Horses on the Farm

Dad once said that in the days before tractors there had once been as many as 21 horses on the Baird farm. In my earliest memories there was a tractor, but there were still five or six horses, plus the pony, Ned. Ned was rather old and slow—you had to kind of kick him in the sides with your feet to get him to move—but we all had a lot of fun with him. Later we had a little buckskin riding mare named Ginger that was really fast and a thrill to ride. However, Ginger was easily “spooked” and tended to jump sideways when scared. Dad thought she wasn’t safe enough for kids, so we didn’t have her very long.

We had a draft horse named Maggie that I used to ride sometimes. Once when I was about four years old Dad used the team Maggie & Mollie to pull a water tank to the hog lot north of the orchard. When he unhitched and separated the team I rode Maggie, holding onto the hames, back to the barn. Paul wanted a ride, too, so Dad lifted him onto Mollie, who immediately started bucking like crazy. Paul was thrown off and landed under Mollie’s bucking feet. Paul wasn’t hurt, but it was so close that a hoof had torn the front of his little shirt. Dad hadn’t realized that Mollie had never been ridden or he certainly would not have put Paul up on that horse.

When I was six I got my first chance to drive a team doing real field work. It had been a very late, rainy spring and Dad still had soybeans to plant on the Fourth of July. The hired man, Charlie Winters, had the holiday off and John and Donald were busy with other work so Dad asked me to help. I was proud to get the chance to do real “grownup work.” We drilled beans that day with two corn planters. Dad would lead off and I was to follow behind and straddle his rows. Mostly I did a good job, but in one part of the field the ground hadn’t worked up well and it was (or seemed) hard to follow the other planter tracks, so in two or three places I wandered off and followed the wrong tracks. Dad was quite proud of his straight rows, yet he was patient and tolerant with me. But I’ll bet he winced when those beans came up and my wanderings were there for all to see.

These days I love to visit Amish communities and see the Amish farmers working their fields with horses—it reminds me of the “good old days.” Back in the thirties most farmers in our area had tractors, but they were quite small and crude compared to the huge, fast modern machines with air conditioning, hi-fi, etc. Everyone used lumbering draft horses for a lot of work. In hot weather horses were not only slow in plodding through the fields, but you had to let them rest a few minutes at the end of each row. One hot July day one of our horses, Glory, dropped dead in the field of heat stroke. At another time during a heat wave Donald and John decided to cultivate corn on a bright moonlight night—that was easier on both the boys and the horses.

Dad always insisted on doing all of the corn planting himself, with a two-row planter and his favorite team of horses, May and June. He really took pride in those straight rows; to him it was a sort of art form. I remember once he had to go to the hospital in Moweaqua for a couple of days and then was released with the usual, “Rest and take it easy,” but the moment he got home he changed his clothes and started planting corn. He could delegate most any other job, but not planting corn; those straight rows were that important to him.