The Farm Buildings

With all the animals and activities in the 1930s, we had lots of farm buildings of various sizes. We had twenty-four buildings in addition to the house, but only four of these are still standing today—the garage, toilet, smoke house and granary. Here is a brief rundown of the farm buildings we had when I was growing up, starting with those near the house.

The Cellar The steps down to the cellar were just outside the west screen porch door. The cellar was the best we had for cool storage space—our substitute for refrigeration--but it wasn’t all that cool. Sometimes in the summer milk would turn sour between morning and evening. It was dark (no light down there) and damp and low (about five and a half feet clearance). There were wooden bins for keeping potatoes and apples and things like that—but they usually tended to get kind of withered after a few weeks.

“Up Above Cellar” This was another storage room, used mostly to store “outside” things like garden tools, plus some old trunks. The steps up went beside the dinner bell that was used to call everyone in for a meal.

The Wash House Imagine a wash house without running water! Mother needed lots of help to get set up for the weekly washing. Water was heated on the kitchen stove in a copper wash boiler and then carried out and poured into the washing machine and rinse tubs. After Mother finished washing with the gasoline-powered Maytag wringer washer, the wastewater from the machine and tubs was dumped on the ground behind the wash house. There was no dryer, of course, so all clothes were hung out on the clothes line.

The Coal House Our coal came from the Moweaqua coal mine until December 24th, 1932, when an explosion trapped and killed 54 miners. The mine never reopened. The coal house had a section for fire wood.

The Cob House Corn cobs ignite easily and create a hot fire, so they were used for kindling for fire starting. The cob house was attached to the coal house.

The Smoke House In earlier days the smoke house may have been used for smoking meats, but in my time it was never used for smoking. Dad hung sugar-cured hams and bacon there for curing, but the primary use was for storing eight or nine barrels of feed used for feeding pigs in nearby lots.

The Toilet Our toilet was probably the nicest toilet in the Prairie Home area. The two-seater was well built, attractively painted white inside and out, had a little window high in the back, and a shelf for holding the old Sears catalogs. (The plain pages were torn out first; when only the slick, coated pages were left you had to wad them up tightly, straighten them out, then wad them up again--repeating this process two or three times until the page was softened up.)

The “Duck House” Dad built this little (about 6 x 8 feet) building as a tornado shelter. It was built around heavy hedge posts set in concrete with thick walls and roof, and a low open doorway. This and the round hog house were the only new buildings constructed on the farm while I was living there.

Barns Our big main barn was built in 1911 and had stalls for fourteen horses, including two box stalls. It had a huge haymow, two large grain storage bins that could hold hundreds of bushels, and a center driveway large enough to hold two loads of hay. It was torn down a couple of years ago.

The Old Barn This smaller barn was built in 1869, the year after the house was built. When I was young it was used to store farm implements, including the tractor and on old enclosed carriage. It had a dirt floor and was unpainted. Paul took this old post-and-beam barn down in 1949.

The Cow Barn This red barn had stalls for seven cows, a large bin for storing ear corn for feed and a big haymow. One year the clover crop was poor, so Dad put up some soybean hay; this turned out to be extremely dusty hay—it was terrible to work with. There were hooks in the cow barn for hanging the kerosene lantern for light when we milked in the dark.

Hog Houses The large main hog house was built about 1920. It was very modern for its time (it even had twenty skylights) and was well equipped with such things as an inside pump and a heating stove. The round house was a well-designed prefabricated hog house for eight sows and their litters of pigs. Each sow had a pie-shaped pen. The round hose was in a hog lot just north of the orchard. Dad provided water by putting a galvanized steel water tank in a small farm wagon, installing a spigot in the tank and hauling water from the windmill. There were several other pig pens around the farmstead, each with a simple little house for shelter.

The Hen House The hen house provided shelter for our free-range hens. (“Free-range” wasn’t a big deal back in the thirties; essentially all chickens were free to range all over—and they did!) The hen house had several horizontal rows of poles for roosts and a row of about twenty egg-laying boxes nailed along the back wall. Attached to the hen house was a small open-front building with a high fence that we called the “jail.” In the spring and summer a hen’s maternal instinct may switch on and she will stop laying eggs and go into a “broody” mode, sitting in the nest intent on hatching a batch of chicks. However, if she was tossed in jail--where there was no nesting material--for four or five days she would get over it and start laying again when she is released from jail.

The “Egg Factory” The egg factory was a second hen house with one of Dad’s “fanciful names.” Although it had been important in earlier years, it wasn’t used much in the later 1930s, so I took it over to raise 25 Buff Orphington chicks. Dad was a lifelong fancier of Barred Rock chickens, but he was generous in allowing us boys a chance to experiment with other breeds—John’s Berkshire pigs and my Buff Orphingtons. I thought the Buffs were a lot prettier than the Barred Rocks—and I still do!

The Shop Imagine a working farm shop without electricity! A modern shop has several kinds of electric saws, electric drills, electric sanders and grinders, etc. In contrast, our non-electric shop was crude and slow, but a person could do surprisingly effective work—if he wasn’t in a hurry. Our shop had a long workbench, a heavy vice, an anvil, a forge, a manual drill press and lots of hand tools. The drill press had a heavy flywheel that was cranked by hand and a ratchet wheel that slowly forced the bit down into the workpiece. It could do a satisfactory job of drilling iron, but it might take three or four minutes to drill a hole that a modern drill press could handle in about five seconds. We boys loved to make things in the shop. A favorite project was making wooden toy guns that shot rubber bands cut from old inner tubes. Paul was the really expert gun maker.

The Double Corn Crib The double corn crib—two long cribs with a wagon driveway down the middle—was an old building by the 1930s. The whole building leaned a bit to the east. Dad went to the timber and cut down five sturdy young trees, which he used as logs to brace the crib to keep it from leaning over farther. In two or three weeks a couple of the logs sprouted a few leaves. Dad joked that those logs were starting to grow and in time would push the crib back to where it was “square with the world.” In those old wooden crib days there was a lot of damage to the corn from rats and mice.

The Garage The old garage looks just the same today as it did in the thirties. In the old days we never took the key out of the car’s ignition. The garage has a dirt floor and a small attic we used for storage and for drying freshly-dug onions. The anchor on the front of the garage has been there since 1943. I found this old, abandoned anchor at the edge of the Nantucket harbor while I was stationed there in the Coast Guard. I sent it to Dad as a “trade mark” for the Baird Anchor Farm. The “rocks”—Duroc hogs and Barred Rock chickens—are long gone, but that old anchor is still there.

The Corn Crib/Implement Shed The corn stored in this crib was mostly used for feeding our farm animals. The implement shed was tightly packed with plows, harrows, cultivators, etc.--it was a big job moving other implements out of the way to get at things in the back. A little side shed housed the buggy we kids used to ride to Patton’s store in Prairie Home.

The Granary This small building is significant only because it is one of the few outbuildings still standing. It was used for storing oats for livestock feed.

The Windmill This wasn’t a “building” in the traditional sense, but the windmill was very important to us. The wind powered the pump that filled the big livestock water tank, and it sure saved a lot of hand pumping. And it was a lot easier to dip water out of the tank to carry to the hog troughs than it was to pump it each time.

The Hired Man’s House This was a simple four-room cottage (living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and an attic) that was across the road and about 400 feet south of our house. Outside there was a storage shed, a toilet, a water pump and a vegetable garden. When I was quite small Frank Monroe lived there with his wife and five children: Howard, Opal, Mildred, Pauline and James—I don’t remember how they could all fit in that little house.