Count the men at that table. Now understand that she does this three times a day, seven days a week, and she is the reason that mill runs. 🍽️ Timber and sawmill camps went up wherever the cutting was, and they were full of single men a long way from anywhere. Those men had to eat, and they had to eat enough to do extremely hard physical work, and there was nowhere to buy a meal. So a woman cooked. Usually she and her family lived at the camp, and she fed the crew out of a kitchen with a wood range, no running water and no refrigeration, on a schedule that never moved. The arithmetic is staggering when you lay it out. Twenty or thirty men eating three meals a day is sixty to ninety plates, every single day. Biscuits by the hundred. Pots of beans started the night before. Meat, potatoes, cornbread, pie if she could manage it, because a camp that fed badly lost its men to a camp that fed well, and the company knew it. Water carried. Wood carried. Dishes washed in a tub. Bread set to rise at four in the morning. And she was paid, by the company or by the men directly, in her own name, in cash. 💵 That is a woman running a commercial kitchen at volume, in the woods, with a workforce of herself and whichever of her children were big enough to carry something. The mill superintendent's name is in the company records. Hers is usually not. But every man on that crew knew exactly who was keeping them fed, and none of them would have stayed a week without her