“The Hoe Handle, the Snake, and the Barn,” or “The Snakebit Hoe Handle,” as it is sometimes known, is a tall tale told across Appalachia. The story centers on a farmer who, while working in his field, has his hoe handle bitten by a poisonous snake. After the bite, the handle swells to unbelievable size and the farmer uses the wood for a project. Later on, as the venom comes into contact with an old time cure-all, like turpentine, or is washed away, the wood shrinks back with disastrous results.
In the tale, an often distraught or depressed farmer is contemplating all his hardships and struggles as he halfheartedly hoes his crop, usually corn or cotton. As he works, he comes across a poisonous snake, and he uses the hoe to fend off the snake to keep from getting bitten. In the process, the snake strikes the hoe’s handle. After the snake slithers away, the farmer notices that the hoe handle has started to swell. He watches in awe as the handle continues to expand with the effects of the poison. When it finally stops, the handle is large enough to cut away several logs to take to the sawmill, where he gets enough lumber from the wood to build a new barn. Unfortunately, the farmer either puts turpentine in his paint, or someone spills a bottle of it in the barn, which counteracts the swelling and the building shrinks down to its original size.
This story is told across a wide region from the American Southeast to the Amish districts of Pennsylvania. As with other folktales, migrant groups carried the story across the United States to the Midwest and beyond. The story has a number of variations; some say the farmer builds a cabin while others say he builds a barn. One of the most common variations has the farmer building either a chicken coop or a pig pen. Unfortunately for the chickens and pigs, the wood shrinks back and either crushes them or the building explodes when the effects of the poison wear off. As with any tall tale, the details in the story make it more believable to the audience, so many versions pack details and a descriptive backstory into the tale, depending on how engaged the storyteller wants the audience to be before the punch line arrives.
The story appears in many folklore collections. In American Folklore, Richard Dorson quotes a version from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, involving a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer contemplating suicide. When the hoe handle swells, he has enough shingles to cover all his buildings. In South from Hell-fer-Sartin’: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales, Leonard Roberts tells a version in which the farmer builds a hog pen. Roberts also includes another variant on the story titled “The Swollen Tree” in which a rattlesnake bites a tree instead of a hoe handle and the farmer builds a five-bedroom cabin from the wood. Unfortunately, his son spills turpentine on the mantel and the house shrinks to the size of a birdhouse. These are only two examples; there are many more with similar circumstances and endings in collections of folklore from the Appalachian region.
Recently, a video recording of a narrator telling the Hoe Handle story appeared in the documentary Mountain Tales. Similar stories appear in other dramatic renderings, such as the story “One Fine Trade,” the tale of a bumbling man on a quest to trade a horse for a silver dollar to buy his daughter a wedding dress. This story includes a section where the man encounters a huge rattlesnake and his stick is bitten and thrown in the woods where it grows to the size of three trees. The man then sells the lumber to a railroad man to use for cross ties. Of course they subsequently shrink in the rain to the size of toothpicks, and the railroad man sells the toothpicks to the foolish man’s wife and gets his money back. These different versions direct the audience to a common and very humorous conclusion typical of the genre of Appalachian folktales.
Jonathan Byrn
See also Babes in the Woods; Bunch of Laurel Blooms for a Present; Hairy Woman; Hardy Hardhead; Jack Tales; Storytelling; Tall Tales
Further Reading
Chase, Richard. 1956. “The Snakebit Hoehandle.” In American Folk Tales and Songs, and Other Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States, 105. New York: Dover.
Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peck, Catherine, ed. 1998. “The Snake-Bit Hoe Handle.” In QPB Treasury of North American Folktales, 72–73. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club.
Roberts, Leonard. 1955. “The Swollen Hoe Handle.” In South from Hell-fer-Sartin’: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales, 153. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.