Grandma's Table.....

I was given this walnut table by my Grandmother Brooks. She had lived a hard life and she still was always a survivor and hard worker. When the opportunity came about, where she could receive for free, an new table and chairs, she jumped at it. She replaced this walnut table with my brothers small formica-covered, chrome table and gray vinyl chairs also made from chrome. She had first owned the walnut table as it had been given to her when she was first married. That was early 1900''s. It was a used table when she got it and she had it as a dinning room table in her old house on the farm. They moved off that farm in 1960 and through various family situations ended up in Murray, Iowa.
I remember many things about that table with it filled with dishes of food at family dinners. She had some make shift boards for it to make it large, but I never saw those after her move. She must of left them behind. I also remember her cutting things with a large very old knife. It left marks but she didn't care just a long as she the task she was doing was done. At her later years she started making crafts. She always sewed clothes and made the aprons with rick rack, but she liked making crafts. Purrty things she would call them. One day I was at her house and she was using that table to cut toilet paper rolls in half. It was the cheapest toilet paper you could buy of course. She was making some kind of thing where two doilies sandwiched a half of toilet paper and you could pull paper from it like a kleenex box. They of course were decorated with plastic flowers, but again she was hacking away with her dull knife on the table.
When I took the table apart to refinish it when I was 19, I found the town, Woodburn, Iowa stamped on the bottom of the leaf runners. I was thinking it had a patent date of 1897 on it too. That doesn't date the time of the making of the table but just reports that it did have a patent back then.
The one leaf of the table was made from the burl of the tree. That is the swirl pattern you see in the grain of the leaf. The burl is the area where the walnut tree, which was large, had many growth areas of branches and stubs that created that pattern.
My Grandma Brooks and a neighbor lady, bought a large cloth chicken at a craft sale. My Grandma took it home and tore it apart for the pattern, and the rest was history. With her treadle sewing machine she made hundreds of these large and small chickens. I don't remember her buying the smaller hen pattern but she made just as many of those. She sold them to everybody and she got so much glee making money on the side. She even took a chicken with her to the hospital when she had surgery for colon cancer. Nurses bought them from her at the Methodist Hospital. The large and small hens were the last things that she made before she died in 1972. She was so proud of her work. She received scrap cloth and made what she thought were racey hens, with there unnatural colors.
That table speaks history to me. Seeing the food, the relatives around the table, and the small short Grandma with a large dull knife whacking away at fruit and vegetables and cardboard for her hen bases. I need to refinish it again, but those knife marks are always going to stay right where Mabel Zella Wheeler Brown Brooks had put them. She would be pleased that I am still using that table, just as pleased as she was getting to own a set of chrome table and chairs. Thanks for reading....