Family Farm

Stearns' Farm
looking southwest
circa 1956

The Bureau of Reclamation took aerial photographs of area farmsteads at various times, and farmers were given the option of purchasing prints. The black and white photo above shows the family farm in its early days - about twelve years after my parents purchased it.

In the late 30s and early 40s, the Wind River valley was the site of proposed irrigation projects, and my dad and his brother, who grew up on a dryland farm near Provo, South Dakota were eager to become a part of that venture. (One of the irrigation canals can be seen in the lower right corner of the photo.)

My parents had been married about 10 years when they moved from South Dakota in the early 40s. The irrigation project was the driving force behind their coming to Wyoming with four small children. My uncle Ted had moved to Wyoming earlier, and he encouraged his younger brother to make the move. My parents lived with my uncle until they could purchased a farm of their own - 150 acres of irrigated ground.

They built a small house on their new farm (photo of the house is on this post) and planted a windbreak of poplar, Chinese elm, Russian olive, apple, plum, currant, and caragana. By 1956, as shown in the photo, the trees and the farm were doing well.

By 1956, our family included six children: three boys and three girls. My mother always planted a large garden to feed the family during the year. The field with the vertical lines near the center of the photo is the garden. It was a large plot, and it produced an abundance of produce. 

source

In order to feed the family through the winter, my mother canned a lot in the 50s and 60s. She grew corn, pumpkins, winter and summer squash, beets, carrots, turnips, tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, kohlrabi, green beans, lettuce, radishes, zucchini, and potatoes. Hoes and a hand-powered cultivator like the one shown above were used to keep the weeds under control.

Mom frequently purchased bushel baskets (the real, wooden ones with slat lids) of peaches and pears, which she also canned. The pressurized canner and Mason jars got a good workout every fall.

The canned goods, winter squash, potatoes, apples, etc. were stored in an under ground root cellar. 

Stearns' Farm
looking southwest
circa 1980s

Thirty years later, the farmstead photo shows many improvements. The blue garage was a machine shed, built in the late 70s. The large white building surrounded by corrals is the six-stanchion dairy barn that my father, brother, and brother-in-law built in the early 1960s.

The trees surrounding the house are mature in this photo. In the Fall, it was my job to get the leaves off of the lawn. Many of the leaves were as large as dinner plates. Some years, the leaves were loaded into a manure spreader and spread in the fields; other years, they were raked into the ditch by the house and burned. When I left home, my mother picked the leaves up with the riding lawn mower.

Dairy barn and corrals
looking west

My nephew, Dwight took this photo of the farm one summer while flying over the farm. This angle shows the dairy barn and the Wind River mountains in the distance. When I was growing up, the mountains had snow on them year round; now, the peaks are bare in the summer.

The farm was sold after my brother died in 1996: it had been farmed by my family for over fifty years.