When Horses Pulled the Plow: Life of a Wisconsin Farm Boy, 1910–1929

6. Hired Men

86 Hired Men During the busy season, from planting through harvest, my father could not do all the farm work by himself, so he took on a hired man, paid by the month. These men were always single. They ate their meals with us and had a room of their own, and my mother did their laundry with the family wash. Sometimes additional help, paid by the day, was hired for short periods, such as tobacco harvest. During the time I was at home, most of the men hired by the month were relatives. The first hired man I remember was my mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Fred. He had lived with his widowed mother and stepfather on a farm until, at about the age of sixteen or seventeen , he came to work for my father. From that time until he was married, our home was his home. One of the things he did soon after joining us was to buy a sled for me. This sled never wore out. Another thing he did was buy a bicycle, which he stored where our car was. I would go in by myself to admire it, wishing I could ride it. I never did get to ride, but actually I was too small to do so. Later, Uncle Fred bought a horse and buggy; the horse soon died. One winter, my uncle went to Janesville and worked in a tobacco warehouse; he did 6 87 not like it. For two years or so he left to work for another farmer on a very good farm. But he came back to be with us. One day during tobacco harvest when he, my father, and I were hanging tobacco in the tobacco shed, he said, blushing, that he was going to start farming for himself. That meant that he was going to get married. My father immediately said that he would loan Uncle Fred five hundred dollars to help get started and named a piece of farm equipment he could have. Uncle Fred started out as a farm tenant. Before long, when he was a tenant on a very productive 120-acre farm, all tillable, the owner decided to sell the farm. A wealthy farmer nearby voluntarily offered my uncle the money to buy the farm; he had noticed what a good farmer and hard worker my uncle was. Another of my mother’s brothers, Uncle Paul, also worked for my father but did not overlap with Uncle Fred. One day, at the noon meal, he said that he “wanted to put his feet under his own table.” That meant that he was going to get married and start farming for himself. He was always a renter. The third relative to work for my father was my mother’s nephew, my cousin. He had been sent by his father who had a small farm in the cutover area of northern Wisconsin. My cousin started working on our farm the first year I was in college so we worked together the summer after my first year away. One year, when my uncles no longer worked for us, the hired man was a recent emigrant from Norway. Another year, my father was persuaded to take a young man, a relative of my father’s sister’s Hired Men 88 husband’s family in Norway, who had a drinking problem. His family thought sending him to work on a farm in America might help him get over his problem. He was a greenhorn with respect to our type of farming. The one thing I remember about him is that one morning he went to the pasture to fetch the cows for milking. In the gully at the end of the lane he noticed what he thought was one of our black and white cats caught in a trap. I had set the trap for woodchucks . When he went to take the cat out of the trap, it turned out to be a skunk, about which he knew nothing. The skunk thoroughly sprayed him. He came back to the barn with the cows. All the milk had to be discarded because of the skunk odor. All the clothes he had on were buried in the manure pile. The persons I recall being hired by the day included a neighbor boy who helped with the tobacco setting one year, a man hired to help with haying and...