this page is for short stories written by my late grandfather, sherman george stevenson. my poppop was a farmer and served as the vice president of the delaware farm bureau. he wrote about farm life, the politics that affected farmers, and things that interested him. his works were never widely published, however, his small creative writing column, cy says, found its home in the delmarva armer.
as of may 10th, 2026, i have a small binder of typed short stories and a tote full of highly damaged, hand written stories. I will update this page with poppop's writing as I go. most stories do not appear to have dates or order to them, so I will be posting them in the order I find them unless otherwise stated. this may change if I am able to get my hands on archives or back issues of the delmarva farmer.
it's okay if these stories aren't interesting to you. they were written for a specific kind of person who no longer exists. and while i haven't read through the entire collection yet, i'm going to slap a preemptive warning: while i never knew my poppop to be a raging biggot, he was from a different generation and set in his ways. these stories were written for the american farmer of that same generation. some things may pop up in these stories that you find offensive or uncouth. but like i said, i haven't read through them all yet, so we'll discover it together if they do.
also yes a lot of things are misspelled. it was a stylistic choice in order to recreate the accent of delmarva area farmers of the day.
T'Other day I was taken advantage of a good day, weather wise an was settin' back in a shady stop jest enjoyin' life. Now a feller can't jest sit back and do nothing if he does he's wastin' Gods wonderful time. And time is somethin' that we all don't have enough of. So wastin' is jest about as bad as sinnin' and I don't want to start to preachin', so I won't say anything more about sinnin'.
Well, sir, I was reading' my "New Jersey Farmer," and the lead story (that's newspaper talk), was about somethin' which really ain't news anymore. The story was about the budget noose gettin' tighter. And the cut backs that that was likely to come in the state Department of Agriculture. Now it seam like every time you turn around there's some sorta cut back hittin' in the face. Now cut backs ain't bad if it means you're payin' less, but it never seems to work. They do the back cuttin' but the taxes keep goin' up. And that right there causes a feller to scratch his head. Seem like if you cut back on what the governments givin' and start folk payin' what they call user fees, then them that ain't usin' should not have to go so deep in the pocket. But it don't work jest that way.