The Old Farm, A Shadow Of What It Was

Come take a small tour with me of my husband's family's farm.  

Back at Thanksgiving I took a walk outside and captured a few pictures.  It's very basic, no frills, and just a shadow of what it was.

A gate opening to the west field

 His sister Clara created this gate and added some garden art

His Mom always joked and called it "green acres" after the tv show because of the cobbled way things were put together.  It's a little home all of about 800 square feet.  Can you imagine raising 4 kids in this tiny home!  They did finish the attic and made extra sleeping room up there.

 She's always had some kind of flower gardens around the place.  These days they are scaled back to manageable areas that she can maintain. 

 The old work shop in the background. Off in the distance there was an apple orchard and there was fencing for the cows.

Free post World War II materials were acquired to build it (definitely not glamorous but as you see it's stood the test of time).  A lot of hours were spent in there fixing broken farm equipment and repairing cars. 

It's a quiet space now and a bit dilapidated on the interior.  After his father passed it was gutted and it now represents only a fading memory of all that took place in there.

 This old door had a lot of time put on it.  I told my husband I want to bring it home with us.  It would be a piece of the old farm to hold on to for nostalgia.

  

This used to have doors covering it up and an old 53' packard sat quietly in there for years and years.

The big John Deere farm tractor always resided in this spot.  Now his brother uses it on his property nearby.  This old Massey Ferguson still runs.

The old barn is tired but the roof is still good. 

His sister Clara created this barn art along time ago.

The 1950 date represents when his parents bought the farm.  "Old Doc Smith" as they always called him helped them get their start.  He owned the property and rented it to them in the beginning.  

The milk house.  I can still remember the big shiny milk tanker truck backing in to collect milk.

They haven't been active as a dairy farm since 1985.

I can still see the black and white Holsteins standing there.  Holsteins yield the highest production of milk.

 His brother sells a bit of hay to locals and stores it in the barn.  He's the only one who stuck nearby and has tried to keep some farming in his blood.

  There used to be a silo at this end but it's long gone.

This was the grain room.  The silo would have been full of silage that they fed the cows through the winter along with the feed grain that was stored in here.

This is inside the milk house where the big stainless steel milk tank sat.  

When they first moved here there was a very old farmhouse that stood closer to the road.  Doc Smith decided a new home should be built for them and the old place was demolished.

When I was dating Dan we spent a lot of time here. He always had a motorcycle or car that had some work that needed to be done.  Someone was always dropping in and visiting his parents.  A tractor could usually be heard in the distance somehwere, music played on an old radio from the barn, farm cats and a dog ran about and on occasion they even had a pet raccoon. The fields were full of corn, hay and oats.  A vegetable garden was always planted and his mom canned lots of tomatoes, cucumbers and more.

 

These days it's only a shadow of what it was, but I like think of it like it used to be. 

When you drive by an old farm try to imagine all that might have gone on there before....running a farm is a life in itself.  

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Have A Cup of Mrs. Olson 

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