I grew up in Alma, Wisconsin, about an hour and a half south of Minneapolis/St Paul via Highway 35, (The Great River Road), at Lock and Dam number 4 on the Mississippi River. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin, Wisconsin about 15 miles up the road. That is where my mother grew up as well.
Alma is the county seat for Buffalo County, white-tail capital of the world (although my dad said there were hardly any deer around when he was growing up). It is part of the Driftless Area, somehow untouched by glaciers millions of years ago. Alma was originally a logging town called Twelve Mile Bluff and founded in 1848 by German and Swiss settlers. The ancestors on my father’s side of the family immigrated from Germany and Switzerland to Buffalo County in the late 1800’s.
The town is built into a 600-foot bluff. Bluffs flank the Mississippi River which is about a mile wide at this point. You will find “goat prairies,” or dry prairies on top of many of these bluffs, a land feature which is unique in the world to Buffalo County.
There are three main streets, River Street, Main Street and three other steep roads that take you up to Second Street. The population has hovered around 1000 for decades. There are no stoplights and the closest fast food restaurant is 25 miles away. The closest hospital is in Wabasha, Minnesota, 15 minutes away.
I grew up on a 400-acre dairy and beef farm in Alma, 3 miles north of town. I am the youngest of three. My brothers are seven and eight years older than me. We raised corn and hay and sometimes grain for the cattle.
To get to our farm, you would enter Spring Creek Road, now Spooner Road, from Highway 35. Watercress grew in the springs alongside the road. Actually high schoolers including my brother used to hide beer in the culverts by the spring as well. I think my dad was the beneficiary of some of that beer. Sometimes we picked morel mushrooms in the woods in the spring, black-caps (berries) in the summer, and hickory nuts in the fall.
Our family owns the land next to the highway...woodland that extended up a goat prairie bluff to the right. My folks later built a house on that property in 1976. The house overlooks the K-12 school we attended. My mother was an elementary school teacher there as well. The home cost $25,000 to build and my 91-year old mother still lives in it to this day.
We owned the swampland that was on the left side of the road with a couple of ponds in between that led up to the first neighbor a half mile up the road. My dad used to clear the trees in the swampland hoping to dry it up and perhaps put in some crops. I helped him burn brush when I was small. Years later in 2001, my father was killed in a tractor accident just up the hill by the swamp.
Less than a quarter mile on the left was another neighbor, then you would go up a steep hill another half mile to our farm. The Abstract for the farm dates back to 1855. My dad’s parents bought our farm in 1939; my dad bought the farm from his parents in 1948; and he sold it to my brother Brian in 1976. My brother still lives there with his wife and he retired from milking in December 2019. He still has some beef cattle, so there is not as much work as milking cows. He leases some of the land to deer hunters, and is also selling some land to pay taxes. His son helps him from time to time.
Upon entering our yard, there was a large 3-car garage built into a hill on the right. It housed our car, pick-up truck, and in the middle was a bay to fix our tractors and other equipment.
There was a raspberry patch on the left, with a non-working windmill and water pump (that was later taken down) and a ditch where I would burn our trash. A gravel circular drive went around our house to the barn and other buildings.
Our house was straight ahead, a 2-story square gabled Victorian house with blue asphalt shingles. There were 3 porches in the front, and one in the back. One of the porches in the front was off the second floor on top of another one. There were 2 huge maple trees in front that had trunks at least three feet in diameter and roots we would stumble over. It was likely they were planted when the house was built, and were probably over a hundred years old. I had a tire swing on one of the trees. A hedge enclosed the front yard, but we took it out as it was hard to mow around and leaves would get stuck in it in the fall.
The house was painted in a 2-tone scheme: half was white and the other half brown. Someone told my mom to do it that way so the house would not look so tall or something like that. My brothers painted it a charcoal gray with white trim one summer and looked a whole lot better.
You entered the house through the kitchen from a screened porch, which was added on. The kitchen was pretty basic, although my mother was always remodeling and painting. In the 60’s she added new cabinets and painted the kitchen a groovy green, outfitted it with green and blue curtains, and hung a white chandelier with blue and green medallions around it. We added a dishwasher to the kitchen in the 1970’s which I was thrilled about because I had been the dishwasher. We had an old-fashioned water pump outside the kitchen window that was later dismantled.
We had white appliances in the kitchen. My mom actually won our stove from entering a Wisconsin Dairy Cook off for her “Seafood Delight” recipe. Ingredients consisted of canned tuna, asparagus, cream of mushroom soup, cheese, and egg noodles. It was not one of my favorites. She was on one of the local TV stations demonstrating the recipe. I never saw the program because we did not have very good TV reception “in the valley.” (We got 2-3 stations on our black and white TV.) A decade later she was on TV again for her prize- winning strawberry pie...but she did not get a stove that time. Needless to say, my mother was a very good cook.
The living and dining room was located off the kitchen. My mom had the ceilings lowered and added Kelly green carpeting to the wooden floor and removed some of the woodwork trim. There were two other doors off the living and dining room that led to the porches on the front of the house, but the doors were never used.
We had a crank telephone off the kitchen that had a “party line” and sometimes you could eavesdrop on neighbors’ conversations. My folks overheard a neighbor gossiping about us a few times. We later got a regular phone for the kitchen.
We had a small bathroom off of the kitchen with blue and white postage-size tile on the floor, and white pedestal sink. There was a small rustic yellow-topped cabinet for towels. My mom made curtains out of 2 blue beach towels and white pompom trim. There was only a bathtub. Chalk-ware fish figurines adorned one wall.
We stored a 50-pound bag of Tuffy dried dog food in a closet off of the bathroom. Stairs led down to the basement, which had a dirt floor. Not sure why I did it, but my brothers or folks used to catch me eating dog food in that closet. I guess we didn’t have any snacks around! I learned to be very self-sufficient. My pets were my companions and I was happiest with them.
My parents put a concrete floor in the basement. A wood-burning furnace was in the middle, later converted to gas. Wood was thrown down a small opening from outside. The furnace reminded me of the Bible illustration of the men who were put in the fiery furnace. I would roller skate around it on my strap-on roller skates.
There was a big table in the basement and my brother used it for chemistry set experiments, tying fishing lures, and also making shotgun shells. We had a huge chest freezer in the corner filled with beef, venison, chicken, and sometimes a raccoon carcass. In high school my brother made a ping pong table in shop class, so we had fun with that. My dad was an excellent ping pong player. He was hard to beat.
There was a laundry room off to the side where we had a wringer washing machine. We later got a 2-tub machine....one for soap that was used over and over again, and the other for rinsing. We would flush the water down a sump pump. I did the washing at an early age. I did it every Saturday for the whole family. I usually dried the clothes on the clothesline. We had a dryer, but usually only used it in the winter.
My folks’ bedroom was in the corner of the first floor. A door off my folks’ bedroom and dining room lead to a stairway upstairs to five rooms. The stairway went straight up and then curved to a landing to my bedroom at the top. I had a white princess bedroom set that my parents bought when I was 4 or 5. I was not too keen on it at the time because I slept in my parents’ room. I think they thought it was incentive to sleep by myself. Brian’s bedroom was down the hallway next to mine, and Dwight’s was at the end of the hallway near the second story porch. I was in charge of cleaning my brother’s rooms. They made such a mess!
Another small hallway intersected Brian’s room. There was a storage room to the right and another large room at the end with an iron bed at the end of the hallway. I used it for a “playroom.” All my toys were perfectly organized there. In that hallway there was another wooden stairway that led to the attic. We stored some old wainscoting and old player piano scrolls up there. (Our piano was converted from a player piano.) There were a lot of bats up there too and a few times our family would go up in the attic (probably on a Sunday afternoon) and kill bats with badminton racquets and brooms. I thought nothing of it and it was fun. I really feel bad about it now. We would have a 2-foot high pile after the massacre and we totally wrecked our badminton racquets.
We also had mice. We set a mousetrap in the kitchen behind the refrigerator. I used to change it out with my bare hands and reuse the trap. I would not think of doing that now. At night I would hear mice or bats through the walls in my bedroom. I thought they were going to get me.
It was cold on the second story. I’m guessing it was about 60 degrees. We could not get enough heat up there in the winter. In the summer it was hot. We would change out the storm windows in the spring for screens. I never looked forward to that as it meant washing windows and screens during colder weather and my skin got chapped.
Our house almost burned down twice while I was growing up. Once was when my brother Dwight lit a candle in his room and fell asleep. The candle toppled over and ignited the room. Fortunately he woke up and put out the fire. Some of his room was charred, but it was fixed. We were tight-lipped about that incident. One winter, an old building that was about ten feet from the house started on fire. The whole thing burned and the Volunteer Fire Department from the neighboring town of Nelson came and put it out. My Dad volunteered for that fire department as well. It was windy that night and we were lucky to save the house. Both times I was carried downstairs and I don’t remember too many details of the incidents.
The back porch led to our red barn about 150 feet away. We added on and enclosed the back porch in the early 1970s. On the way to the barn on the left we had a 50’ X 50’ garden that I would help plant, hoe and weed in the summer. A security light there illuminated our way at night.
The barn was built in 1910 by our neighbor, William Ristow. It was a post and frame hipped roof barn with stone foundation. The original barn was 66 feet long and 36 feet wide. You would enter the barn through the milk house that housed the refrigerated stainless steel bulk tank, tubs to clean milking equipment, racks to hang the equipment from, and a drain in the middle. Then you would go through a breezeway to the barn. We milked about 28 Holstein cows.
The barn held 28 stanchions, 14 stanchions on each side, with a trough in front to feed hay and feed, then a long gutter on each side behind each cow to catch manure. There were doors on each end of the barn. The cows entered and exited through one door. You had to step over the gutter to get to the long platform in the middle. On weekends, my brothers would have to clean out the gutters. Later we got an automated barn cleaner that really helped.
Calf pens were located in the upper end. In the spring, barn swallows would make nests in the rafters or return to them year after year. We kept the Dutch-style barn doors open for access in the summer and to air out the barn. We had a radio that was tuned in to WCCO, out of Minneapolis, to listen to farm and weather reports and Twins baseball. It was left on in the winter for the cows’ listening pleasure.
Each cow had its own water in a levered contraption. If they pressed down on a lever in the bowl, water would fill it. The mechanism would sometimes clog with hay and feed, so I would clean it out from time to time.
We had automatic milking machines and could milk two cows at once. Once a cow was milked, the milk was poured into a 4-gallon stainless steel bucket, which someone had to carry to the milk house to the 300-gallon refrigerated bulk tank and pour it in the “strainer.” I helped carry milk when I was old enough to hoist it up shoulder height into the “strainer.” Sometimes I missed and milk poured all over. So that was money down the drain.
Cows were milked twice a day at 6:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Every morning my dad in a gruff tone would call upstairs to say, “Dwight, Brian, let’s to get to work.” They took turns to help my dad with the milking process before school. Interestingly, I have never milked a cow, never had to.
The hay mow was located above where we milked the cows. It had two holes cut out of the floor through which to throw hay down to the cows. A hinged door in the floor covered the holes. A ladder was attached to the wall below. We filled the hay mow in the summer. Sometimes the stacks of hay were 30 feet high. Sparrows made their nests in the rafters and created quite a mess. Sometimes at night I would go with my brother “bird hunting” to shoot them with BB guns. I would hold the flashlight for him. I could not think of doing such a thing now. A lot of people picture a hay mow as a place to play and swing around on ropes. We were not allowed to do that. A hay mow can be a dangerous place. You could easily fall down one of the hay mow openings if they were not closed.
They had barn dances in our hay mow during prohibition. A grain bin in the hay mow was used as a stage. Oddly enough, my sister-in-law’s great uncle played the accordion at those dances along with her grandfather who played a portable pump organ. My elementary school music teacher Millie Benjamin was a musician too. Our neighbor Ray Wibel sold moonshine at the dances as well.
In the summer, one of my favorite jobs was to get the cows for evening milking. (In general, the cows would be waiting by the barn in the morning to be milked.) I would either walk or ride my single speed bike on the cow paths or ride one of my ponies (although that was actually more of a hassle) a half a mile into the pasture to find them and bring them to the barn. They knew the way and were very compliant, always in a group. They liked seeing me, but not so much when I brought the dogs as they would nip at their legs. The cows were usually huddled under some trees. I’ve always said I invented mountain biking and still enjoy it to this day.
Once the cows got to the barn, they would file in. Each knew their space. I was always amazed at that. Occasionally a young cow would go nuts and not get into her stanchion very well. Usually you heard lot of cussing from the menfolk when this happened. After each cow was in the stanchion, we gave them a scoop or two of ground feed, from the feed room off the breezeway. This consisted of ground corn (that we raised and took to town to have it ground at the Farmer’s Union) and we added some nutrients to it as well. Each cow had a numbered tag on a chain around her neck, and later a tagged number to their ears. We would scrape the floor between the gutters before and after milking. In the evening we would throw down “lime”. We did not really name any of the cows, but my favorite was “99”. She was the first cow that you would see coming out of the breezeway. She was older and never shied away from me.
In the summer we pumped fly spray into the air for flies. I liked the caustic smell of it, along with the smell of gas, which probably wasn’t very good for me. Who knows what we ingested.
A milk hauler would come about twice a week to haul milk away to a nearby creamery. He would hook up a hose to a tube that extended out the milk house to drain the milk to his truck. We drank the milk from the bulk tank and would store it in a 2-gallon Tupperware container. If we needed butter, we would let the milk hauler know and he would leave it in the milk house and we would leave the money due.
Our dogs liked to chase the milk truck or cars in general. A few of them got run over. I saw my white German shepherd Gidget get run over one day. Her front legs were broken and it was a horrible sound. Instead of taking her to the vet, my brother shot her a short time later. I lived an “Old Yeller” moment. One time I also witnessed a steer being bludgeoned by a hammer while getting ready for butchering, and also one of my Shetland ponies being castrated.
Also on the land was the original 30-foot tall silo with brown staves next to the barn. It was dilapidated and eventually torn down. We had a 75-foot silo made of concrete staves built to house corn silage for the cows and livestock in the winter. The cows pretty much stayed in the barn in their stanchions all winter only to be let out in good weather and to clean the barn.
We had about 30 head of beef cattle and also sheep and pigs for a short time. Pig smell is the worst. I think I can still smell them. I remember the sows having pigs. They were very cute, but sometimes the sows would lie on the piglets and eat them if they were unwell. They were housed in our chicken coop.
We had chickens, too, after the pigs left. My mom would get about 50 rooster chicks in the spring and then it was my job to raise them in the summer. I would lose a few chickens every summer because they were weak and the others pecked them to death, so I would have to bury them, usually in the garden. I had no attachment to those chickens. Occasionally we would get a couple of “layers” mixed in so it was nice to have some fresh eggs. I would have to add calcium to their feed to harden up their eggs as some came out soft.
In August, my mom or dad would announce we were butchering chickens. Not fun at all! My brothers or dad would cut the heads off with an ax on a block of wood with a clothes hanger hook. We would boil water and dunk the chickens in a 5-gallon pail. The hot water would make it easier to pluck feathers. My job was to pluck the feathers. This was done outside. I would light a page from a newspaper to singe the rest of the downy feathers off, then take the chickens to the kitchen for processing. My mother would remove the guts and feet in the kitchen and boy did it stink! I think contents of the gizzards did not help in the matter.
We also used the kitchen as a butcher shop in the fall when we would cut up deer from hunting. We would wrap the meat in butcher paper and secure with masking tape and label the cut of meat.
So on about two acres of land we had the house, barn, chicken coop, a two-story granary, and a pole barn that was built behind the barn to store machinery and extra hay, and a corn crib. One acre was grass. I cut the grass with a push mower and then we got a John Deere rider which was really helpful. As soon as I got done mowing, I’d have to do it 3 or 4 days later as the grass was so lush. Sometimes if the grass got too long in spots, I would stake out one of my Shetland ponies to a 20’ chain and they would do the work for me. This would also alleviate dismemberment of poor snakes and frogs in the long grass with the lawn mower. I’m sure our yard looked like some of those “crop circles”.
I was 16 when my father retired from farming and my brother took over. He was getting married in the summer and I was his hired hand. My other brother was already married and out of the house. We had a house built down the “valley”. We actually moved the day before my brother’s wedding. We loaded up our belongings on a hay wagon and moved into our new home. Wedding festivities were held the next day. I was in the wedding and had to leave the reception and go do chores with a family friend who was milking the cows. When we finished, I cleaned up and put on my green dotted Swiss dress and headed to the wedding dance, hopefully not smelling like “barn.”
Perhaps my life on the farm seems idyllic to some and a little shocking to others. This is just a smattering of what it was like. I have been a “city girl” for two thirds of my life now, but I see the world in a different way because of my life on the farm. I am a country girl at heart and this has made me who I am today. It was a lot of work living there, but we had fun too. I do not regret living on a farm. It has enriched my life.
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