Summer of 1930
In the summer of 1930, my grandmother would have been 15 years old. Life on a farm was a struggle for many, as this was part of the depression era.
In her memoirs, she wrote: "Our farm had one hundred sixty acres, which was the average size of the farms people claimed as homesteads. The farm was a mile and a half south of Thief River Falls. The home that my father built here had a large kitchen, a large bedroom and a large living room with two porches - one in the front and one in the back. There were two large bedrooms upstairs, one for the boys and one for the girls.
Living on the farm we always had plenty of food to eat and clothes to wear. We had a very large garden where we grew all our own vegetables. The staples were potatoes, corn, carrots, onions, beans, peas, rutabagas and turnips. There were a few things we couldn't grow very well because of the cold winters and short growing year like tomatoes. Yet we did grow enough to get us by.
Under the house was a large cellar where we stored our fruits and vegetables. We had a lot of potatoes. A large box of sand is where we stored the carrots and they stayed fresh all winter. We would dry the ears of corn, beans and peas. The onions and rutabagas were stored down there too. In the winter when it was very cold my folks would hang a lighted lantern down there to keep it from freezing. My mother would place a dish of water on the step going down there to see how cold it would get. If it looked like it would get cold enough to freeze she hung the lantern.
When we got home from school it was our job to slop the hogs, pick the eggs, feed the chickens, then it was up to us to milk all of the cows. We did it all by hand as there were no milking machines then. We had a water pump and we would have to pump all of the water for the animals to drink. It took so much water it seemed we just pumped and pumped and pumped. We had to take turns. It took a lot of water to water all of our animals.
When the depression of 1929 hit the country, we hardly knew it on the farm. The only things we had to purchase were coffee and sugar. One day my father sent a cow to the herd stockyards in St. Paul but the price of meat was so low it didn't even pay for the freight so my father had to send them money instead of him getting anything for it. He never sold any more."
