Pictures Have Stories to Tell

 

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  For me, a picture is also worth many stories, stories that may not have been told for many years.  A couple weeks

ago, my brother Donald and I gazed at the picture of the home farm’s buildings.  It was an aerial photo taken in the late 1950s, after my two brothers and I had left the farm, but our father and mother continued farming.

We looked at the photo of the old barn, really two barns in one.  We had moved the larger barn to the farm shortly after World War II.  What a task it was to move a barn of that size.  Pa had purchased the barn from near Heffron, which was about five miles north of our place.  Don and I talked about how we spent several days trimming back tree limbs along the country roads where we would haul the barn.  Not an easy task.  Then we talked about the day that the barn was moved.  The mover had attached wheels to the corners of the big structure, and then with his truck along with our Farmall H tractor and our neighbor, Bill Miller’s John Deere B, we pulled the huge barn—it took up the entire road—from Heffron to our farm.  It moved along at about three miles an hour.  And what a sight to see.  A barn moving down the road.

We noticed the big straw stack just beyond the barn, and commented that that the photo had been taken shortly after we had threshed.  This brought back memories of threshing machines and threshing dinners, and moving from farm to farm during threshing season.  Pa and Bill Miller owned a threshing machine together, so we had first had experience with that complicated machine with its pulleys and belts running every which way.  We remembered how important the straw stack was to our dairy farm operations, as the straw providing bedding for the cows that remained in the barn throughout our long, cold Wisconsin winters.

We commented on the brooder house, just west of the barn, where we started all the baby chicks that arrived each spring by train.  We looked at the machine shed on the west side of the farmstead, with its crooked doors built by a carpenter who had celebrated a bit too much the night before he worked on our shed.

So many stories buried in one picture.  Stories of farm life in the1950s, when there were family farms everywhere.  Now, all but a handful of them are gone.

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: So many stories from old photos—stories that should be told, and remembered.

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS

  To learn more about family farms, see  Wisconsin Agriculture: A History. Buy from your local bookstore, or buy online from the Wisconsin Historical Society bookstore, https://shop.wisconsinhistory.org/books, bookshop.org, or purchase from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering, or contact the librarian: barnard@wildroselibrary.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984.
www.wildroselibrary.org

If you live in the western part of the state, stop at Ruth’s home town, Westby, visit Dregne’s.  and look at their great selection of my books. Order a book from them by calling 1-877-634-4414. They will be happy to help you.  If you live in northcentral Wisconsin, stop at the Janke bookstore in Wausau (phone 715-845-9648).  They also have a large selection of my books.