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

Foreword

ix Foreword J A Olaf Larson is a generation older than I am. He grew up in the early 1900s; I grew up in the 1930s and ’40s. We were both farm boys, he in southern Wisconsin, I in central Wisconsin. Although some twentyfive years separate us, we had nearly the same farm experiences. We both grew up driving horses. Neither us had electricity, indoor plumbing, or central heat in our farm homes. And we both grew up during times of great change in farming. To understand these changes, we need to look at some history. After years of French trading, exploration, and missionary work in what became Wisconsin, the first wave of landowners arrived from upstate New York and New England, beginning in the 1830s (lead miners had arrived in southwestern Wisconsin about a decade earlier). Thousands of German, Norwegian, Irish, Polish, and other European immigrants followed the Yankees, as they were called. Immigrants began arriving in Wisconsin shortly after territory status in 1836 with numbers increasing after statehood in 1848 and continuing into the early twentieth century. By 1900 some fifty different ethnic groups had found new homes in Wisconsin; Germans were the most numerous, followed by Norwegians, Irish, and Poles. Olaf Larson’s father, Sandberg Larson, immigrated to Wisconsin from Norway. He settled near Edgerton in 1903 and married in 1909. x When Olaf was born in 1910, life on a Wisconsin farm had become a bit easier than that of early settlers. Many changes in agricultural practice and farm family life had taken place in the years from statehood to the early 1900s. During the early years of settlement, farmers grew wheat, thousands of acres, but wheat growing had faded into the background and dairy farming had taken over in the southern two-thirds of the state by the time Larson was born. Much of the vast timberland in the northern one-third of the state had been cut, the logs moved off to sawmills. A few pioneers tried farming in the cutover , but the growing season was short, much of the land poor, and before a crop could be planted enormous stumps had to be cleared. In the southern counties, especially in counties such as Rock where Larson’s story takes place, dairying flourished by 1910. It was in that year that Wisconsin for the first time surpassed New York State as the nation’s leading producer of cheese. When Wisconsin moved from wheat growing to dairy farming, farmers built the great barns, many of them still found around the countryside today. Larson describes the barn on his home farm in considerable detail, indicating that the beams and posts came from trees growing on the farm. “The beams showed the marks of the axes that had shaped them from logs,” he writes. Larson also recalled seeing reminders of earlier life on his farm—he found an ox yoke and cradle (a special scythe for cutting grain) stored in their barn. From the settlement years to the years beyond the Civil War, when wheat was king and dairy farming was unknown, farmers planted wheat by hand, harvested it with a hand-operated cradle, and threshed it with a flail—a hickory pole to which a smaller piece Foreword xi of wood was attached with a piece of leather. Sometimes oxen walked over the grain to thresh it. The earliest barns, those that preceded the big dairy barns, were called three-bay threshing barns and were used as a place to thresh grain and to store it. The center of the barn had two large doors, one on each side of the floor where the wheat was threshed. The doors were opened when flailing took place, to allow the draft to blow away the chaff. These early barns did not house livestock. Once dairy began replacing wheat growing, farmers sometimes jacked up the earlier three-bay threshing barns and constructed a basement under them to house cows. The upper part of the barn was used for hay storage. Just before 1900, gambrel-roofed barns began appearing. The cattle continued to be housed in the basement area of the barn; but the upper part, with a gambrel-roof, provided more space to store hay than the simple gable-roofed barns that preceded them. During the early 1900s, University of Wisconsin researchers began studies to determine effective ventilation systems for barns. Conducting much of this research, Franklin...