Disappearance of wheat fields marked a major change in northern Illinois’ prairie farming

This year’s grain harvest has largely wrapped up here in the Fox River Valley, following roughly the same schedule it has been on for the last 1,200 years.

Illinois’ Native People began cultivating corn sometime between 900 and 1000 AD. It joined the beans and squash they’d been propagating to create the basis for their subsistence crops they called “The Three Sisters.”

Interestingly enough, modern farmers still grow versions of the Native People’s “Three Sisters,” although these days soybeans have taken the place of native edible beans and pumpkins have largely replaced other squash. But still, it’s sort of comforting that a 1,200 year-old harvest tradition continues into the 21st Century.

The member tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy had moved into the area west and south of Lake Michigan in the 1740s, displacing the member tribal groups of the Illinois Confederacy. The Three Fires relied on growing “The Three Sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) for a large proportion of their died. Like the region’s modern farmers, the Native People completed their harvest in late fall.

By the time the first permanent White settlers began arriving along the banks of the Fox River, the resident Native People were inter-related members of the Three Fires Confederacy comprised of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi people. These people, too, relied on growing The Three Sisters for a large percentage of their diet. Over the centuries since its introduction, corn had been crossbred and otherwise genetically modified by its Native American growers.

European immigrants had quickly adopted growing what they called “Indian corn” to differentiate it from the “corn’ they called wheat back in that day. It grew okay in the thin, rocky soils of New England, but crops kept getting better the farther west White settlement moved because soils were better, too. When the frontier finally moved out of the Eastern woodlands onto the tallgrass Prairie Peninsula in the 1820s, corn found its ideal habitat.

But those White settlers did not live on corn alone. They needed wheat for bread and other foods, along with oats to feed their livestock, and rye and barley for foodstuffs as well as to manufacture the alcoholic beverages that seemed to power so much of frontier society.

So the crops grown on those first Fox Valley pioneer farms were quite diversified, right along with those of their neighbors all the way west to the Mississippi. Wheat was considered a vital crop, both for consumption on the farm, and after pioneer town developers arrived, for sale in town. Corn was fed to the farm’s livestock, which could then walk the 40 miles east to market in Chicago. Rye and barley were both used on the farm, but were also good sale crops and which could also be turned into extremely valuable—and easily transported—whiskey.

Grain, too, could be hauled to the Chicago market, although the 80 mile round trip in wagon-and-team days was time-consuming, keeping the farmer away from taking care of his other responsibilities such as feeding and otherwise caring for his livestock, not to mention taking care of his family on their often isolated farmsteads.

The Illinois & Michigan Canal linked the Illinois River with Lake Michigan at Chicago. Although its heyday was brief, it boosted Illinois’ economy starting in the late 1840s. (Wikipedia image)

So when the Illinois & Michigan Canal opened following the course of the Chicago-Des Plaines-Illinois River system from Lake Michigan to the head of navigation on the Illinois River at Peru, it created a nearby, easily reached incentive to begin growing more grain of all kinds than could be consumed on the farm.

For one thing, it meant the meat being produced from Chicago’s stockyards could move south to the St. Louis–New Orleans market as easily as east to the New York market.

Even more importantly, its existence meant that grain from the rich region west and south of Chicago could finally be shipped north as well as south. Previously grain taken to the Illinois River system went downstream to the St. Louis market. But with canal boats hauling it, grain moved north as easily as south. Chicago’s grain elevators were ready to handle the huge influx of grain, too, readying it for shipment east to the New York market.

Thus began cash grain farming in earnest. And within a year or so, the first railroad, whose right-of-way followed the course of the canal, opened. That offered a year round grain and livestock shipping opportunity for area farmers, something the canal, which had to close during the winter months, could not.

It was during this period of the late 1840s and early 1850s, that northern Illinois’ wheat crops experienced a number of failures. And since it was a major crop during those years, it led to severe financial problems. In response, farmers tried everything they could to try to make the area a viable wheat-producer, including introducing dozens of new wheat varieties and tinkering with planting schedules.

The preferred wheat for market was hard winter wheat, which was planted in the fall, germinated and greened up, went dormant over the winter, and then resumed growing in the spring to be harvested in late summer. But northern Illinois’ climate and its very soil warred against producing good winter wheat crops. The region’s numerous freeze-thaw cycles during an average winter tended to kill the vulnerable wheat seedlings. Then if it did begin growing it was often attacked by a variety of diseases including rust and blight along with insect pests such as the Hessian fly and chinch bugs. And, oddly enough, the soils on northern Illinois tallgrass prairies seemed to be too rich to support good wheat crops. Farmer Edmund Flagg decided in the mid-1830s from his own observations that the worst soils of the Prairie Peninsula were best-adapted to growing wheat.

Before the advent of mechanical reapers, harvesting “small grains” (wheat, oats, barley, rye) was both labor-intensive and subject to weather-related problems. Those problems were so severe and prevalent on the Illinois prairies that farmers, a group normally reluctant to adopt new methods, were eager early adopters of mechanical harvesting equipment. McCormick Reapers were manufactured under license south of Oswego at AuSable Grove in 1847.

And then there was the problem that growing and harvesting wheat is extremely labor-intensive and very dependent on just the right weather conditions during the harvest cycle. Wheat had to be cut, bound into bundles, stacked to dry, and then threshed. Excessive moisture in the form of rain at any time after the grain was cut could lead to it developing rust or other fungus, or even sprouting spoiling the crop.

This need for speed during the wheat harvest spurred by the upper Midwest’s damp climate during the peak harvest season led to early and intense interest in mechanical harvesters that allowed far more acreage to be cut, bundled, and shocked than the old manual methods. Area farmers not only imported early harvesters made by Cyrus McCormick and others, but they also licensed them for manufacture here. Out in AuSable Grove south of Oswego Daniel Townsend secured a McCormick license and produced harvesters in the 1840s. Eventually, of course, the folks in Plano here in Kendall County became one of the premiere harvester manufacturers in the nation.

Corn, in comparison, was pretty hardy stuff. It could even be left standing in the field all winter if necessary, to be successfully picked and husked in the early spring with no visible impact on its value as a human or animal food.

Northern Illinois farmers gradually switched to trying to grow spring wheat and met with more success. But the spring varieties were softer and less attractive for milling into bread flour than the hard winter varieties. So, wheat growing began to disappear from Fox Valley farms in favor of corn and oats, which found a ready market in area cities during the era when horses provided the main motive power.

Not so in central and southern Illinois, where wheat farming was part of the Southern farming culture that had arrived with those regions’ pioneers. The southern part of the state was largely settled by pioneers from Virginia and the Carolinas who came west through Kentucky and Tennessee, and then up the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. They were also some of central Illinois’ first pioneers.

Southern farming culture was far more subsistence-based than that of the New Englanders, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians who settled northern Illinois. The soils and climate of the southern half of the state favored wheat farming, which fit in with the culture Southern farmers brought with them. That culture not only included the kinds of crops they grew, but also extended to their farmsteads.

Probably built around 1847, the barn south of Oswego on the Daniel Townsend farm was used both as a traditional barn, but also may have housed Townsend’s manufacturing operation to produce McCormick reapers. The barn was built on the traditional stone Pennsylvania plan with slit ventilating windows.

Barns, for instance, were common sights on the northern Illinois landscape but not so farther south. According to Richard Bardolph, writing in the December 1948 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, the editor of Moore’s Rural New Yorker visited Illinois in the 1850s and reported to his readers, that “barns are scarcely to be seen on the prairies, and they seem to be considered more of a luxury than a necessity.”

In contrast, here in the Fox Valley barns were among the first structures pioneer farmers built. They were multi-purpose buildings farmers relied upon for everything from grain and hay storage to protecting livestock from the region’s bitter winters to storing farm equipment. Storing farm equipment under roof seems to have been another Southern farmer cultural trait they didn’t share with their Northern counterparts.

As late as the 1940s, one of my Kansas cousins came east to learn Midwestern farming practices from my father and uncles. One of the things he took back with him was the importance of storing farm equipment out of the weather to lengthen the equipment’s lifespan and to assure it worked when needed. That was a new concept for many Kansas farmers of the era whose roots extended east through Missouri into Tennessee and Kentucky.

During the Great Depression here in northern Illinois, wheat farming nearly disappeared. The 1935 Census of Agriculture for Kendall County reported only four farms grew wheat, amounting to a bit over 400 bushels. We now know that 1934 was probably the worst year for northern Illinois farmers during those awful years. Drought, chinch bug invasions, crop diseases, dust storms, and just about any other disaster you can think of afflicted the region’s farmers. The price of corn had collapsed in 1933, bringing only 14-cents a bushel, down sharply from $1.14 in 1925. That made it cheaper for many farmers to burn it as fuel in their stoves and furnaces than coal. Sears Roebuck, in fact, marketed special stove grates in those years designed for corn, which burned hotter than coal or wood.

In addition, corn could also be fed to animals on the farm, producing livestock the farm family itself could consume. Many a farm family of those years helped feed their city cousins. In general, it took about seven bushels of corn to produce a pound of beef and 6.5 pounds to produce a bushel of pork, Many farmers favored raising hogs because pork could be turned into a variety of meats from roasts and chops to sausage and with smoking, hams and bacon. And corn could also be used as human food as well, ground into corn flour to make cornbread, fried mush, and other dishes. This diversity of use apparently made growing corn a more sensible course for the region’s farmers.

Also in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois Extension Service began promoting soybeans as a new cash crop for Illinois farmers struggling through the Great Depression. And so starting here in Kendall County in the dismal year of 1933 a variety of beans far different than those grown by the region’s Native American farmers began to sprout on the Illinois prairies, just as the need for so much oat acreage was disappearing as the horses who used so many bushels of oats for food were replaced by motor vehicles.

Today, Illinois still produces a fair amount of wheat, but the vast majority of it is grown in central and southern Illinois where the climate, growing seasons, and soils favor it. Here in northern Illinois, occasional fields of wheat can be spotted by the alert motorist, along with a few acres of oats here and there. But for a crop that was once a vital staple of pioneer farms, the disappearance of wheat fields marked one of the many profound changes in prairie farming.

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“The Basics” of American life have significantly evolved

I was paging through an old photo album the other day and came upon a photo of my grandmother dated about 1915. There she was standing beside her father-in-law in back of her two-story Aurora home, smiling into the camera holding up the severed head of a pig.

In this day and age, someone hoisting a pig’s head up for the camera would be considered odd if not downright dangerous. But my gentle and kindly grandmother was obviously not a bloodthirsty woman. So what was going on?

Wilhelm Holzhueter and his daughter-in-law, Mabel Lantz Holzhueter, make headcheese at the Holzhueter Home on Hinman Street on Aurora, Illinois’ east side neighborhood nicknamed “Dutch Town” because of its overwhelming German population. Photo probably taken about 1915 by Fred Holzhueter.

What was going on was everyday life at that time.

The early years of this century were times not so far removed—in lifestyle if not in year—from the subsistence farming in which the pioneers engaged. Until relatively recently (we’re talking in historical terms here), people did not go down to the supermarket for their every food need. Sure, there were grocery stores, but they mostly stocked staples like flour, sugar, rice, and the like. Instead of buying everything they ate, our not-so-distant ancestors had big gardens, raised chickens, and they kept cows and sometimes pigs, often even in town.

One reason most women did not work outside the home back then is because there was so much work in their homes to do all that gardening and animal husbandry not to mention trying to keep up with normal household tasks like cooking. Back in that day, just doing the family wash was a day-long job that involved heavy lifting, not to mention often having to be a cross between an engineer and a water-carrier—as my grandmother came to realize after she and my grandfather moved to a farm in 1920.

In this public relations photo taken by the McCormick-Deering folks about 1925, my grandmother washes clothes in a Dexter Double-Tub Washing Machine powered by one of Deering’s gasoline utility engines. My grandfather also used it to power his concrete mixer and for other farm chores in pre-rural electrification days.

Farmers, of course, always tried to grow as much of the food they needed as possible while also trying to grow enough extra to send to market to earn cash. But frontier farmers found that given the transportation technology of the day their farm produce was hard–if not downright impossible–to move to market. As a result, they tried to convert their produce into something that was easier to transport.

Corn, rye, and other grains raised west of the Appalachian Mountains could be fermented and then distilled into whiskey, which could be transported a lot easier than the tons of grain it took to make the spirits. One of the nation’s first tax crises, in fact, happened because the government insisted on taxing whiskey, a practice western farmers insisted was unfair, since grain sold by eastern farmers was not similarly taxed. The Whiskey Rebellion was brief, but the animosity of the western settlers towards the more settled east remained and simmered.

The concept of making it easier to get western agricultural products to eastern markets was one of the major forces driving development on the frontier. Such giant—for their times—public works projects as the Erie Canal, the Welland Canal (around Niagara Falls), the all the other canal systems in the nation were attempts to open farm-to-market transport routes.

Meanwhile, farmers were trying to survive by producing enough for their families to eat. Virtually every farmstead featured a standardized set of buildings and agricultural features that were geared towards not only producing products for sale or barter but for the subsistence of the farm family as well. Early on, a barn to provide storage for fodder, protection for draft animals, and farm equipment storage (meaning a plow during pioneer days); a crop storage building that eventually evolved into what we now call a corn crib; and a chicken house were the minimum buildings, beside the farmhouse, that were included on most farmsteads. Gradually, the kinds of farm equipment farmers needed increased and so a separate machine shed was added to the farmstead.

About 1900, R.D. Gates proudly poses with the hogs he’s raising on his farm on Minkler Road south of Oswego as his hired man on the wagon full of freshly picked and husked corn looks on. (Little White School Museum Collection)

In terms of livestock, at least one cow was kept to provide milk and butter for the family. A few pigs were almost always kept because they were easy to raise and provided a lot of meat for the cost of feeding them. Cattle were usually kept, although they were more expensive to purchase and breed than pigs because they did not convert forage to meat as efficiently. And, of course, chickens were almost always on hand because of their utility as garbage disposals, egg layers, and ready sources of fresh meat.

Until the 1960s, most farmers raised all of the above animals at once on their farms, sometimes for the consumption of their families and even more often as profit centers for their farming operations.

Outside on the farmstead, there was an orchard and a large garden plot. Orchards usually included apple, cherry, and pear trees, plus sometimes plums, apricots, and peach trees. Early on, fruit was dried or stored in cellars for use later in the year. Later on, the fruit was either canned or turned into jellies and preserves.

Preserving vegetables and other garden produce, fruit, and meat was one of farm wives’ major tasks. Vegetables were canned, while root crops were preserved in cellars. Some vegetables, like cabbage and cucumbers were preserved by pickling, including making sauerkraut out of cabbage. Fruit was, as mentioned above, either canned for later use in pies and salads, or made into preserves, jams, and jellies. Many farm tables featured a jelly dish at all three meals during the day.

My grandmother in 1978 enjoying a rest after a busy life in the house my grandfather built in town for their retirement.

Meat was preserved in a variety of ways, including canning, which was especially favored for beef. Pork was preserved by frying the pork chops and putting them down in layers in large crocks. Each layer was sealed from outside air–and spoilage–with a thick layer of pork grease. Bacon and hams were smoked for preservation. And some parts of the hog were preserved in other ways. “Headcheese” was created by boiling the hog’s head to remove and cook the meat and release the natural gelatin in the bones and connective tissue. Then the mixture was seasoned and poured into loaf pans to cool. This produced a spiced lunch meat loaf that was sliced for use in sandwiches and other recipes.

Which gets us back to what my sweet grandmother was doing displaying that hog’s head so proudly: She was getting ready to make up a fresh batch of headcheese for use in my grandfather’s lunches at the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad shops in Aurora—no trip to the packaged meat aisle of the grocery store needed.

As a commentary on American life, the photo leading off this post is just one more indication of how far our definition of “the basics” has moved from the time of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’.

Last agriculture census confirmed some trends, revealed some surprises

From the time it was settled in the late 1820s, Kendall County’s geographical location has had both its positives and its negatives.

Claiming land 40 miles west of Chicago that was located on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, the farmer-pioneers who settled the county’s rich prairie found the fast-growing city’s market for grain and livestock an economic boon. Chicago was close enough that cattle and other livestock could be driven there within a couple days. The county’s farmers were able, in fact, to create personal relationships with such prime movers of the meat industry as Phillip Armour. And in the 20 years before rail lines pushed west, the city was also within realistic grain hauling distance.

Kendall County not only borders on three of the Chicago metro region’s populous “Collar Counties,” but it is within convenient distance of the city itself.

But the county’s location also posed some negatives, especially for those more interested in business than farming. Oswego, in the northeast corner of the county, was never able to grow its small two-block business district because of its proximity to Aurora, just six miles away. Aurora, with its large downtown business district fueled by heavy industry and the shops of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, drew enough business north to keep the village’s retail district from growing. Those effects only worsened when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road opened in 1870 linking the coal fields south of Ottawa with Fox Valley towns as far north as Geneva. The advent of the interurban trolley, and completion of the line running from downtown Aurora through downtown Oswego to downtown Yorkville made the situation worse.

The effects of the county’s location was to keep it almost entirely rural with the business of its scattered hamlets, villages, and towns aimed at supporting the farms that surrounded them. That 125-year era ended in the 1950s when Caterpillar Tractor Company built a sprawling plant in Oswego Township that eventually employed some 7,000 people and the manufacturing arm of AT&T expanded an old wallpaper factory, also in Oswego Township, to make electronic communications equipment. Those factories made an already-existing post World War II housing shortage in the area worse, prompting the area’s first sustained population growth since the Civil War. It didn’t take people elsewhere in the Chicago metro region long to decide Kendall County’s bucolic landscape was an inviting place to raise families. That first growth spurt of the late 1950s and 1960s, was joined by further growth eras culminating in the early 2000s when Kendall County, in percentage terms, was the fastest growing county in the United States.

Kendall’s farmers found, given the distance, it was practical to drive their cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses to the Chicago market, a definite plus in the pre-railroad era. After railroads and then interurban trolley lines and eventually all-season paved roads connected the county to Chicago it opened markets for everything from dairy products to honey and fruit.

For the 40 years from the 1970s through the first decade of the 2000s, the county grew housing and retail developments at a dizzying rate, as once productive farmland changed from growing crops to growing homes and businesses. The area’s explosive growth took a breather with the Great Recession of 2008 when the world’s economic system was nearly wrecked by the greed and illegal activities of the financial services industry.

The effect of all of that, along with profound changes in agriculture itself, had a not inconsiderable impact on farming in Kendall County, something I’ve been watching for decades now.

Threshing small grains—oats, wheat, rye, barley—was both labor and capital intensive, requiring farmers to create cooperatives to buy and use the complicated harvesting equipment of the era. Members of the Harvey Threshing Ring farmed on and around the Harvey Road east of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

As a statistical measure of those changes, every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts a farm census, with the last one completed in 2017. And with five years having passed since then, farmers and ranchers all over the U.S. got packets of surveys in June asking for information about their operations for the latest farm census.

That last ag census, taken back in 2017, reported a host of facts about Kendall County and that continuing change from an almost entirely rural area to a community that seems to be growing more and more homes and shopping centers than row crops every year.

A modern combine (short for “combined harvester”) does the work of several men and machines. Improved grain hybrids and high-tech equipment have combined for explosive growth in grain yields and much larger, although far fewer, farms—and farmers.

Some of the census information confirmed overall trends that have been continuing over the past several decades, while others suggested the farm scene itself is changing. Not all that change has been negative, either. For instance, the census reported that, as of 2017 at least, Kendall County farms were overwhelmingly still in the hands of families and not corporations. A total of 92 percent of the county’s ag land was in the hands of family farms, the census reported.

On the other hand, there were interesting changes to report along with some more predictable information. Two county farms, for instance, reported raising emus, not exactly the usual kind of poultry you’d perhaps expect to find out here on the northern Illinois prairie.

Emu wrangling? In Kendall County? In the 2017 Census of Agriculture, two county farms reported raising the big birds.

Other statistics in the report contained trends both continuing and interrupted. The number of Kendall County farms continued to decline, reaching a new all-time low of just 313. That’s nearly 100 fewer farms than the 412 the census reported in 2002 and 773 fewer farms than existed here in 1950.

But while the number of farms declined, the size of the remaining farms continued to increase as consolidation in the agriculture sector—even among family farms—continued. In 2017, the average Kendall County farm covered 419 acres. In 2012, Kendall County farms averaged 356 acres, and back in 1950 when modern farming was on the cusp of major changes in farm use philosophy, the average farm here was just 180 acres.

The trend of more and more ag land turning into housing and business developments, however, took a breather in 2017. The census numbers suggested the housing market crash of 2008 had an impact on the previously steady repurposing of farmland. For the first time since 1987—the result of another economic downturn—land was apparently returned to agriculture production instead of being used for development. According to census statistics, a little over 8,000 acres were put back into crop production between 2012 and 2017.

Even with that pause, the value of Kendall’s farmland continued to rise, going up 4.3 percent from 2012, reaching a record average of $9,059 an acre, the 2017 census reported.

As this 1939 aerial photo shows, at that time, a few years before the start of World War II, Oswego was a small village set among a surrounding agricultural area. Oswego’s population in 1940 was 978. (Little White School Museum collection)

Likewise, the value of farm homes and buildings continued to increase along with the land on which they sit. In 2017, the value of the average Kendall County farm’s land and buildings stood at nearly $4 million, a 29 percent increase over those same values in 2012.

The census counts farm producers these days—at one time called farm operators—and they found 548 of them in Kendall County. The department’s official definition of a producer is: “Persons or entities, including farmers, ranchers, loggers, agricultural harvesters and fishermen, that engage in the production or harvesting of an agricultural product.” Given that definition, it’s clear one farm can have more than one “operator,” and thus the change in nomenclature to producer.

Now with a population of more than 35,000 (more than three times the population of all of Kendall County in 1939), Oswego is no longer small, and instead of farmland is now set among the housing and commercial developments that surround it. On-going development in Kendall County is the main driver behind the substantial increases in the price of land since World War II. (Google Earth image)

The 2017 census reported 380 male farm producers, down almost 4 percent from 2012, while the number of female producers in 2017 was 168, up a hefty 15 percent over 2012.

Another trend that continued was the increasing number of Kendall County farm producers who work off the farm at least part of the time. Nearly 53 percent of the county’s farm producers reported working off the farm at least part of the time in 2017. That was the highest number in a quarter century.

While the county has lost a significant amount of farmland to development over the past several decades, there has been no corresponding decline in production. Modern hybrids and continually improving farming technology seem to be combining to offset the loss of Kendall County farmland to housing and commercial development. In 2002, 82 percent of the county was being farmed. By 2017, that number had decreased fairly sharply to 67 percent. But even with less land available to farm, crop yields had increased sharply. For instance, in 2002, county farmers produced 9,249,000 bushels of corn and 2,761,000 bushels of soybeans. But in 2017, with less land under cultivation, the county’s farmers produced a remarkable 13,780,000 bushels of corn, a 49 percent increase, and 3,122,000 bushels of soybeans, up 13 percent.

Kendall was also contributing to another interesting statewide agricultural trend: The increasing number of honeybee colonies on farms. In the 2012 ag census, 919 Illinois farms reported having honeybee colonies. The number nearly doubled in 2017, with 1,770 farms reporting colonies. In Kendall County, 14 farms reported having 296 honeybee colonies in 2017, with a bit over 10,000 pounds of honey collected during the previous year. The 2017 result was not an outlier, either. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of farms producing honey doubled statewide and here in Kendall County, the number of honeybee colonies increased by 65 percent.

The Oswego Depot, its sidings, livestock loading chute, and the trackside stockyards—along with the livestock producers that once made use of them—are all gone today, but once provided a substantial economic boost for the area. (Little White School Museum collection)

While grain production was booming in 2017, the county’s livestock production continued it’s long-term decline. In 1950, during the heyday of diversified farming where each farm raised livestock as well as a variety of crops, 861 Kendall County farms reported having some beef cattle, 694 farms reported having at least one milk cow, and 741 farms reported raising hogs. The switch to specialized livestock or grain farming accelerated in the 1960s. And by the time the 2017 farm census was taken, with the switch to specialized grain or livestock farming, only 39 county farms reported having any beef cattle, only 1 reported owning milk cows, and 11 reported having hogs.

The switch away from raising livestock was also clearly evident in the sharp reduction in Kendall County acreage devoted to corn raised for silage to feed livestock as well as acreage devoted to pastureland. In 1950, county farmers raised 2,236 acres of corn for silage and had almost 24,000 acres devoted to pastureland. By 2017, county farmers only grew corn for silage on about 300 acres and only devoted about 1,600 acres to pastureland.

In 2017, Kendall County was still recovering from that near-total collapse of the world financial system driven by illegal and unethical practices of giant financial corporations. Recovery was slow, but by the time the 2020 U.S. Census was taken, population growth was already recovering in Kendall County, to the point that it was the fastest growing county in Illinois.

That’s why it will be so interesting to see what new information about the county farm scene this summer’s agricultural census will uncover.

One of agriculture’s once-busiest seasons has virtually disappeared from northern Illinois’ farm calendar…

Time was this time of year, farmers had mostly wrapped up the harvest of their small grains—wheat, oats, rye, and barley—and were looking towards threshing it. Because back then, those were two different, extremely labor-intensive processes.

Nowadays, of course, grain farmers use giant combines to harvest, thresh, and winnow small grain—if they’ve grown any of it, of course.

Farming’s changed considerably during the last 70 years. Back in 1950, almost all farming operations were diversified, meaning farms produced both grain and livestock, from cattle and hogs to sheep and poultry. These days, farms specialize in either grain or livestock. And for grain farmers—the vast majority of today’s farmers—the types of grain grown here in northern Illinois have changed considerably. While you can still spot a few fields of traditional small grains here and there, for the most part farmers around these parts today grow corn and soybeans. Oats, wheat, rye, and barley have mostly disappeared from the area’s agricultural landscape. But for a century after the settlement era, Kendall County produced a LOT of small grains, both for market and for use on the farm. Oats, in particular, were valuable, both as a cash crop and on the farm itself to feed the horses and mules to power the farm equipment of the era.

There was a huge settlement rush into northern Illinois in 1833. Known as “The Year of the Early Spring,” the weather warmed earlier than usual drying out what roads and trails there were and greening up the prairie grass providing ample forage for the teams of horses and yokes of oxen pulling the settlers’ wagons.

The crops those pioneer farmers planted were largely the same as the ones they’d grown back east. Corn was a staple, and so was wheat as well as oats, rye, and barley along with flax for making linen thread.

And while experiments had been ongoing for a long time on mechanizing parts of the farming process, about the only thing that could be called a machine they used was a plow. And the ones of that era were nothing to write home about, either. While their iron plowshares and wooden moldboards worked in the thin stony soils found back east, they proved inadequate when working in Illinois’ deep, rich loam. John Deere eventually solved the plow problem, which was a definite help, but that only put a shallow scratch in the problem of easing farmers’ backbreaking labor.

Harvesting grain with scythe and cradle.

Those small grains needed for survival on the prairie—wheat for flour, oats for food for both man and beast, rye for flour and whiskey, and barley for food as well as beer and whiskey—were terribly labor intensive to grow and harvest.

Grain seed was broadcast by hand and then worked into plowed ground with harrows after which it was a chore to keep birds and other critters from eating all of it. Then weeds had to be hoed out as the crop matured. When it did, the real work began. First the grain stalks had to be cut and gathered into bundles. That task was done with large sickles called scythes with contraptions consisting of flimsy wooden fingers called a cradle attached. An experienced farmer could cut the grain, gather the stalks on the fingers of the cradle, and lay them in a neat row behind him as he worked through an entire field. A good man with a scythe and cradle could cut up to two acres of grain a day.

Shocking oats. (Wisconsin Historical Society collection)

After it was cut, the grain had to be gathered into bundles, each tied with a stalk of grain in a backbreaking process of stoop labor. The bundles were then neatly piled in small stacks called shocks, with roofs created by skillful placing of other bundles to shed most of any rain to allow the grain in the shock to dry. And that wrapped up harvesting.

After the grain bundles in the shocks dried they had to be hauled up to the barn where the threshing process began. Barns of the era had threshing floors where the boards were tightly fitted to allow no grain to escape. The bundles were laid in a single layer on the floor and then beat with a flail to separate the wheat, oat, or other grain from the stalks and hulls. Stalks of the straw had to be removed by hand and stacked for later use as livestock bedding, with the grain swept up and put into bins or barrels.

But the grain was still intermixed with a lot of dust and hulls, so it had to be winnowed. Using large, flat baskets or trays, the grain was tossed into the air on a windy day allowing the breeze to blow the lighter chaff away from the heavier grain. Then the clean grain was stored in bins for use on the farm or put directly into sacks to be hauled to whatever market might have existed.

As settlement moved west, pioneer farmers left the dense woods of the east and entered the Prairie Peninsula. The huge tallgrass prairie region was a rough triangle stretching from northwestern Indiana northwest through Illinois, Iowa, and western Minnesota to extreme eastern North Dakota, then straight south to the Kansas-Oklahoma border and then east and north back to northwestern Indiana.

McCormick’s patented reaper. Daniel J. Townsend manufactured McCormick reapers under license in rural NaAuSay Township in 1847

The region was underlain with rich, deep soils created by the last glacier and, as its name implies, thickly covered with prairie grasses and other plants sometimes seven and more feet tall. It was a revelation to eastern farmers who’d had to wrestle every acre out of dense forests, an area conducive to much larger farms. But there were problems.

First, labor was in short supply on the Illinois frontier. Second, as noted above, grain farming was extremely labor intensive. In 1830, it took around 300 labor hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat and around 90 hours to produce 100 bushels of corn, with the whole family pitching in to help. Big farm families were a definite help, but it took a while for kids to get to an age when they were more help than hindrance.

So western farmers naturally started looking for ways to ease the labor needed to produce those crops. Which is where American ingenuity came in. The first area addressed was the initial harvest with scythe and cradle. Harvesters pulled by horses that cut grain stalks allowing a person riding on the machine to rake the stalks so they fell in rows behind the machine were first developed in the 1830s, with Cyrus McCormick’s machine gradually becoming dominant over its competitors.

Here in Kendall County, Royal Bullard of Millbrook bought one of the first McCormick Reapers in 1844. Three years later, Cyrus McCormick traveled out from Chicago and contracted with Daniel J. Townsend of NaAuSay Township to build and sell reapers for the 1847 crop. Townsend’s steam-powered factory was located in AuSable Grove, miles from any town and only operated for a few years.

A brand new 1881 Plano Harvester outside the firm’s Kendall County plant.

By the late 1840s, however, reapers were being replaced by harvesters, machines that allowed workers riding the machine to bundle the grain by hand after it was cut, dropping the bundles on the ground. The Plano Harvester Works here in Kendall County manufactured hundreds of the machines each year until they, too, were replaced by the grain binder. Those machines cut and automatically bundled the grain, allowing one man to do the work it previously took three to do. The Plano factory manufactured 2,000 Gordon patent binders in 1877 and early 1878 for the 1878 harvest. According to E.W. Hicks’ 1877 history of Kendall County, 10 improvements patented for the Gordon machines were developed by Kendall County residents.

In addition, the first practical mechanical threshing machines were beginning to appear on the Illinois prairies in the 1840s and 1850s. John Avery and Hiram Abial Pitts had patented a successful machine in 1837 that not only threshed the grain, but also mechanized the winnowing process. Their machines were animal-powered using simple devices that allowed horses hitched to horizontal arms to walk around a circle while gears powered a pulley. A belt from the pulley powered the machine. By the 1870s, steam engines were being used to power threshing machines, a novelty reported by the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent on Aug. 21, 1879: “A steam thresher is the latest enterprise added to the business institutions of this town; the proprietor of it is Wm. E. Smith. It was set to work Saturday out at Wm. Pearce’s and being the first thing of the kind in this vicinity a large number went there to see its operation and all expressed themselves highly pleased with it except a few of whose running horse-power machines, who of course saw disadvantages in it and predicted trouble.”

The Harvey Threshing Ring on the move from one member’s farm to another sometime around 1900. The ring was comprised of members living in the Harvey and Wolf’s Crossing roads area. (Dale Updike collection)

Threshing machines continued to improve, as did the steam engines that almost exclusively came to power them. But a threshing outfit was far too expensive for average farmers. So they combined into neighborhood cooperatives to buy the equipment. Each cooperative had its own rules and regulations and during the harvest, each member was entitled to have the equipment used on their farm, with all the members and their families contributing to the labor. The threshing outfit moved from farm to farm around the neighborhood, and so the cooperatives began to be called “rings.” Threshing rings operated in Kendall County up until the advent of affordable combines farmers could buy on their own. Combines were originally called combined harvesters because they mechanically combined harvesting and threshing in one piece of equipment.

The East Oswego Threshing ring in a photo taken by Malcom Rance during the 1911 season. The East Oswego Ring also included some farmers from Wheatland Township, Will County. (Little White School Museum collection)

Advances in harvesting and threshing technology, coupled with improvements in plows and other crop preparation equipment plus progress in new varieties of wheat had huge effects on farm production. While it took around 300 work hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat in 1830, by 1890 it was only taking about 30 hours.

Ironically, by that time, wheat was no longer a major crop in northern Illinois, it being discovered wheat grew much better farther west where the climate was dryer. In 1860 Wisconsin and Illinois were the nation’s chief wheat states. By 1910 North Dakota, Kansas, and Minnesota were the chief wheat states as the Midwest’s eastern states began concentrating more and more on growing corn as well as oats and the other small grains.

The remaining small grains were also on the way out. Kendall County’s oat harvest reached its height in the early 20^th Century. The county produced 2.1 million bushels of oats in 1910 that went to feed horses used on the farm as well as in town. But with horses being rapidly replaced as the prime movers both on the farm and in town, oats were no longer so much in demand. In 1940, the oat harvest in Kendall County was down to 1.8 million bushels and down further to 1.6 million bushels by 1958. From there, the bottom literally dropped out and by 2007 so few bushels were grown that the U.S. Census of Agriculture for Kendall County didn’t even report them.

The modern oat harvest–what there is of it in the Fox Valley these days–is now on.

In the 1930s, realizing that the days of Illinois’ production of small grains was numbered, the Farm Bureau partnered with the University of Illinois Extension Service to begin pushing soybean production. With a few inexpensive modifications, the same equipment farmers already owned could be used to plant and harvest beans. By the time the U.S. Department of Agriculture took the 2017 farm census, Kendall County farmers were producing 3.1 million bushels of soybeans annually.

If you drive around the countryside this time of year, you’ll still see a few acres of oats and wheat ripening in area fields. You might also get a chance to see a farmer using his combine to harvest those rare fields of small grains. While farming is still hard work and the hours during planting and harvesting seasons are long, today’s powerful, comfortable, computer-assisted equipment is a far cry from the days of cradling, bundling, and shocking grain by hand and threshing it with a flail on the barn floor.

There was a time when apples were a cash crop in the Fox Valley

It’s fall here in northern Illinois, and that means it’s apple season.

Most of us figure there’s nothing quite as American as a good, fresh crisp apple. But the fact is, the eating and cooking apples we enjoy so much these days are descended from European imports. Only the lowly crabapple is actually native to North America.

The wild, ancient ancestor of virtually all of today’s apple varieties originally evolved in the mountains of Central Asia in the area today occupied by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and the Xinjiang region of China. Apples appear to have been actually cultivated first in Turkey. Alexander the Great is generally given credit for introducing the fruit to Europe.

Although not native, apples were one of the first fruit crops brought to the New World by Europeans, who heavily relied on the fruit to produce cider for drinking and vinegar for food preservation, as well as a popular fruit for eating fresh.

The first apple seeds were brought across the Atlantic to North America by French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century. The religious separatists who settled Massachusetts starting in 1620 brought apple seeds and seedlings with them and immediately began planting orchards throughout the region when they arrived.

Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore

In the 1630s, Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore advised Maryland settlers to bring with them “kernalls of pears and apples, especially of Pipins, Pearmains and Deesons, for making thereafter of Cider and Perry.” Perry is a fermented drink made from pears. According to survey records of 1644, just ten years after Lord Baltimore’s decree, more than 90 percent of Maryland’s farms had apple orchards.

Pennsylvania’s German settlers, called Pennsylvania Dutch by their English neighbors, became famous for using apples to make a wide variety of food, including apple pie and apple butter.

In the early 1800s, John Chapman, a former resident of Massachusetts and Connecticut, began planting apple seedlings throughout Ohio and, eventually, Indiana. Looked upon with affection by the early settlers of those areas, the eccentric Chapman soon received his nickname, Johnny Appleseed. In addition to planting apple orchards from seeds retrieved from cider-making operations, Chapman also planted pennyroyal, catnip, and horehound on his tree-planting journeys. Besides planting orchards in unsettled areas, Chapman also regularly returned and pruned the trees to assure their productivity.

By planting the seeds instead of reproducing them by grafting (which he opposed on religious grounds), Chapman spread a huge variety of apple trees in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and as far west as eastern Illinois. Apples do not reproduce true from their seeds, meaning seeds from, say, a Pippin, do not necessarily produce Pippins. What Chapman really did was to spread a huge variety of apple rootstock all over the areas of the then fast-growing western frontier. As a result, when settlers did arrive, they could graft on desired varieties but they could also select the best of the varieties that grew from Chapman’s random seeding.

Here in Kendall County, like every other frontier community, apple trees were prized possessions, and joined cherry and plum trees in the orchards planted by the earliest settlers.

Elvirah Walker Shumway and her husband James emigrated from Massachusetts to Kendall County in 1847, settling near her brothers, Seth and Lauriston Walker, on a farm just east of the intersection of Douglas and Simons Road in Oswego Township. On their arrival, Elvirah discovered one of the hardships she had to endure on the Illinois frontier was a serious lack of apple trees with which to produce vinegar. She didn’t let that stop her, though, from preserving food by pickling. In a letter written to her sister back in Massachusetts in September 1847, she reported she had “two three gallon pots of pickles stewing—if you ask what I do for vinegar! Oh I use whiskey and water.” Which may help explain some of those wild pioneer parties.

Apples were grown to be eaten fresh, but also to be dried for use during the Fox Valley’s long winters. The fruit was also turned into apple butter, jelly, and cider.

As the 19th Century progressed, apples became fairly big business here in Kendall County and the rest of the region. On Nov. 14, 1872, the Kendall County Record reported that “Dr. J.A. Cook has shipped 1,750 bushels of apples from his farm in Fox this fall, and made 50 barrels of cider.”

Many farmers owned their own small cider presses, but for processing serious quantities of apples, steam powered presses were used to squeeze cider out of apples.

In 1884, Kendall County produced nearly 25,000 bushels of apples according to state agricultural officials.

Cider itself, long a staple of the American diet, was served both fresh and fermented. Cider appeared on the table in virtually every American household in the first half of the 19th Century, as a good tasting and mildly alcoholic beverage enjoyed by all members of the family, no matter how young. Cider was also safer to drink than the water available in most of the era’s towns and villages.

After fermenting, hard cider was sometimes distilled into hard liquor. More often it was simply processed into applejack during the winter by allowing a keg of fermented cider to freeze, driving the alcohol to the center. The center was then tapped, producing a strong alcoholic drink.

Vinegar was the other major product made from apple cider. Since vinegar was one of the primary food preserving tools of early householders (everything from meat to vegetables to eggs were pickled in vinegar), its manufacture was an important early industry.

Besides merely reproducing popular varieties of apple trees, at least one Kendall County farmer developed his own variety. Smith G. Minkler, who farmed along what is now Minkler Road in Oswego and NaAuSay townships, perfected the Minkler Apple, and it proved to be a favorite of local orchardists. As a young man, Minkler received his first seedlings as payment for helping break prairie sod for early Kendall County entrepreneur Peter Specie. Specie apparently got the seedlings from the Detroit area’s French settlements.

Today, the Kendall County Historical Society still has a few Minkler apple trees at the Lyon Farm and Village, and there are a few Minkler apple trees still growing on area farmsteads.

Some of the apples Minkler produced were giants. The Kendall County Record reported in the fall of 1881 that apples weighing a pound each and measuring 14 inches in circumference were being picked in the Minkler orchards.

In January of 1889, Minkler printed a “Plea for an Old Orchard” in the Record. He urged county farmers to prune their trees, “plow the ground shallow” in their orchards, and then apply manure to feed the trees. “The orchard is the most abused piece of ground on the farm,” Minkler complained. “You expect it to produce a crop of apples, a crop of hay, and a pasture besides, and make no return to the land.”

A nice selection of Minkler apples from Eastman’s Antique Apples, Wheeler, Michigan. Minklers are large, juicy, and crisp, good for both eating and cider.

Apples harvested each fall were either pressed on-site in individual orchards or taken to the many local cider-pressing businesses. In the Oswego area, a number of pressing operations were in operation in the late 1800s, including at the Wormley farm on Ill. Route 31 and the Wayne farm on Ill. Route 71. In addition, Oswego businessman David Hall had two presses in operation in 1889. All were powered by small stationary steam engines.

All those apples grown in farm orchards had to be hauled to the presses by the wagonload for processing, and that offered numerous opportunities for mischief-inclined youngsters. From the Oct. 23, 1889 Record: “Owing to the making of much cider now, many loads of apples are being carried through town and whenever one is spied by the small boys, they swarm upon it filling their pockets, biting into a few, and then pelting each other with them so that the streets are strewn with apples. This raiding upon their loads causes farmers to get through town as quick as possible and Monday, as Charles Stiefbold was coming along at a trot with a load upon wish some boys jumped and by some means let down the end board, a patent device, and the first thing the owner knew was that most of the apples were strewn along the street the length of a block or more. As fathers don’t exercise the least control over their boys on the street, the formation of a society for such control would be much in order.

The cider-making season usually ran from September through November. Here’s what the Nov. 11, 1891 Record had to say about that year’s cider season in Oswego: “The end of cider making has not been reached. David Hall has made over 1,500 barrels so far…John Wormley, with his celebrated cider press, has managed to make about 1,700 barrels this season. The largest amount of cider to the bushel was made for S.B. English—from 50 bushels of Minkler apples, 252 gallons of cider was extracted.”

Much of the cider pressed locally went to make vinegar. David M. Haight, who owned the general store at the northeast comer of Washington Street (Route 34) and Main Street in Oswego, operated a large vinegar fermenting room in his store basement. One of Haight’s vinegar jugs is in the collections of the Little White School Museum in Oswego.

Nowadays, many county residents have an apple tree or two on their property, but the days when thousands of gallons of cider were processed from local trees is long gone.

This fall, some hardy folks will still press fresh cider from local apples while the rest of us pick up a gallon or so at the grocery store or a farmer’s market while we reflect on the days when the Wormleys, the Waynes, and the Halls made apples one of the county’s commercial mainstays.

Those “Amber waves of grain” are mostly a thing of the past in Kendall County

My dad, while watching someone with a lot of energy, would often remark, “He’s really feeling his oats!”

It’s an expression you don’t hear much, if at all, these days, but back when the U.S. was a mainly agricultural nation the phrase really meant something, especially to those who had lived during the era when horses provided much of the motive power that grew the nation.

Granted, horses can eat hay and graze on pasture grass, but it turned out that oats are a sort of superfood for horses.

As Horse Canada magazine explained, “Of all the cereal grains (e.g. corn, barley, wheat, etc.) oats have the most appropriate nutritional profile for horses. They are an excellent source of calories, and have a better protein and amino acid profile than many other grains. They are higher in fat and fibre (thanks to the hull) and are, therefore, lower in non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) than most other grains. They are well digested within the horse’s small intestine, even with little processing (as long a horse has good teeth!) and, therefore, pose a lower risk of sugars reaching the large intestine and contributing to colic or laminitis. Also, because of their lower NSC content, they are not considered a ‘hot’ feed.”

When Katharine Lee Bates wrote about “amber waves of grain” in “America the Beautiful,” she was talking about cereal grain fields like this stand of oats.

These days, horses, especially on farms, have been mostly relegated to the status of expensive hobbies and oats are considered for their value as health food. What were the mechanics of that change over time?

By now, even casual readers of this blog have realized I have a keen interest in how farming has evolved during the past couple centuries or so. And, especially as this time of year rolls around, few things illustrate the profound changes in farming and farm culture than virtual disappearance of small grains in the local agriculture cycle.

Small grains are ancient in origin and were (and in some areas of the world still are) vital parts of the farming process. But not here, and not now.

Defined as cereal grains—wheat, oats, rye, and barley—small grains are, like their cousin, corn, the seeds of genetically modified grasses that humans have relied upon for food for thousands of years. Some, like oats and wheat, still somewhat resemble their ancient genetic ancestors. Other grains, like corn, no more resemble their most ancient ancestor than a Chihuahua resembles a timber wolf.

You can still drive around the northern Illinois countryside this time of year and see a few small fields of small grains turning a beautiful golden color in the summer sun. But today’s occasional fields of oats and even more rare stands of wheat are pale shadows of what farmers planted and grew here a century and more ago.

A century ago, the annual harvest of cereal grains like oats, wheat, barley, and rye were just getting a good start this time of year. Above, the East Oswego Threshing Ring’s steam engine and threshing machine works on the 1911 harvest in eastern Oswego Township. From the Aug. 3, 1910 Kendall County Record: “Farmers are very busy threshing wheat and oats.” (Little White School Museum collection)

These days, instead of those once extensive fields of ripening small grains, you’ll mostly see extensive fields of tall corn swaying in summer prairie breeze, interspersed with huge fields of soybeans, a crop that was as rare here in the 1920s as wheat is today.

Why the change, why the evolution? Because times change as does the use to which crops are put. Back in the early 1800s when pioneer farm families settled Kendall County, small grains were absolutely necessary for survival. Wheat was harvested and ground into flour either on the farm or at one of the new gristmills that were rapidly popping up along every county stream whose bed had enough fall to power a waterwheel.

Oats, on the other hand, were the fuel that powered the horses and mules that were the backbone of energy on the farm and in the transportation industry of the era. Granted, oats, too, could be ground into flour or they could be otherwise processed for use as oatmeal and for other human foods, but their primary use was to feed the millions of horses the nation relied on for everything from pulling stagecoaches to delivering beer.

A stand of ripe oats in the field. The grain once fueled the horses that everyone from farmers to handsome cab drivers relied on.

Barley and rye were also used for human consumption by being ground into flour, but they were also popular grains for processing into the beer and whiskey so beloved by so many in that era when drinking water was mistrusted, often for good reason. The germ theory of disease was still considered a radical hypothesis, so wells and outhouses were often adjacent leading to outbreaks of typhoid fever and other waterborne illnesses from which even the wealthy were not immune. In 1861, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died of complications of typhoid fever contracted in their London palace, probably from tainted water.

But back to farming. It didn’t take too long after settlement for farmers to realize northern Illinois really wasn’t good wheat country. Wheat likes warm, relatively dry growing conditions, and while we all know Illinois does not lack for summer heat, dry conditions (except during drought years) are not what you find around these humid parts.

As the frontier kept moving ever farther west, those ideal wheat conditions were found west of the tallgrass prairies out on the Great Plains in a huge swath from Texas north to the Dakotas. Improved transportation systems added to the climate soon meant that bread could be baked in regional cities and shipped to small farming towns cheaper than rural folks could produce it on their own.

Horses and mules were raised in the barns at the old Judson Farm on South Madison Street at Wilson Place, on the south end of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

But that didn’t apply to oats. In 1912, which was close to the high-water mark for oat production, Kendall County farmers harvested 53,000 acres of the grain, producing well over 2.5 million bushels to feed their own horses and mules, but mostly for market. But by 2007, so few acres of oats were harvested in Kendall County that the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn’t even report them.

Why so many bushels of oats then and so few later on? When oat production was at its height, farmers relied on horses to plant and harvest crops and then haul them to market. Today, farmers use gasoline and diesel oil to fuel those activities, which have become entirely mechanized. And in towns and cities, where horses once hauled everything from streetcar passengers to mail delivery buggies to the milkman’s delivery wagon, hydrocarbon-fueled machines have replaced the millions of horses that once did those tasks.

By 1900, the nation’s total horse population reached an estimated 24.1 million, with just under three million being kept in cities. In cities with more than 100,000 population there was roughly one horse for every 15 people, varying from one horse for every 7.4 people in Kansas City to one for every 26.4 in New York City. And those horses required millions of bushels of oats for food. The nation’s horse population peaked about 1915, and from then on thanks to the advent of dependable, economical automobiles, the horse population declined by about a half a million animals a year. Along with that decline, the need for oats similarly decreased.

By 1912, the transition from horse powered vehicles to vehicles with horsepower was well underway as this winter scene on Washington Street in downtown Oswego suggests. (Little White School Museum collection)

Not that folks back then were sad to see horses go, of course. In Chicago in 1900, the city’s 82,000 horses deposited between 1.2 and 2.4 million pounds of manure and 20,500 gallons of urine in stables and on city streets every day. In addition, one contemporary expert estimated in 1900 that three billion flies—each a tiny airborne disease factory—hatched in horse manure every day in U.S. cities. It was little wonder automobiles and trucks were welcomed by public health experts of the era.

So the realization that wheat grew better farther west, the disappearance of the horse, and the evolution of Midwestern farming to specialization in either raising grain or livestock led to the annual harvest of small grains and all that it meant to our farmer forebears, both socially and economically. But gradually it became mostly a thing of the past here in the Fox Valley. The change accelerated as the nation transitioned from a largely rural to an overwhelmingly urbanized nation.

And so today, you can drive around Kendall County and still see small stands of cereal grains here and there. But the “amber waves of grain” that once carpeted our landscape have been almost entirely replaced by corn and soybeans–and subdivisions. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but it’s certainly a big change.

A little local dairy history to celebrate National Dairy Month

So how are YOU celebrating National Dairy Month in June?

Down at the Little White School Museum, we’re doing a special exhibit and I’ll be giving a short program on the community’s dairy history—which turns out to have been fairly extensive.

Here in northern Illinois, the counties up north and communities like Harvard have been known for their dairy farms for generations. But little Kendall County had a surprisingly robust dairy industry right up until World War II, and even for a few years thereafter.

In late April 1875. H.N. Wheeler, editor and publisher of the St. Charles Leader up in Kane County, tweaked Oswego about its dairy business: “Oswego claims to send a good deal of milk to Chicago. Well how much? It’s the first time we knew that the milk business, to any extent, had got that far south.” To which Kendall County Record publisher John R. Marshall shot back: “Come down the river some day, Wheeler, and we’ll show you. Yorkville ships a dozen, or 10 cans a day, also. You haven’t all the milk (or the coconut) up the river.”

Milk cows arrived in the Fox Valley with the earliest settlers in the 1830s, and by the 1850s, dairy farms in Kendall County were producing quite a bit of milk. The problem was what to do with it. Milk spoils easily and in 1850, it would be three more years until a rail line extended through Kendall County that could handle shipping easily spoiled products like milk. The roads of that era were little more than tracks across the prairie, nearly impassable after the spring thaw or at any other time of the year after heavy rains.

The solution was to turn milk into products such as butter and cheese that were less prone to spoilage and that would stand being shipped overland.

In 1850, less than a decade after Kendall County was established, the U.S. Farm Census reported there were 3,160 dairy cows in Kendall County. Further, the county had reported producing 180,000 pounds of butter and 27,000 pounds of cheese that year. Most of those products were produced on individual farms or in homes in town for sale locally, but a fair amount was shipped east to the nearest railhead where it could reach the Chicago market.

Seely’s “old stone machine shop” at the west end of the Oswego Bridge housed the village’s first creamery. (Little White School Museum collection)

It wasn’t until 1867, that Oswego’s first commercial dairy operation opened. As reported in the Record on July 25 that year: “Oswego is still making improvements and among them is a new cheese factory on the west side of the river. The old stone machine shop has been fitted up by Messrs Roe & Seely into a neat and thorough factory for the manufacture of cheese. These gentlemen are both from that renowned dairy district, Orange County, N.Y. Mr. Roe has been 12 years in the milk and cheese business and understand it in all its branches. On Tuesday we called on him and he showed the operations of the factory and gave us much general information in regard to dairies, etc. The factory commenced operation on the 6th day of May last and has been constantly at work since. They use 1,500 quarts of milk a day from about 175 cows. They do not work on shares as some factories do, but buy the milk for cash.”

That “old stone machine shop” at the west end of the Oswego Bridge is still standing as a private residence, and is known today as Turtle Rock.

By 1860, the number of milk cows in the county had more than doubled to just over 7,000 and the amount of butter produced had skyrocketed to 602,000 lbs., while the amount of cheese manufactured on farms and in homes had not quite doubled to 46,000 lbs.

In 1870, the number of milk cows in the county had decreased a bit, just like the county’s population, but the amount of butter produced had again increased. And also that year, Oswego, Yorkville, and several other towns up and down the Fox River finally got a direct rail connection. That meant dairy products—including raw milk—could be more easily shipped to distant markets. But the rapaciousness of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad and its monopoly on rail transport meant shipping dairy products to market was an expensive proposition. Oswego general store owner David M. Haight went so far as to propose shipping milk and other dairy products by road to the Chicago market, but the condition of those roads remained terrible.

Instead, businessmen and farmers’ cooperatives decided the best course was to open local creameries where farmers could sell their milk that could then be processed into butter and cheese. By the late 1800s, most communities in Kendall County could boast their own creamery. Oswego, for several years, had two creameries, the first a commercial operation in an abandoned brewery along modern Ill. Route 25, and the other a farmers’ cooperative located in the area of the Oswego grain elevator.

McConnell’s Oswego Butter and Cheese Factory located in a former brewery on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. (Aurora Historical Society collection)

The March 1, 1877 Record reported that “W.H. McConnell & Co. are doing an excellent business for a new business at the Oswego Cheese and Butter Factory (the old brewery), and have stopped in a measure the shipment of milk to Chicago by the farmers in that vicinity. Mr. G. Roe takes his milk to that factory and many others are preparing to do so. The firm means business, and dairymen should give them a try.”

Those creameries produced huge volumes of dairy products. By 1878 McConnell’s Oswego creamery alone was processing 14,000 lbs. (almost 1,630 gallons) of milk a day. On May 16 that year, the Record reported: “The creamery is now producing 2,600 pounds of butter per week and is furnishing the Grand Pacific Hotel 20 gallons of cream daily.”

Local dairy production was not limited to farms during that era, either. Most houses in town boasted a small barn on their property where the family kept a few chickens, the family cow, and a driving horse, with a buggy and, for the winter months, a sleigh. The problem, of course, is that town lots don’t have any space to pasture a cow. So for much of the 19th Century, cows in small towns like Oswego and Yorkville were allowed to roam at large. As you might guess, this caused frequent problems.

On March 21, 1867, Marshall complained in the Record that: “Farmers coming into Yorkville to trade are annoyed beyond patience by the cows running in the street, that make their way to a wagon as soon as it is left by the owner, and forage the hay, straw, apples, potatoes, or whatever there is eatable therein. Nothing is save from their ravages and at the coming town meeting something should be done to abate the nuisance.”

Oswego’s “Barn Alley” between Monroe and Madison streets had one of the village’s best collections of town barns. (Little White School Museum collection)

Towns soon passed laws forbidding cows to roaming at large. But that didn’t go down well with some residents. On May 20, 1869, under the headline “The Great Cow Rebellion,” Lawrence Rank, the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported: “The great sensation of Oswego last week was the cow rebellion. It happened this way: The corporation powers that be [the village board] ordained that all cattle should be prohibited from running at large in the village streets. A lot of cows soon were in the pound. Cow owners were filled with indignation, denouncing it as a piece of highhanded legislation, a crushing down of the poor, etc. The government backed down. The cows are now enjoying the liberty of the streets. As for myself in that struggle, I was on the side of the cow; am too much of a calf, that is, like milk too well to go back on her.”

Eventually, because of the destruction they kept causing, Oswego’s cows, like those in Yorkville, were ordered restrained from running at large, no matter how indignant their owners became.

How many cows were in town? I couldn’t find any figures from the 19th Century, but in 1910, the U.S. Farm Census reported how many cattle were being kept on farms as well as in town. It turned out there were half again as many cattle as people in Kendall County on farms that year. Plus there were 230 head of cattle—likely all or most being milk cows—kept in town, a fairly sizable number for a small county with a population of just over 10,000.

In 1890, Kendall County hit its peak dairy cow population, with 9,500 cows in the county. That year, at least a dozen creameries were operating in Kendall County, most of them farmer cooperatives.

The production of dairy products was high during that era, too. In 1885, the Illinois Agriculture Department had reported that during the previous year, Kendall County farms and businesses reported selling huge amounts of dairy products. According to the state, Kendall County farms sold 433,599 gallons of milk; 18,241 gallons of cream; 282,495 pounds of butter; and 24,500 pounds of cheese during 1884.

In the 1930s, Clarence Schickler operated a farm dairy from the basement of his large farm home along Ill. Route 31 just north of Oswego. Ironically, his father had been arrested for operating large bootlegging operation out of the same space a decade before. (Little White School Museum collection)

From that high point, however, dairy production in Kendall County began to decline. The shear work dairy farming entails, along with the steady consolidation into ever-larger dairy farming operations and increasing health regulations began squeezing out, not only smaller dairy farm operations but also the small local creameries that processed their production. By the end of World War I, all the local creameries were gone.

By 1959, the number of dairy cows in the county had dropped below the count in 1850, and it, along with the number of dairy farms, declined even more sharply after that.

As late as 1950, 694 farms in Kendall County reported having at least one milk cow on the place and the number of dairy cattle was reported at 4,569. By 1964, the number of farms with a dairy cow on the place had dropped to just 133, and the number of dairy cows in the county had decreased to 1,751. In 1997, just nine dairy farms reported having only 246 head of dairy cattle and by 2002, there were only two dairy farms left in the county, the number of cows so low it wasn’t recorded by the farm census.

While the dairy farming and dairy products businesses were consolidating, so were the companies that provided milk to consumers. Very early on, farmers would actually go door-to-door in towns and sell milk to householders and businesses by the bucket. George Henry Lester patented the first glass milk container, the ungainly Lester Milk Jar, in 1878. He started selling milk in his jars in 1879, but it wasn’t until 1884 that really practical milk bottles hit the scene. The invention of practical milk bottles, along with the home icebox allowed small dairies to pop up all over the country—and not just in towns.

A milk and a cream bottle from Oswego’s Schickler Dairy will be among artifacts on exhibit during “Milk and More: Discovering Oswego’s Dairy Industry” at Oswego’s Little White School Museum on Saturday, June 12.

Here in Oswego, the community was served by two farm-based dairies. The Roberts Dairy was based on Charles Roberts’ farm south of the Oswego Bridge on modern U.S. Route 34, while the Schickler Dairy was located on the Clarence Schickler farm on modern Route 31 north of the bridge. They served the community during the 1920s and 1930s.

After World War II, larger dairies in Aurora were able to undercut the prices of the smaller local farm-based operations. Oswego was served mostly by Aurora’s Oatman’s Dairy in the 1950s. Oatman’s provided both home delivery by milkman Les Weis and also provided milk to Oswego’s schools for those government-subsidized daily milk breaks. At first school milk was served in small half-pint glass bottles, but those were soon replaced by waxed cardboard half-pint cartons.

Milkmen, in turn, were displaced in the home milk supply business in the 1960s when gas station owners discovered milk was a great customer draw. Grocery stores had by then begun selling more milk as well, but the hours of stores of that era were far more limited than gas stations. Gas station owners found the investment in a glass-doored milk cooler attracted many more customers than their old, limited product line. And thus was invented, after a few years of evolution, the mini mart that dominates so much of today’s retail landscape.

On Saturday afternoon, starting at 1:30 p.m. at the Little White School Museum, I’ll be recounting these stories along with a few others (such as the one about how Clarence Schickler’s father operated a huge illegal bootleg still out of the same space as his milk bottling operation occupied) during a program that’s part of our salute to National Dairy Month. We’re also assembling some fun exhibits of dairy-related materials from our museum collections—glass Schickler and Oatman’s milk bottles, a hand butter churn, milk and cream cans, and a lot more. Admission to the program at 1:30 is $5, with proceeds benefiting the museum. For more information, call the museum at 630-554-2999 or visit their web site at https://littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org.

Hope to see you Saturday!

How traditional are our Thanksgiving celebrations, anyway?

After rereading the Thanksgiving post I dredged up from the History on the Fox archives last week, I got to wondering just how “traditional” Thanksgiving celebrations were here in Illinois. We all know the story of Abraham Lincoln declaring an official day of Thanksgiving in 1863 during the Civil War. But where did Lincoln get the idea? Why the last Thursday in November? Is turkey really a traditional Thanksgiving treat?

So I started digging into it.

Celebrations to mark the end of the harvest date to ancient times in England. When the colonists calling themselves Pilgrims arrived in the New World in 1620, they brought that tradition with them. And in 1621, the survivors of the first harrowing year on the Massachusetts coast had real reason to offer their thanks to God, their own labors, and to the Native People who’d been key in helping them survive.

Lyle Shoger, about 1930, with a load of corn he picked by hand, probably looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner to come. (Little White School Museum collection)

When those New Englanders began pioneering the western frontier—Illinois—in the 1830s, they took their traditions, including the end-of-harvest Thanksgiving, with them. Those earliest celebrations, mostly held in late November after the vital corn harvest was largely finished, were family affairs. It wasn’t until 1842 that Illinois Gov. Thomas Ford, in the midst of the harrowing effects of the disastrous economic Panic of 1837, proclaimed Thursday, Dec. 29, as a statewide day of Thanksgiving.

It’s more than likely the pioneers from Vermont, Massachusetts, and other New England and Middle Atlantic states brought Thanksgiving celebrations west with them to Kendall County. So local residents were receptive to Gov. Ford’s proclamation.

“It was, perhaps, the darkest time in the history of our State, and in many a household the pinching of poverty was extreme,” noted Kendall County’s earliest historian, the Rev. E.W. Hicks. “The prayers offered up were heard, for times began to be better, and two years thereafter emigration began to pour in as of old, and money, the life blood of the community, began to circulate through the channels of trade.”

In 1847, Hicks reported, Illinois’ official Thanksgiving Day was set for Thursday, Dec. 16, just in time for people to be thankful a smallpox epidemic at Newark had ended.

And the tradition continued. The Kendall County Courier reported from Oswego in their Nov. 21, 1855 edition: “In acknowledgement of the bounteous blessings bestowed upon us the past year from the hand of the Giver of every good and perfect gift, the Governor of our State has appointed and recommended the 29th day of the present month to be observed as one of thanksgiving and prayer.”

So by the time Lincoln made his 1863 proclamation, he was used to his home state’s Thanksgiving celebrations that had, by then, been observed for some two decades.

After the war, and after Lincoln’s assassination, celebrating the nation continued to celebrate the holiday, though not always at the end of November. Some years, the event was moved to the first week or so of December. In the Nov. 30, 1865 Kendall County Record, editor John R. Marshall wrote: “Next Thursday is the day set apart for national thanksgiving. The war is among the things that were, and our armies are nearly disbanded. Peace and prosperity assume their reign. Give God the praise.”

Those local celebrations, early on, had two main elements: solemn thanks given for whatever blessings people acknowledged, and turkey dinners. Whether it was a carryover from those Pilgrim days or for some other reason, the turkey dinner seems to have been a key Thanksgiving element for all who could afford one.

Thanksgiving was a popular subject for postcards during the 19th Century into the early years of the 20th Century.

Marshall even joked about it in that same Nov. 30 issue of the Record. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, he suggested: “Turkies [sic] for Thanksgiving festivities will be received at this office at all hours of the day till the 7th prox. If any are belated, they will be taken after the 7th, and will answer for future dinners. No hint is meant by the foregoing,” he added with a wink.

In 1866, Thanksgiving was again observed on the last Thursday in November, and its observance was linked to veneration of Lincoln. Wrote Marshall in the Nov. 22, 1866 Record, “Next Thursday is the day set aside by the President and by our Governor as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for his many blessings conferred upon the nation and upon this state. This is a relic of the New England fathers, which, under the honored Lincoln, became National property.”

Oswego union Thanksgiving church service was held in the Presbyterian Church with the village’s Methodist minister giving the sermon. (Little White School Museum collection)

Another tradition that arose, and continued for more than a century, was “union” church services in most communities in Kendall County. The services were generally shared around among each church in town from year to year, as were the sermons. On Nov. 25, 1869, the Record reported that in Oswego, “Thanksgiving was observed in the usual manner by eating a turkey or chicken-pie dinner, religious services were observed in the Presbyterian church, the Methodist minister preached the sermon,” and adding, “Business was not generally suspended.”

So while people attended church and enjoyed family dinners, Thanksgiving wasn’t necessarily a business holiday. Gradually, however, as the years passed, businesses at least closed during the community church services, an eventually closed for the entire day making it more of what we recognize as a true holiday.

The union Thanksgiving church service was a tradition that continued for well over a century. Here in my hometown of Oswego, the high school glee club always sang at those Thanksgiving services through the 1960s. It was one reason the district’s music director wasn’t fond of Catholics. During that era Catholic kids weren’t allowed to engage in other denominations’ services and so were prohibited from the union services, robbing the choir of some of its voices.

By 1872, a third leg had been added to the annual Thanksgiving celebration. As the Record’s Oswego corresponded reported on Dec. 5 of the holiday’s activities: “The turkey shoot was a spirited affair; a number of crack marksmen from abroad were present but the shooting was poor, the cause of which was laid to the wind. It blowed quite hard.”

An old pigeon shoot.

Eventually, the local sportsmen added pigeons to the day’s shoot as well.

In 1874, a final diversion had been added, even as the severe economic Panic of 1873 began in earnest. Known as “The Long Depression,” the downturn’s effects would extend over two decades. Even so, small towns like Oswego celebrated the holiday, the Record’s Oswego correspondent writing on Nov. 26, 1874 that: “Thanksgiving day is to be celebrated by divine worship in the forenoon, by eating turkey at noon by those who can afford it, and by dancing in the evening of those both old and young who know how and delight in that diversion.”

For several years, the Thanksgiving holiday consisted of those elements: religious services, turkey dinners, a turkey and/or a pigeon shoot, and a dance in the evening. Eventually parts of the celebration began falling away until by the 20th Century it had been whittled down to religious services and a traditional turkey dinner.

Most recently, those joint community church services have gradually disappeared as well. Instead, Thanksgiving has come to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. And, in fact, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November in order to provide more shopping days until Christmas to boost the retail industry. The move proved unpopular, however, and the celebration has remained on the fourth Thursday since.

So, yes, Thanksgiving as we know it, especially those turkey dinners, really is a tradition that dates back into the nation’s history—here in Illinois, we’ve been enjoying the observances since 1842. And, I think it’s fair to say, doing something for 178 years can legitimately be dubbed a true tradition.

Maintaining an eclectic palate makes life more interesting

Anyone who’s ever read this blog knows that I enjoy food. And one of the initially alarming things about this stupid pandemic we’re suffering through were rumors and reports about the disruptions in the chain of food deliveries from growers to grocery stores. Fortunately, those dark days seem to have gradually passed by, though it’s not out of the question that they might return.

When we lived out on the farm, the food chain was pretty short. That was in the early 1950s, so we had indoor running water and a flush toilet along with electricity and a party line telephone. But in many ways, we were still living as farmers had from the end of World War I through the Great Depression and World War II.

Our Wheatland Township farm, about 1950.

My dad’s job was to farm. He grew the crops, raised the livestock—pigs and feeder cattle—milked the cow (when we had one), repaired machinery and our car and truck, and cut my hair. My mom was responsible for the house, keeping it clean and tidy, cooking the meals, raising chickens (which, with the eggs they produced, were traded for groceries in town), and maintaining the garden and our small orchard.

Every Saturday, my mom, my two older sisters, and I would head to town, where we’d drop my sisters off at their piano lessons, while mom and I would drive down the street to the grocery store. There, mom would deliver one or two crates of eggs and sometimes freshly dressed chickens ready to be sold. They liked my mom’s eggs because they were always clean and fresh with no cracked shells. She’d get a receipt for them and then we’d shop for groceries, mostly staples, the bill for which was reduced by the amount she’d earned in credit for from the eggs and chickens.

Michaels Brother Grocery Store in Montgomery where my mother traded eggs for staples. Although this photo was taken around 1900, it looked much the same 50 years later. (From The History of Montgomery, Illinois in Words and Pictures)

Some of those groceries were for the school lunches for my sisters and me, like peanut butter, bologna, and liver sausage, and, depending on the season, fruit.

We were lucky growing up in the 1940s and 1950s because by then there was sufficient money for food. My mother recalled when she went to her rural neighborhood one-room school that some of the kids were so poor their school lunch sandwiches were bread and lard.

By the early 1950s when I started school, our lunches consisted of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, some kind of fruit, and dessert—my family was big on dessert. I don’t recall eating salty things like potato chips, but I suppose we might have.

My grandmother happily holding up a hog’s head as she and her father-in-law make up a batch of head cheese on Hinman Street in Aurora about 1910.

Living on a farm during that era meant you got a lot of food choices that my town cousins and friends didn’t. Early on I developed a taste for sandwiches made with the pickled heart and pickled tongue my grandmother made after my family did their annual beef butchering. And then there was head cheese, a product whose creation I won’t go into detail about here, although I will note there’s a surprising amount of edible meat on a hog’s head. My grandmother had a frequent hankering for headcheese, as did her son-in-law, my father, although by the time I came along we ate the store-boughten stuff (as grandma put it), the days of using everything but the squeal on the butchered hog having passed on into history. Anyway, I still love the stuff.

Bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches seemed to predominate at lunch time during those early school years, but I always favored an eclectic mix that didn’t much interest my classmates when sandwich trades were in the wind.

Liver sausage—also called liverwurst and Braunschweiger (technically, Braunschweiger is the smoked variety of liver sausage) by some of my German friends and relatives—was one of my favorites. My buddy Glenn’s dad used to frequently remark, “Of all the things I like the best, I like liver wurst.” But I really liked liver sausage from the time I was a little kid, along with pickled tongue and head cheese, any one of which gave most of my lunch mates a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.

While I hated liver as a child—and still do as an adult, for that matter—I’ve always liked liver sausage. Don’t ask me why, except that the two, as far as my taste buds are concerned, are not even in the same food universe. Early on, my father attempted to get me to like liver as much as he did—which was a LOT. But there was something about the taste and consistency of the stuff I couldn’t stand. It was difficult for my parents to cajole me into eating liver since my mother couldn’t stand it, either, which made the whole “encourage by example” thing moot. Luckily for my father, he found a kindred spirit after I married my wife, and the two of them enjoyed liver and onions to their hearts’ content.

Still hard to beat Oscar Meyer’s recipe for liver sausage.

I got a real taste for the Oscar Mayer brand of liver sausage around fifth grade, and carried it in my lunch for several years. Liver sausage, dill pickle slices, and mustard was my standard lunch, and when Fritos were introduced, they provided a perfect compliment.

Out on the farm, my mother made jelly and jam from the fruit she grew in our farm’s small orchard, and pickles—sweet and dill—from the cucumbers she grew in the garden. We had a small grape arbor, and so did my grandparents, both of which seemed to produce lots of grapes for jelly as well. So peanut butter and jelly were my go-to sandwiches, along with bologna and cheese, for the two and a half years I went to one-room school when we lived on the farm, along with an occasional pickled tongue, liver sausage, or pickled heart sandwich treat.

But pickled heart or pickled tongue or head cheese sandwiches just aren’t very marketable in the sandwich trading market that often goes on during school lunchtimes. Even in my one-room country school, it was vanishingly rare to find anyone who’d risk a trade. Which was fine with me because it was hard to beat any of those sandwich fillings anyway.

My one-room school where we ate lunch at our desks and occasionally traded sandwiches–though few wanted to trade with me.

My grandparents retired from farming a year or so after my parents did, and moved into town. There, my grandmother still made the occasional batch of pickled tongue or pickled heart that made great sandwiches, though not ones anyone at school would have a thing to do with.

After my grandmother died, my sister Elaine continued the tradition and would make me an occasional batch of pickled tongue. I wrote a column several years ago about the joys of a good pickled tongue sandwich, lamenting my wife would have nothing to do with even the concept of pickled tongue. My editor and good friend, strongly agreed, stating she would definitely not have a thing to do with a recipe that began: “First peel the tongue.”

I did, however, manage to convince my son that unpopular foods might actually taste good. And that came in handy when we were traveling through West Virginia one time. We’d stopped at a local diner for breakfast, and he noticed something on the menu called “country sausage,” which was plainly differentiated from usual pork sausage. He asked the waitress what was in it, but she seemed a bit unsure what the difference might be. Turned out, it was a good pork sausage with a bit of a kick to it, and it was excellent.

Then there was our trip to Scotland. I was working on a book with my buddy Paul and it was also my 30^th wedding anniversary, so I talked my wife into taking a celebratory trip to Scotland to do research for the book and generally have fun. It didn’t take much talking, either.

Scrooge McDuck was not a fan of Haggis. It turned out to taste pretty good.

That was back in the CompuServe days and I was able to make connections with people in Scotland who could help me out, and who became reasonably close on-line friends. We even stayed with one couple and their sons for a few days and enjoyed the kinds of Scottish food and pub visits you are denied with packaged tours. Our host told us he was preparing a true Scottish treat: Haggis, neeps, and tatties. That turned out to be haggis, served with yellow Swedish turnips and mashed potatoes.

I admit to having had a dim view of haggis since my days reading Scrooge McDuck comics—he claimed haggis nearly did him in. And, of course, haggis has been a banned Scottish import to the U.S. since 1971 just because it’s got sheep lungs in it. I mean, come on! We export Twinkies, which I suspect are far more deadly than the occasional sheep lung.

Haggis itself consists of sheep’s pluck minced and mixed with spices, oatmeal (wouldn’t be Scottish without it!), and suet, and then it’s all traditionally packed into a sheep’s stomach (artificial casings are favored these days) and then boiled, as are the Swedish turnips and potatoes, both of which are served on the side, mashed with butter and salt.

A hearty meal of haggis (center), neeps (right), and tatties looking much as it did when my friend Ian served it for my wife and I near St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland. Haggis is Scotland’s national dish.

So our friend Ian made the Haggis—the Scottish national dish, by the way—although his wife Sue would have nothing to do with it. He was fairly impressed when both my wife and I not only ate it, but really enjoyed it. I did, however, put my foot down at blood sausage as well as everything else the British insist on calling “sausage.” I don’t know what that stuff is, but it’s NOT sausage.

So my message today is that an outright refusal to try regional or national foods just because they’re a little off-putting (okay, haggis may be more than a little off-putting) is being short-sighted. Trying some adventurous food choices makes traveling—if this damned coronavirus ever allows us to get back to doing such a thing—a lot more interesting, and can even add a bit of a historical dimension as well. From colonial Williamsburg’s rabbit stew to Acadia National Park’s popovers to West Virginia’s country sausage to Lordsburg, New Mexico’s green salsa, there are tasty chances to be taken. Some of them might even make for a good school lunch.

That’s a lot of bologna…

Was just making out our sheltering-in-place grocery list and found myself adding Oscar Mayer bologna. Which, of course, started the

My bologna has a first name;
it’s O-S-C-A-R.
My bologna has a second name;
it’s M-A-Y-E-R.

jingle rattling through my head nonstop.

Ring bologna’s never been one of my favs, but my dad really liked the stuff, thanks to childhood memories.

But it also brought up bologna for lunches in decades past. LOTS of decades. My dad had a soft spot in his heart for bologna. Turned out that when he was a little kid growing up in poor, rural Kansas and the family would take the horse and wagon into the little village of Madison to do the weekly shopping, the children looked forward to a treat. If there was enough money left over after buying the necessary staples, the kids would be treated to sharing a ring bologna as they sat, swinging their barefooted legs, on the back of the wagon on the way home.

So we ate quite a bit of it when I was a kid growing up on a farm out in then-rural Wheatland Township here in Illinois. We never, however, ate the stuff fried. Long after I was grown and raised I heard some people actually eat their bologna fried—and LIKE it. The thought of it sort of gives me a queasy stomach to this day.

At home, early on, I preferred my bologna with a slice of good old American cheese (none of that fancy-schmancy Longhorn or Colby stuff for me!) and mustard. But I also came to enjoy my sisters’ and my mom’s favorite method of making a sandwich with bologna, lettuce and Miracle Whip—which my mother always called salad dressing, for some reason.

Grades 1-6 at Church School in the spring of 1953. No cafeteria–we had to take our lunches–but we did have a fireplace!

When I was 6 and went to school—no kindergarten out in the country (or in many towns for that matter)—we all carried our lunches in colorful lithographed steel lunchboxes with a Thermos bottle clipped inside. Those glass-lined Thermos bottles were marvels that kept soup hot or milk cold. But they also broke easily when dropped, and kids drop things a lot. The standard procedure after dropping our lunchbox with the Thermos inside, or dropping the Thermos itself was to shake it and listen for the sound of broken class scritching around inside.

For those first two and a half years of school, I alternated between bologna and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and that largely continued until we moved to town in the middle of my third grade year.

But in town, we had at least three choices for lunch during the school year. We could continue taking our lunch from home, although colorful steel lunchboxes were out in terms of fashion and brown lunch bags were in. My mother, a great saver, insisted that I bring the bags home to be reused.

The cafeteria ladies at Oswego High School fed every kid in town who wanted a hot lunch. In fact, it’s where I ate every hot lunch during my school years from the second half of my third grade year until I graduated from high school. After all these years, I only recognize two of them, Mrs. Fiscus on the far left (mother of my classmate Terry Fiscus) and Bernice Bower on the far right (an old, old family friend).

The second choice was to get a hot meal at the cafeteria. Our small town had one cafeteria in the high school basement, several blocks east of our elementary building. That meant that when the bell rang for lunch, anyone wanting a hot meal had to run the blocks up Polk Street to the high school, rush down the basement, and stand in the queue while waiting to go through the lunch line. We quickly learned which foods it was worth all the trouble to run the blocks there and back. For me, that included their toasted cheese sandwiches, which were cheese sandwiches that had been wrapped in tinfoil and baked instead of being fried on a griddle. I have tried—and failed—as an adult to recreate those things with their crunchy outside and tender, gooey interior with no luck at all.

Rob Chada (right) and Mike Ode raise the flag at the old Red Brick School in the spring of 1957. For lunch, we either ate in, walked to the high school cafeteria several blocks away, or went home. (Little White School Museum collection)

I’ve always thought that it was remarkable that school authorities allowed all of us elementary students to take off and go all that way for lunch. And as an adult, I’ve also thought it was remarkable that we all came back again. But in those days, if we misbehaved on the way to the cafeteria someone would be bound to call our parents at home to let them know. In those days, the whole village was interested in raising children, whether the children liked it or not.

My third option in town was to be invited to my grandmother’s for lunch. She made the best pancakes in the world, and it was only a couple blocks to my grandparents’ house, just a couple minutes on my bike. I’ve never been able to figure out why Grandma’s pancakes were so much better than my mother’s ever were. The best I’ve had since are at the Bob Evans restaurants.

After all these years, Oscar Mayer is still my favorite bologna.

Throughout junior high and high school, I still had the occasional bologna sandwich in my school lunch, although they were much more common as lunches at home, especially during the summer when those bologna, lettuce, and Miracle Whip sandwiches were a lunch staple at our kitchen table.

After my wife and I married, I was pleased to find out that she liked bologna sandwich as much—if not more—than I do. We imparted that love to our daughter, but our son never caught the bologna fever. And frankly, he’s never been able to figure out what the lure of the stuff is.

But it’s well into spring, and there are warm sunny days now. And after working out in the yard during these shelter-in-place days, our fancy turns to bologna, lettuce, and Miracle Whip (or do you call it salad dressing?) between two slices of fresh Butternut or Rainbo bread that not only satisfy our hunger but also bring back the memories of a couple family generations.