about midway through these long, ten-acre strips of land, they all had the houses on, well most of 'em had the houses on the lower side of the road, some of 'em were on the upper side. But they all, pretty much raised the same thing. They were all in neat rows. And it was all going, the rows were always going east and west, never north and south because that land was pretty hilly. And it would be pretty hard to cultivate the land going alongside the side of the hill, it'd be much easier to go up and down. And I think that was the primary reason that they raised the rows in that manner. And quite a few of the families irrigated, because that was high ground, and Kelsey Creek -- at that time known as First Creek -- was used to irrigate their dry land. They had a, well, a lot of us, in fact most of us at that time did not have any electricity, so they used gas-powered pumps to pump the water from the stream, by way of 2 inch steel pipes in most cases. They didn't have any of these convertible, rolling type irrigation mechanisms that they do have today. So a lot of that was all hard hand work. You had to disconnect the pipes every season, after the crops were done so you can plow up the land. And in the spring you reversed, and you connected all the pipes together again and got it ready to harvest when the ground start drying out, because, you can get maybe two to three times the crop that you would by irrigating. And if you don't, why, your harvest is maybe half or less. So that was a big thing.

AI: And then what about your farm right before war started, where were you farming? What did it look like in that area?

TH: We were on [inaudible], and we worked five acres. But we were leasing ten. So we were farming fifteen acres. And our main crop, well, let's see, our biggest crop was lettuce, tomatoes, and peas. We tried a little strawberries at one time but it didn't work out quite like we wanted it to, so, it's primarily lettuce, peas, were our two main... lettuce, peas, and tomatoes were our main source of resource.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.