This was a neat thing I remember from my last year of highschool.
Merritt and his family farmed in Toulon, my families are from Galva and Kewanee, and the other hamlets and slowly declining population of the farming community of central/western Illinois were all of a similar disposition.?ÿ I'm glad I came from the Midwest.?ÿ
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1t8-x3uOSqY
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Thank you, I enjoyed that.
Johnny Carson had the best talk show; then, now or before that.
My Grandpa, on my Mom's side, worked a farm in Windygates, Manitoba; just North of the North Dakota boarder.?ÿ
My Dad's Dad owned farm land in Leslie, Saskatchewan, but mostly ran the Co-op Elevator in town.
My Mom's Dad used draft horses, when I was toddler. I had some old 8mm tapes put on DVD; I'll have to see if I can put together a post some day...
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Family time on the farm is something I will never forget!
I recall picking corn by hand in a small field with Dad, using a team of horses to pull the wagon. They knew what to do and didn't need a driver.
We have movies taken in the late 1920's or early 30's by my great uncle, who was a life-long amateur photographer. Much of it is family gatherings when my mother, her brothers, and cousins were little kids.
Some of the movie scenes are of using horse-drawn machinery, and the county museum is using those scenes in an exhibit.?ÿ If I recall correctly, there is cultivating corn, mowing hay, taking, and pulling hay into the barn using a hay fork.
My grandpa borrowed a horse to plow his field. When he was done plowing he put me on the horse and turned the horse loose. Hire knew the way home and went right to his home haystack,
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Reminds me of when I was young.?ÿ My Uncle had cattle and leased a wide range along the Mississippi River Bottomlands.?ÿ There were no 4-wheehers and atv's back then.?ÿ Only horses.?ÿ So we would saddle up and ride for hours looking for cows and checking fences.?ÿ When we were finished and ready to go home all you had to do was lighten up on the reins and let the horses find their way back.?ÿ And if it was real late you better not try to steer the horse or you might find yourself on the ground without a horse.
@bill93 We never had to pick a whole field but we had to pick rows so the tractor could pull the corn picker that was mounted on the rear but offset to one side. We called them "pull rows".?ÿ Hot, rough, dirty work for a young teenager in the South Georgia heat in September.
Andy
I never lived on a farm but dad grew up on one and talked about it often. One day, he showed me his house in Oklahoma. I could not believe how small the house was, or how desolate the farm was. They were a very close family. We had lived in a few "sizable" towns when I was growing up. We moved to a tiny Cowboy town in Colorado in 1970 when I was 10. He loved the small size and still lives there.
Four different branches of my family tree spent time in an area southwest of Peoria.?ÿ Not the same towns, but not too far apart.?ÿ The Tracewells and the Sweets.?ÿ Both at my great-great-grandparent level. Two other branches were in that same general area at the great-grandparent level (Hutchinsons and Conrads) for about twenty years.?ÿ Why they all happened to be in that general area, I have no idea.
Mom's side left Belarus in '17 and supported the anti communism movement.
Dad's side jumped ship when the founder learned he wasn't really immortal in Navoo and died of lead poisoning.?ÿ
All in all, great place to be from.
area southwest of Peoria
My great grandmother nee Reffner was born at Canton, but they didn't stay there long before moving to Iowa.
This is what makes researching history and genealogy so interesting to me.?ÿ Thinking back to various circumstances that occurred to get our ancestors together so that eventually we would be here today proves how remarkable that really is.
We all have one set of biological parents, two sets of grandparents, four sets of great-grandparents, eight sets of great-great grandparents and so forth, doubling each generation back.?ÿ In my case, one set of great-great grandparents met there in the middle of Illinois because one was born there and the other moved from upstate New York to that same little community.?ÿ Another set of great-great grandparents were born in different parts of England but ended up in neighboring communities in eastern Nebraska.?ÿ Another set of great-great grandparents were born in adjoining counties in central Ohio with ancestors going back to the early 1700's in what is now the U.S.
My parents grew up 30 miles apart during a time when that was like 300 miles today.?ÿ My mother's parents walked to where they needed to go as they had no vehicle.?ÿ Without WW II, my parents would have never met.?ÿ My mother's parents met by chance on the interurban train car one day as both were going to work.?ÿ My dad's parents met because Grandma's family moved from central Illinois to west central Missouri about two miles from where Granddad had been raised.?ÿ They were around 28 and 25 at the time.?ÿ Had either of them married at a younger age to someone from their hometown my Dad would not have been born.?ÿ One great-grandfather somehow survived fighting for over 3.5 years in the Civil War before coming home to marry and have eight kids.
