Friday, January 30, 2009

Down On The Farm

The 2 pics above are of the old hand water pump we had in the back yard out at the farm. The well was hand dug, and was the only source of water for the house when it was first built. Eventually a pumphouse was built (pumping water from that same well) and we got running water in the house. The old pump still got a lot of use, though ... mostly for us kids and hired hands to wash up (hands and feet) before going into the house. Mama din't cotton to people trackin' dirt and mud into her house, no! That's the SW corner of the house (Mom & Dad's bedroom) in the bottom pic ... and if you look closely at the top pic, you can see the corner of the brooder house in the upper right ... and an old piece of horse-drawn farm machinery sitting beside it in the weeds ~ I think it was called a 4-row lister.

These are a couple of old cream cans sittin' in the shady weeds ~ we had hundreds of these old cream cans when the farm was a working dairy ... milked 70-80 head of cattle twice a day ... that's a lot of milk. At one time, we were the 3rd largest dairy in the state of Kansas ... one of the first dairys in the country to use the new electronic milking machines (Surge) ~ I can remember making the switch from hand-milking to mechanical milking machines was a big, big deal ... newfangled technology, dat.

1 comment:

Joy Tilton said...

This is very interesting. Glad you added the Linkwithin, isn't it great! My family also have a old homeplace with many memories. Mom's in nursing care now so it sits empty, very hard when I go check on it to see it that way.
joy c.