My paternal grandfather born on May 26,1899. My paternal grandmother was born October
30,1900. My grandparents married on
August 26, 1923. I never met my
grandfather as he had died before my birth.
I am told he was a happy man and a practical man. My
grandmother wrote notes on her wedding certificate and from the gist of those
notes he wasn’t the romantic type.
In one picture I have of my grandmother she
was 18/19 and while thin as ever she looked happy. It is the only picture of her I can say that
about. From what I have heard/read she
was a spitfire in her youth and not afraid of anything. At one point she was the town butcher while
my grandfather worked on the railroad.
In a picture of her when she was about 27 she already looks old. She
had several miscarriages before my father’s birth in ’26. He just barely made it having been born
weighing only 2 ½ pounds. They stuck him
in a shoe box and put him behind the wood stove like a make shift incubator. Whatever they did worked because he grew to
be hale and hearty!
My grandparents bought and combined several pieces of property on April 2,
1930 and started working on their house.
On July 6, 1931 at 9:30 AM, my grandfather paid $15.00 to buy the Ridgeway
School House which was located on a piece of the property he had bought, a building he graduated from in April of
1915.
This building eventually was
turned in to the haymow for our barn and the coal shed is now used as my
chicken coop. I remember as a kid taking
pieces of plaster and using it as chalk to write on the blackboards in the
schoolhouse.
Some scribbles can still be seen today.
The cloakroom (door on the left) was our feed room
and the schoolroom itself was part of our hay mow. Most of the windows were boarded up when
additions were added to the right and left side to hold the dairy
herd. Whereas the builders of the school used mortise and tenon construction
my family was all for nails, nails and more nails....
My
grandmother was 64 when I was born. I
remember sitting on her porch swing snapping green beans, cutting limb wood for
the kitchen stove, bringing in buckets of coal, taking the chamber pot out to
dump in the outhouse if I had slept over and been unable to hold it till
morning, and I remember walking down the hill with her to the ice cream store
when all the work was done.
When her health became an issue, she wanted
us to move in with her but her house had no insulation, a coal stove in the
livingroom and a combo stove (coal or wood on oneside and propane on the other for
heat and cooking, it only had one ceiling light in each room with the outlets
in the light fixture . The water came
into the kitchen sink but there was no septic so it had to be carried outside
in the dishpan or flood the kitchen floor….which also meant there was only an
outhouse. My mother having three kids
and all the aforementioned missing amenities in her own house couldn’t see the
sense of it so my gram moved in with us.
I remember her as being so stubborn.
She would try to do her own laundry and hang it out on the line. We would come home to find her lying on the
ground in whatever weather there was unable to get up and unsure how long she
had been lying there. She wanted her independence and we wanted her safe. The same thing some families are facing
today.
Our small dairy herd was milked twice a day. The milk was
transported and sold. My father worked
nights as a guard in a state mental institution. My mother helped on the farm and canned up
most of what we ate from huge gardens they planted. Potatoes were planted and sold to boarding
houses, corn sold to who ever came to the house to buy some, hay baled from
numerous fields to feed the stock over the winter. My father was the type of guy who could walk
into a bar and sit there for hours with the same drink in front of him because
he was too busy telling a story to drink it. Real
whoopers were affectionately referred to as “Kuhn stories”.
I remember my dad going and getting us
birch branches to chew on when we were hot while baling hay. I remember digging through the groundhog
holes found while baling to find pieces of flint or if you were lucky an arrow
head. I remember throwing all that hay
into the mow. My grandfather had built a
ladder right in the middle of that school house and we use to climb it to stack
the bales higher. I remember jumping from
it into a pile of hay. On the beam
holding it up was a rope swing that when the hay got low we were able to swing
on. Life was indeed good then.
The ladder is now laying out behind the barn. Look how deep they drilled those rungs into the sides.
My father died unexpectedly on March 7, 1974. He had gone to check his trap line with my
great uncle. The weather had been warm
so the ice was only three inches thick.
They were walking out to an island on the lake when they both fell
through. My job that week was to water
the calves. As he had not returned I
decided to go up to the barn alone and do my chores. I was trying to carry a five gallon bucket of
water past a cow's head to get to a calf when the cow knocked the bucket of
water from my hand and spilled it all threw the manger. I ran home to tell my mom who knew that meant
my father had never returned to the barn to let the cows out for water,
something he would never do. She called
my older half brother to go look for him.
They found the vehicle and the police were called and a search ensued. They were found by a dive team and pronounced dead on March
8, 1974.
My mother, who always said she had loved my
grandfather, respected my grandmother but I can’t say they had a very amicable
relationship. My mother was trying to
raise three kids on my father’s social security, take care of the barn chores
and the garden along with trying to keep an eye on my grandmother. They were two
women from different backgrounds living together and mourning the loss of my
dad but unable to really communicate with each other.
My
grandmother died in her bed in June of 1977.
My mother was shocked when she found out she had inherited the farm and
the old house. She thought of fixing up
the house and moving us in but the money was never there. She saved enough to put a new roof on, then saved for the new
bilko doors to the basement ,then saved to do some work on the electric but the
house just kept aging and we grew up and moved away.
I moved back home in 1993 and started a
completely different relationship with my mother than I had before. She became more than just my mom bossing me
around (how I use to see it) and became my mentor. She showed me how to garden and how to
can.
The gardening and canning inevitably led to
having animals. Time had taken a toll on
the barn and the left section had fallen down and taken out a chicken coop and
then most of the old school house fell.
We started digging through the fallen part and burning it. We built a small barn on the slab from the
chicken coop and put Jingles, #2’s horse up there. Then came the pigs, several steer, turkeys,
sheep, chickens and ducks, with mom
telling me how to train the pigs not to stand in their trough, what to feed, how
to load them to go to the butcher and millions of other helpful tidbits…all the
while sneaking them treats!
After a trip together to Puerto Rico, she
was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Three
years later she lost the battle and I inherited the old house and the barn.
Until last year the right side of the
school house where the feed room was and the right wing of the barn still stood. It was unused but a reminder of those that
came before us and the work they had put into the farm. Then last year on a perfectly dry and wind free
day it toppled under the weight of a grapevine planted by passing bird.
Earlier this year we started to cut pieces
off the fallen barn to burn. This weekend while it was
raining we set a pile of the barn on fire.
There will be several more piles before she is all gone.
Random pics of the place...
FK, my great uncles initials. A real character who once came home and told his wife he had sold the house and they had to be out the next day. Way ahead of his time he subdivided all his properties and they still exist under that subdivision plan today.
Back in the day my father use to patch every hole in the siding so that bee's, wasp and mice couldn't get in and build nests. That practice wasn't kept up. Happily the weather is cool and we didn't find this active.
It's proving to be a time capsule in it's self just with the nails used.
Hopefully in the future we can re-build on the site as I wish to expand and have a dairy cow. And hopefully years from now my children or grandchildren will return home and continue where the man and I leave off. And that they have as much love and as many memories attached to this piece of land as I do.
I hope Gerald O'Hara was right when he told Scarlet " It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it if you're Irish"
And mixed in with their German heritage is Irish , so here's hopin'.
