Our future home would have quite the story to tell if it could speak. Before being moved 9 miles onto our family's property, I don't know the exact date, but classes were held it in her until sometime in the 1930s, after which, students began attending school in Atwood. There was a period where she would house another family residing in the building until my grandparents purchased it and moved it to the farm in the mid 1970s.
>> The little school house on the prairie.
One of the unique features of the rural areas of the country, prior to the 1950s, was the one room schoolhouse. Originally these schools were constructed of whatever material that was available in the area, meaning that on the prairie, most of the first schools were housed in sod structures. As lines of transportation and movement of material goods improved with the westward expansion of the railroad systems, stick framed schools dotted the prairie. A township was plotted to contain 36 640 acre sections, with sections 18 and 36 reserved for the use of the school. A section is nominally a one mile by one mile square, so roughly every 6 to 12 miles there should be a school house.
These school houses were little more than plank sided buildings, with no insulation in them and heated by a wood or coal stove, depending on the region they were built in. School teachers at the time were almost exclusively unmarried young women, whose job not only included teaching the three Rs, but also making sure that the fire was lit in the morning, that water was brought in from either the schools hand pump well or from a neighboring farm’s well and that the school house was clean and orderly before her charges arrived for the day.
Multiple rows of desks were arranged in the school house, with the youngest children sitting at the front of the assemblage and the oldest at the back, with the rows more or less corresponding with the grade that child was in. Children began in the first grade and had completed their education in the 8th grade. Often the teacher herself only had an 8th grade education. My grandmother was one of those young teachers, teaching her fellow neighbor’s children reading, writing and arithmetic until she wed my grandfather in 1955, after which she attended nursing school to become a nurse's aid.
Knowing the history of these schools impressed upon me how much history our future home has seen. Group after group of students tromping through the door, taking their seats and then waiting until it was their particular grades turn for their lesson. Students idly staring out the big, single panes of glass as the seasons turned from fall, then to winter and then to spring. Those walls have heard the scratch of chalk on a blackboard and also on the practice slates of the students, lessons repeated year after year, the Pledge of Allegiance being recited every morning. The smells as well! Wet leather during the rainy and snowy seasons, the smell of coal or wood smoke from the stove, that particular smell that those of us over 40 know of chalk dust (especially when it was our turn to take them outside and bang them together to clean them).
My grandmother lived in this house until her passing in 2019. She wouldn’t entertain the idea of moving away from there, even after a fall in 2016 left her bedridden for several months with a broken hip. She was adamant that she was going to stay in her home, and she did. My father, being the oldest, inherited the property at that time. My Dad was in his early 60s at this time, and wasn't particularly interested in keeping the place, as he has his own property to care for. My Dad offered the place to his brother, Jim, but Jim owns an irrigation company and is the primary caregiver for his wife, who has Huntington's Disease, so he wasn't interested in taking on the property either, but he suggested to my Dad that he should offer it to me, as I was one of the only grandkids who would appreciate it.
At first I wasn’t so sure about taking on such a project. I had so many of my own irons in the fire that I wasn’t sure I would be able to devote the time that the place needed. At the time I was the president of the local Ag Society, on the local Development Corporations board of directors, along with running a business, being a dad and a husband. Initially, I declined the offer of taking over the home place. My Dad understood and didn’t push the issue, he simply said “Okay”. As time went on and there were hints that my Dad and Uncle were thinking of selling the place and that a local dairy farmer was interested in tearing everything down and turning it into more pasture for his cattle reached me, the nostalgic part of me kicked into gear. I couldn’t let something that my Grandmother had worked so hard for, that had seen so much joy and sorrow, so many births and deaths, be bulldozed and turned into pasture. I saw my Dad one afternoon and told him that I had changed my mind, I did want the responsibility of taking care of the family homestead, that I didn’t want to see it sold off or to become another abandoned house out on the prairie.
The first summer under our care was a difficult one. There were the normal challenges of keeping the place mowed, keeping the invasive black locust trees from creeping into the yards, but that summer was also an extremely dry summer, drought hit much of the Great Plains that year.
Earlier in the year we had purchased 300 trees and shrubs through our extension office in Nebraska. They were trees and shrubs suited for our area on the plains, and the price for them was extremely affordable. For over 300 plants, we paid just a touch over $150. At the same time, the Arbor Day Foundation was offering bare root fruit trees for sale. Jennifer makes an amazing apple pie (the kind that our grandmothers and great grandmothers would approve of) using golden delicious apples. I ordered four bare root golden delicious apple trees, and Jennifer found a deal on a couple of Bartlett pear trees. These would be the start of our orchard, or so we thought.
We knew that keeping them watered would be a challenge, but with some internet research, we figured out a way to use drip irrigation along with a timer to provide the most important thing that young trees need, water. Our plan was to turn a section of empty space into a tree nursery. We would till up a roughly 50 by 100 plot of grass, plant our extension trees, lay drip irrigation pipe down each row and cover the entire area in mulch. The look on the Menard’s (our regional big box hardware store) face was priceless as I told her I wanted to purchase an entire pallet of mulch, something like 130 or 140 bags.
For the drip system, we ordered what we needed from dripdepot.com. The customer service representative that I chatted with was extremely knowledgeable about setting up a system that would provide just the right amount of daily watering for our young trees. Several hundred feet of drip tape, timers, filters and connectors arrived through the magic of the internet that week, along with links to videos on how to connect the components and what to expect with drip irrigation systems.
Our tree orders had arrived, along with our irrigation system and we had made the trip to the next major town to pick up our mulch order. Everything was loaded in the truck or on the trailer on a Friday evening. We awoke early in the morning on Saturday, to get on the road before 5:00am to make the three and half hour trek to the homeplace, wanting to arrive before the day became too hot and to get as much work in during the day as we could. This was in late May..
Once we arrived, the boys hopped on mowers and made quick work of mowing all of the yard areas down, while Jennifer and I roped out the area that would be the nursery and also where the first row of fruit trees would be planted to start our nursery. Jennifer, Brennan and myself each took turns with the tiller, breaking up the sod that had been grass for years, revealing an extremely soft and loamy soil hiding under the prairie grass. Over the course of several hours we planted each one of those saplings, creating a map that showed which variety was planted where and then laid out drip tape along each row, connecting them to a main line that would feed water to the trees for a preset amount of time each day. And then the real back breaking work started, unloading bag after bag of mulch, opening and then spreading it in the nursery, to help prevent any unwanted weeds from growing and helping to trap in the moisture from the drip system to nourish those seedlings, along with the fruit trees that were planted in a row.
We turned on the water, set the timer and then checked to ensure that all of it worked as designed. We were absolutely beat from the drive down and the hard days work. Packing up our tools and loading what remained in the truck, we made the return journey and pulled into our driveway well after midnight that night. All of us can attest to the powerful sleeping aid that a hard day’s work is!
Life had gotten busy again and we were unable to make a return visit for a couple of weeks. We had gone to Harlan County Reservoir to celebrate Brennan’s birthday, then with plans to haul our camper the 2 hours west to the homestead and park it there, to use it as our base of operations while we continued to work on the place. We had record setting heat that weekend, with the ambient air temp being well above 100 and it must have been too much for one of the camper tires. We blew a tire just east of Norton, Kansas. This was actually a slight blessing, as unbeknownst to us, the lug nuts and the nuts holding the spare tire were different sizes! After unhooking the camper, driving into Norton, buying the correct size socket, then driving back, changing the tire, what should have been at most a 2 hour trip had morphed into a 3 and ½ hour trip!
We finally pulled into the homestead around late afternoon, and I could tell almost immediately that something was wrong. The bare root trees had no leaves on them and the potted ones' leaves were curled up. An inspection of the tree nursery led us to discover that almost all of the seedlings were dry as a bone. I couldn’t understand what happened, what had gone wrong. I attempted to test the timer for the drip irrigation system and found that there was no water coming from the hydrant we had connected it to. I also found that the circuit breaker for the well had tripped. We were devastated. All of the hard work we had put into these trees had been wasted.
The area was already well into a drought by middle of June, having received very little moisture over the winter. I thought perhaps that the water level had dropped low enough due to the extreme amount of irrigating the farmers were having to do, that our well pump was no longer submerged. When I attempted to turn the circuit breaker back on, it tripped immediately. Something was very wrong. Brennan and I retrieved the pitless adapter tool (a long bar that is threaded on one end, that allows you to thread it into the top of the well pump supply pipe) and trudged to the top of a hill, where the well head had been drilled a few years before. We removed the well cap, threaded the pitless adapter tool in and pulled the 60 feet of pipe out of the well casement. As we reached the end, we found our problem. The connector that joined the submersible pump to the pipe that feeds water out of the well and to the homestead, had broken. The pump, being free from the pipe, could build no pressure in the lines, which would keep the pressure switch from turning it off, so the well pump ran and ran and ran, until eventually, it burned out.
We had no water.
The ride home that evening was an extremely somber affair.
Continued next week.