The Family Farms

The land that became the Baird farms was still virgin prairie until after the Civil War had ended. The northern Shelby County area was among the last sections in the state to be developed because it was considered to be too isolated. There were only a few primitive dirt roads--and these became impassable mudholes in rainy weather—and the area was too far from any major river that could be used to transport farm crops to market. Illinois territory had been extensively explored as early as the 1700s and parts of the state near rivers and Lake Michigan had developed thriving communities in the early 1800s. But it wasn’t until the railroads came to central Illinois in the mid-1850s, providing a way to bring in supplies and ship out farm crops, that this rich prairie land started to attract many settlers. I have written elsewhere about the early days of the Bairds coming to Illinois, so will just touch on the highlights here.

In 1865 my great-grandfather, John Baird, bought a half section (320 acres) of unbroken prairie land near Prairie Home for $4,000, or $12.50 per acre; this is the main part of the home farm and the south farm. He also bought a “developed” 160-acre farm and fifty acres of timber land about five miles west of the home farm. The following spring he moved from Pennsylvania to Prairie Home with his wife and three daughters. They lived in a tiny house a couple of miles away until the Baird farmhouse was built in 1868. Later, in 1882, he bought an additional 80 acres across the road east from the south farm for $32.50 an acre. Now the home and south farms each had 200 acres.

When John Baird died in 1888 he left the “home farm” to his eldest daughter, Henrietta, my grandmother; the “south farm” to his middle daughter, Ella; and the “timber farm” to his youngest daughter, Nancy. Each daughter got an equal portion of the timber property. Henrietta and her husband, John Harris Baird (my grandfather), moved to the home farm with their three-year-old son, DeForest (my father).

The Home Farm Dad lived on the home farm until his death in 1957. After he came home from college he farmed with his father for a few years, then took over the farm when he and Mother were married in 1916. He was a very good farmer.

There have been lots of changes in the home farm since I grew up there; most of these have been described in other chapters, but little has been said about how different it now looks without all those fences. In the 1930s there were fences everywhere. The main farm is a half-mile square with a quarter-mile square portion across the road, and I estimate we had more than four miles of fences. There were fences around the pastures, hog lots and gardens, of course, but there were also fences around each separate field so that our livestock could be turned in to clean up any grain and stalks that were left over after harvesting.

Back then our big pastures ran the length of the creek (that often went dry in the summer but sometimes really flooded in the spring). The fence between our farm and Burrows (south farm) was old and every two or three years our cows, horses or hogs would break through the fence and start eating Mr. Burrows’ corn. This was an emergency situation, so all our other farm activities stopped immediately and we all worked to get the livestock back in our pasture and get the fence fixed. “Good fences make good neighbors” is a proven philosophy, but in the Depression era no one could afford to put in new fences. (Mr. Burrows was responsible for half of our common fence and his section was in no better shape than ours—but our fence section was closer to the barns and seemed to get broken down more often.) Today farm fences are rare since very little livestock of any kind is raised in the Prairie Home area.

The South Farm Aunt Ella inherited the south farm from her father. Her husband, Uncle Sile, managed it for her and was keenly interested in the weather and growing crops. Aunt Ella gave part of this farm to my brother Donald when he was just a baby. I understand that Aunt Ella left the balance of it to Aunt Mary (Dad’s maiden sister) when she died in 1935, and Dad inherited it when Aunt Mary died in 1941.

There is nothing left today to show where the farmhouse and a full set of farm buildings stood for well over a hundred years. In the thirties the big Burrows family lived there as tenants. The red farmhouse had a “summer kitchen”—a fairly common feature for country houses in those days. This was a small, detached building just beyond the back porch that was used for cooking and baking in the summer months so the cookstove wouldn’t make the main house unbearably hot. There was a small “cyclone cellar” in the back yard for shelter during severe storms.

The Garman Farm My maternal grandfather, John Garman, bought the 160-acre farm just north of the home farm in 1881 at a cost of $4,000 or $25 per acre. He and his wife, Sarah Frances, raised four children there, including my mother, Grace, who was born in 1891. After the death of Grandfather in 1921 and Grandmother in 1926, the farm went in equal shares to the three living children, Emma, Grace and Walter. A few years later Walter sold his interest to Emma and Grace. The two sisters owned it jointly until Emma’s death in 1979. Four or five years later the Baird family bought Emma’s interest from her heirs.

There is now just a corn field where the Garman house and farmstead once stood. Grandfather was a carpenter as well as a farmer and built a stately home with some unique features; for example, it had a “dumbwaiter” that could be raised and lowered (by a manual rope and pulley system) between the cellar and kitchen. Before the house was torn down about twenty years ago I salvaged part of the walnut stair railing and used it in the house I built a couple of years later. I still have some old, weathered “barn boards” salvaged from Grandfather’s carpenter shop that stood near the house. A distinctive feature of the Garman farm used to be a nice row of black walnut trees in the pasture, but these are now gone except for a couple of trees.

The Timber When John Baird bought his central Illinois farmland in1865, he also bought 50 acres of timber land about five miles west of the home farm for lumber to build houses and farm buildings. Trees were scarce on the prairie, so the timber was also used to supply fence posts and firewood. Those fifty timber acres are still in the family— although for many years now they have been used much more for recreation than for utility.

There are many different kinds of trees in the timber. Whenever we wanted a young tree at home Dad would go to the timber, pick out a nice one and dig it out for replanting at home. In the spring Mother loved to tramp through the timber admiring the abundant wild flowers. Sometimes she would dig up a bluebell or trillium and transplant it in her flower garden. And, like in the earlier days, we would get a couple of loads of fallen logs for firewood each year. This involved a lot of hard work in those days before chainsaws.

One year Uncle Sile put some goats in the timber with the thought that they would eat the weeds and help keep the underbrush clear. It didn’t work. The goats stripped the bark off young trees and left the weeds alone, so the experiment was abandoned.

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In earlier years there were two “out-of-state” Garman farms that have since been sold.

The Louisiana Rice Farm In 1899 Grandfather Garman joined a group of investors on a trip to Louisiana to look at farmland in a rice-growing area. He bought a 246-acre farm near Morse, a little town about forty miles west of Lafayette. He brought in a French Acadian family named Robichaux as tenants and this family farmed the rice farm for four generations.

In some ways rice cultivation is a bit trickier than growing corn. At an early stage of growth a rice field has to be flooded for a period. This means that all fields have to be essentially flat. A water company maintained dikes, canals, water gates, etc. in the area and handled the necessary flooding for a fee.

We visited the rice farm on our trip west in 1941. The Robichaux family was quite “taken” with my brother Paul. Several times one of them would say in their distinctive way, “Paul him Crackerjack!!” We had a couple of meals at their house. At one meal they served fried chicken, but it was a strange grayish color rather than our accustomed brown. And the chicken’s feet (including nails) were on top. We each ate a piece of the chicken, which tasted a little better than it looked—none of us took the feet—but we weren’t very enthusiastic about their way of frying chicken.

In the morning before we left, Mrs. Robichaux took us to visit a neighbor who had had a major flood the year before. This lady wore a loose housedress and as she leaned over to show us how the floodwater had come up about eighteen inches into the house one of her pendulous breasts flopped out of her dress. I was amazed, but she was unconcerned; as she straightened up she nonchalantly tucked in the wandering breast but wasn’t flustered at all. No one in our family said a word at the time or ever mentioned this incident.

In more recent times rice farming became a less attractive investment; we sold the rice farm in the early 1980s.

The Wheat Farm in Canada About 1906 John Garman joined another investor group trip and bought a 640-acre wheat farm near Nanton, Alberta, which is about thirty miles south of Calgary. Dad and Mother visited this farm on their honeymoon after stops at Banff and Lake Louise. For many years we subscribed to the weekly Nanton News for information on the weather and economy in the area.

Dad managed the Canada farm, but was never very enthusiastic about it as an investment. Wheat was the only crop raised in the area, but the soil wasn’t rich enough (and the rainfall wasn’t sufficient) to support a wheat crop each year. So the local practice was to raise wheat on half the land each year and let the other half remain fallow to “recover.” In other words, a given field was planted only on alternate years.

Dad went to Nanton every three or four years to check on conditions. I recently ran across his expense account for a five-day trip in August of 1939:

Rail fare $70.40

Hotels 5.75

All meals 8.60

Incidentals 2.29

Total $87.04

The Garman wheat farm in Canada was sold shortly after the end of World War II. (It was sold during a temporary rise in the price of local farmland when millions of tons of wheat were shipped to Europe as relief for the severe food shortages there.)