David Neumann remembers looking out of the window, witnessing the approaching sleighs accompanied by soldiers.  They came to haul away their last bushel of grain.  His mother told him to get away from the window or he might get shot.  Food had become scarce [pumpkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner] and clothes were as scarce as food. It was at this time, that the Neumanns were the recipients of 30 pounds of white flour, sent to each family by MCC.

     David describes the event in his memoirs:

“Mother baked bread, white loaves of bread …… fluffy as goose feathers…mother called me and laid on my outstretched hand a delicious, beautiful, slice of white bread; a piece measuring perhaps 8 by 6 inches and an inch and a half thick, still warm from the oven.  To the best of my knowledge, that was the first slice of white bread I had ever held in my hand…but alas, the fate of this particular piece of bread was as tragic as the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.  You see, as I approached the wagon, holding the slice in one hand, dad asked me to hook the tug of the cow’s harness into the whipple tree…here I was, with my outstretched hand in a flat horizontal position, the bread resting on it, ready to be devoured on the wagon journey…it so happened that the bread was directly behind the cow…just then, in the midst of the tug-fastening operation, the cow relieved herself of whatever you want to call it, hit the bulls eye dead centre, covering bread, hand and all with a thick layer of cow jam.  It broke my little heart.”

     When flour became scarce, it was mixed with seeds from a bitter weed, resulting in a bitter-tasting bread that even the hungriest found almost impossible to swallow. Pumpkin became a staple, and explains why many, if not all, of the Neumanns developed a permanent distaste for anything made of pumpkin.