Good evening District 27. Today I want to share with you photos from the farm I grew up on. My mom and dad farmed 320 acres of ground and pasture located six miles north of Yankton along US Hwy 81. My mom and dad never owned the land they farmed; they were sharecroppers. They paid ½ the rent in cash and the other ½ of the rent in crop. This was a gentleman’s agreement between the landlord and my parents for over 40 years.
As one can see, we lived in a modest home that provided for our needs. The home that I grew up in was built in the late 1800s. The original home was constructed of logs chinked with mud and straw and covered with asphalt shingle siding. I will never forget how the plaster used to fall off the cold walls and my mom used duct tape to hold up the plaster. Eventually, big chunks of plaster would give way and we could see the underlying lath that was used to hold up the plaster. This went on for years before the landlord finally remodeled the dining room. When we remodeled the dining room in the 1970s, all the old plaster came down and we discovered how old the home truly was. It was like stepping back in time to the era of Abraham Lincoln. The wall between the kitchen and the dining had old red bricks that filled in the window that separated the two. The bricks were probably 100 years old. It was apparent, that the home was built with multiple additions before my mom and dad had arrived in 1963.
The home had a kitchen, living and dining room, a utility (washroom), porch, bathroom, and master bedroom on the main floor. The “upstairs” had four bedrooms. We slept mainly in the first two bedrooms for many years until my mom and dad renovated the farthest back two rooms for my two sisters and for my younger brother and me to sleep in. Eight of us kids slept upstairs. The bedrooms were tiny by today’s standards with small closet spaces. It was always hot and humid during the summer months and cold during the winter months. The home had two oil stoves that would provide minimal heat throughout the living space. Round duct piping that came off the oil stove in the dining area would heat the two bedrooms upstairs. We finally got electric baseboard heating in all of the bedrooms upstairs when the dining room was renovated.
We also had an unfinished basement and cellar. The basement was where the potato cellar was located – under the stairwell. We had gunny sacks filled with potatoes in here and we would have to go get potatoes for my mom from time to time since this was the coolest location in the home. My mom stored crock pocks down here filled with brine where she would have her hams cure. This was also the location where we would go if there was a tornado warning. I remember many summer afternoons having to go down those steps. It was always dark and scary to go down into the basement that was lit with only one incandescent light bulb. Sometimes you would go down the steps and get hit with the cobwebs. You never knew what you would run into down there. The dirt floor basement would eventually have a concrete floor poured and electric heat was installed to keep it warm during the winter months. The basement eventually would become the place where would play pool since we got a pool table one Christmas. There were a lot of pool and ping pong games played down there during the winter months.
From the basement, one could climb through a small access hole built into the wall and gain access to the cellar. The cellar was full of shelving and was where my mom stored her canned goods (apple sauce, canned tomatoes, canned pears, tomato and choke cherry juice). It was also where the water pressure tank and water softener were located. One of my chores was to fill up the water softener with salt pellets since the well water was hard and would not create any soap suds when doing laundry. We had a well with a pump and concrete cistern tank on the farm for many years. My mom would always remind my older brothers and I to make sure the cistern was full by setting up the piping from the well pump to the cistern tank located approximately 40 feet from the home. Somedays, we would forget to do this and the cistern would be dry the following morning when my mom needed water to do laundry or do the dishes. It would take almost all night to fill up the cistern tank since the pump probably produced 2 gallons per minute. It wasn’t until I was eight years old when my mom and dad received rural water piped to the home. I recall the trenching of the water pipe coming from the east side of the cow alley down through the middle of the cow yard and up to the home. I am sure my mom and dad appreciated it.
I can vaguely remember the days when we had to take our weekly bath on Saturday night in an old tub inside the utility room that was heated with a wood-burning stove. It wasn’t until I was probably 5 or 6 years old that the bathroom off the living room was remodeled with a tub and toilet in it. I remember as a child having to use the outhouse located behind the home, which eventually was moved behind the grinder storage shed. I still can remember using the old Sears or JCPenny catalogs as a form of toilet paper. Other times, I recall using the soft tissue paper that came wrapped around each individual peach when my mom and dad bought peaches from Jame’s Market. I remember many days the pipes for the toilet would be frozen and we would have to thaw out the piping so that the stool would not overflow. We had to put straw square bales along the south side of the home to keep the pipes from freezing from the south winds. The sewer would eventually drain out of the septic tank located on the south side of the home and leach out into the south calf pasture.
Our home did not have a garage until I was around 10 years old. I recall when the foundation was poured and eventually, the garage would go up to the north of the utility room. I recall, the garage is where we did a lot of our butchering, welding, oil changing, making our woodworking projects and hosting some of our graduation parties.
Our old cow barn was as old as the home. It was made of old rocks and covered with shingles as well with a hayloft that we converted into a basketball court when the hay bales were not occupying the space.
As you can see from the posted photos, we had a shelter belt to the north of the farm like most farms in the Midwest. We had a silo that we had to climb up to pitch silage for the feeder cows. Sometimes the silage on the top layer was frozen and one had to use a pick ax to break it apart before you could throw it down the chute. I spent many hours in that silo pitching silage down the chute. You will also see the sow and hog barns. We also had a large garden to the south of the house along with a clothesline to hang out the clothes. My mom would air dry the laundry and the clothesline was always full of clothes. We likewise had a small basketball court and a swing set with a slippery slide. We had orchards in various locations throughout the farm. You will also see the grain bins and corn cribs that stored our oats and corn crop that we harvested. On the aerial photos one can make out the cob pile next to the corn crib. The cobs were used to start the wood stove in the utility room. One of my jobs was to fill up the wood box each night during the winter after feeding the sows. The wood shed was located on the north side of the home between the garage. It was full of wood that we had cut from the dead trees that we found lying in the gully of our cow pasture near the stock dam.
I was privileged to be born in a farming family who worked hard and had few material goods, but we had each other and that is what was important growing up on a family farm. We did not have all the smartphone technology that is at our disposal today. We had to create our own form of fun – playing farm in the trees, playing hide and seek, cops and robbers on our bicycles, reading Sports Illustrated, making go-carts, playing baseball, football, basketball, sledding, ice skating, fishing, hunting, trapping, practicing playing music on the piano, drums, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, or clarinet (I played the trumpet), playing pool or ping-pong, watching Gilligan’s Island and the Brady Bunch after school, shooting fireworks, playing school, making snow angels, snow forts, having snowball fights, reading the encyclopedia or yearbooks. We had to wear hand-me-downs. We had few clothes since we grew out of them quickly. My dad never owned a new vehicle. All of his machinery and farm equipment was used and brought very little at the farm sale the year when he died.
The reason why I share this story with you is because several years ago, I was accused by a local person of having “privilege.” I pushed back on this young man and told him he had no idea what he was talking about because he had made a presumption about my upbringing without having walked in my shoes. This young man would later apologize for his inappropriate comment after he had concluded on his own that perhaps people of different races and ethnicities are not all born with privilege. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.” I couldn’t agree more with this statement. If elected your state senator, I will always approach a person with respect, dignity, and love. I will not fall into the trap of identity politics. I will always apply the Golden Rule in my conversations with constituents that I represent. After all, it is my desire to represent ALL of the voters of this diverse district and not a particular group of people. God bless.
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