The Old Silo

 My grandfather had built the wooden silo in the 1930s during the middle of the Depression.  All of the materials had arrived from the factory by train, and he had to take several trips with the wagon and team to bring everything back to the farm from the railroad depot.  I had heard stories about how Grandpa had mixed all the concrete for the foundation by hand in a wheelbarrow.

     In 1960, the wooden silo still stood next to the barn, and a newer 25 foot tall concrete stave silo had joined it.  Both of them were filled with corn silage every fall that was fed along with hay from the haymow throughout the winter, and until the cows returned to pasture in spring.

     The concrete silo had a Patz electric silo unloader that worked with the push of a button, but as the youngest son, it was usually my job to climb up the wooden silo and throw down corn silage to where my brother Henry would load it into a wheelbarrow, and bring it out to the cows in the stanchions.  I always loved the early spring where I didn't have to worry about frozen silage along the silo walls.

     Although the wooden silo has been gone for many years now, and I don't miss my work with the ensilage fork, I still have fond memories of that wooden silo.

Winter Problems

In the year of my 17th birthday in the early 60s, the winter started off pretty mild.  It was a green Christmas that year.  That all changed shortly after the new year when a cold front moved in.  One Monday morning when dad and I entered the barn to start morning chores, we were dismayed to discover that a jersey heifer had gotten loose and had somehow opened the door to the silo room, allowing a cold draught to come in and freeze the two closest cast iron drinking cups, causing them to crack.  We watered the affected cows with buckets and finished milking.  

As soon Jerry's Farm Service opened up at 8:30, dad sent me the ten miles into town in the farm truck to get replacement drinking cups.  Thankfully Jerry had just what we needed and we had everything fixed by lunch time.  That day was another good reminder that sometimes you never knew what what to expect on a winter day on a family dairy farm in the 1950s.

Corn Picking

The Anderson farm had been in the family for several generations.  During the autumn of 1959, Old Mr. Anderson still milked 15 guernsey cows in the old red barn with the date "1902" stencilled in white letters just below the peak of the roof.  Every November, after we'd finished filling the two corn cribs on the home farm, Mr. Anderson would hire us to fill the old wooden drive-through crib that was nestled beside his pig sty.  My older brother Henry was always the one running the New Idea picker behind the Oliver 66.  My job was to bring the galvanized gravity wagons back to the Kewanee elevator that   dumped the ears of corn into the crib.  Perched on the wagon watching the corn tumble onto the rattling elevator, I had a pretty decent view of the farmstead.  The old white farm house, the barns, the rusty windmill with the missing blades, the hogs rooting around in the barnyard, and old Mr. Anderson himself in front of the milkhouse, loading milk cans into the back of his Studebaker truck.  Further out I could see the golden guernsey cows out on pasture and the colorful leaves of the trees along the back fencerow.  I couldn't see Henry behind the tall corn, but knew we only had one or two wagons left to fill this morning before we'd be done for the season.

Now, decades later, I sometimes wish I could be that 14 year old boy picking  corn in rural Illinois again.