There She Blows!

When my Grandfather, Jon Kana immigrated to America from Czechoslovakia, he came with just the shirt on his back. Over a period of time and much hard work, he acquired about 700 acres of property. Most of it was located along East Radhost School Road. He acquired farms of about 100 to 200 acres, one at a time. The farms were close together but not joining each other. My Dad acquired one of these farms from Jon Kana. When Dad acquired the land, it was all virgin land with no clearings and densely populated with wild weeds, trees and very thick brush. Over time, the land was all cleared for farming.

Since most of the land was to be plowed fairly deep, the hundreds of stumps had to be completely removed—not an easy task especially when some of the post oak and pecan trees were as much as 3 feet in diameter? All the clearing was done mostly by hand but a mechanical gadget called a “stump puller” or cap stand was used on most of the smaller stumps. The “stump puller” was a winch with a vertical spool of heavy steel cable. It operated with a team of horses or mules going around and around pulling on a 16-foot tongue attached to the cable spool. The larger stumps were blasted with dynamite. They didn’t blow sky high as one would imagine, but would be split apart into smaller pieces and then pulled out piece-by-piece with the winch.

I was about 12 years old when Dad had to cut down a dead pecan tree from the edge of his corn patch. This was a huge tree and after cutting and burning the tree, he was left with a huge stump 2 feet high. He wasn’t going to plant corn or plow around this stump the rest of his days, so he said that stump had to go.

I don’t know how he acquired the dynamite, blasting caps and fuse but he had it. He told me he blasted many stumps in his younger days and wanted to show me what it was all about. He proceeded to drill a deep hole under the stump at about a 45-degree angle. The hole was about 1¼ inches in diameter and deep enough to accept 4 sticks of dynamite placed into it one following the other. He then took a broom handle to push the sticks down into the hole as deep as he could. Prior to pushing the last stick, he inserted a blasting cap into the stick. Then he inserted a fuse into the cap and crimped it tightly with a pair of pliers. He said he had seen John Wayne crimp the cap with his teeth but that was only in the movies and probably not a good idea. After the last stick was pushed into the hole with the broom handle, the fuse was lit and Dad and I ran to hide behind a tree about 50 yards away.

It seemed forever for that fuse to burn all the way down to the dynamite but after about 45 seconds the ground shook, BOOM— the stump blew apart, and pieces fell all around us. I was very fortunate to witness all of this and thank Dad for showing me how it was done in the old days.