Childhood Anecdotes and Memories of Farm Life - University of Minnesota Morris

For many of the narrators, growing up in the 1950s and '60s in rural Minnesota included helping on the family farm with chores or in the home. Narrators recounted playing with their siblings on their property and other household responsibilities.

Linda Krogsrud

Linda: "I grew up on a farm nine miles northeast of Ortonville, surrounded by lakes. Well, for the first two years of my life, we lived on Highway 75, in a little farm place there. And then in 1949, my family moved over to the place where I actually grew up and graduated from high school, all of that type thing. It was on the shores of Swanson Slough at that time, and across the road from us is Munnwyler Lake, and now it's called Thielke Lake. That was my dad was Elmer Thielke. And my mother was Lillian. I had seven brothers and sisters. They range in age, you know, they were 24 years between the oldest and the youngest." Pictured is the Thielke Farm in Ortonville, 1956.

Joe Riley

Joe: "Well, everybody's job was to—part of taking care of the livestock. If I remember right, before we went to school in the morning, we did chores, we helped feed the pigs, we helped with milking the cows, and we fed pigs, we gathered the eggs from the hen house at least a couple times a day, we had horses that we helped take care of. It was mostly feeding animals and cleaning the barn, cleaning the chicken house. Saturday was a big day, we cleaned—it seemed like we pitched manure mostly on Saturday, cleaned all the pens and the hog houses and the chicken coop, we had just about every Saturday that's what we were doing, especially in the wintertime."

LeAnn Dean

LeAnn: "Growing up on a farm, it's like a family operation. And so early on you helped with whatever you could. I was more of an outside girl following my older brother and dad around. I had an older brother, 10 years older, and a sister, six years older. My sister took more responsibilities inside with household chores. And I don't like to admit that, but maybe being the baby of the family, they just let me do whatever I wanted, to go wherever I wanted. I don't remember any disciplinary action at all. I was never spanked. It was a very gentle kind of growing up experience. It just was instilled with the concept that you never disappointed your folks. You never embarrass them or even just at home, you didn't want to do anything that would hurt them."

Vern Brown

Vern: "So we—as the kids, my little brothers and sisters got—or my brothers at least got older, we spent time doing things that nowadays are cowboys and Indians, the snake end of things, and spent a lot of time playing on the grove and that kind of thing, along with the farm work that we did."

Vern: "Well, as a teenager, I—of course, farm life was—we were a general—my parents had a general farm, so we had pigs, chickens, and milk cows and all of that type of thing, so that's one of them, I guess. There was never a shortage of things that needed to be done, much less things you wanted to do."

Annegine Vipond

Annegine: "So, yeah, you were just more responsible for things and took care of everybody. And we lived that many miles out, so really, we were our own little identity for a long time because we didn't go to town very much. I mean, we had our own gardening and our milkman came to our door so we didn't have to go out, which had your butter and cream and all that good stuff, and we—"
Jodi: "What was the day like when you would get up in the morning?"
Annegine: "Well, if it was a farming season, when they were out in the field, we did a lot of making lunches. So we just cleaned up, did some stuff and had breakfast. We'd always bring lunch out into the guys in the field, which could be just a sandwich, and peanut butter sandwiches were big in our family, you brought that out about 10:00. And then noon, they came in for lunch, you didn't pack that lunch, they ran in. And then about 3:00, you ran out something else for—or between 3:00 and 5:00 anyway, another little peanut butter sandwich. And it was crazy, we always—the coffee came in—you'd put it in a glass jar with a cover on or some wanted chocolate milk so we did milk with a cover and that's how you carried them out there. And most of the time you ran that out either walking into the field or riding your bike out there. And then our evening meal was when the guys were all done and that was your meat, potatoes, vegetable, and then we always had a snack before we went to bed."

Jodi: "What did your chores consist of when you had chores after work or school?"

Annegine: "Feed the chicken, so you had your ground feed, and pick the eggs, of course, water them. And then for the cattle, which is mainly throwing out the hay and drying down the beds and stuff like that. Hogs, I guess I wasn't so involved with, they just slop their own things."

Jodi: "Did—how young do you think you were when you started dealing with the eggs, like, packing them?"

Annegine: "I'd say even by the age of seven and eight. We were young. I mean, they carry them in and it was our job to make sure they were cleaned and not blemished and drying them off, sit on a little stool and sit there and dry away."

Jodi: "And the income from this, this went to family or were you able to keep it?"

Annegine: "To the family. We never—I know it was judged as to—it must have went through a quality test because they would come back and say this was that grade or if there was problems, it was all—or deducted if something was on there. But no, that all went to my dad and mom."

Jodi: "As far as other farm chores, were things divided as far as—did you do field work or inside work, or was it a blend?"

Annegine: "No. I guess as a girl I was pretty much more inside, that's probably why I was doing more just chicken stuff chores. And then I was always helping with the baking and the cooking and the cleaning the house and the laundry. And back then, you ironed everything, so that part. And then the boys were pretty much outside most of the time."

Jodi: "Did that change as you got older? Did you drive truck? Did you drive tractor?"

Annegine: "Yeah. When I was—yeah. When I got to be old enough, I was in everything, from the trucks to the combine to the tractors and plowing and anything else they could help me do, I was involved in."

Carol Swenson

Carol: "And we lived down in the basement at first, like was done a lot in the '50s, and eventually we moved out of the basement and did summers upstairs, in the bedrooms upstairs that were just framed in, and we hung bedspreads between the bedrooms and peeked at each other, of course. But it was really fun because the soffit area of the house wasn't finished and so we could play in the areas that eventually became walled off, and had a lot of fun just going up and down every—in the morning we would go down and come up. And when we first moved in, I shared, it was the freezer room we called it, and my brothers had bunk beds and I had an old iron bed, and we just had a heater, space heater in the kitchen area where we got dressed in the morning. So we'd race to see who got the space first to get dressed where it was someplace warm, and had our baths in the kitchen sink. And my parents' bedroom was the same room that we had our living room in and watched TV, and so that was the experience. And I had then two younger brothers, one who was four years younger than I, and another who was nine years younger than I."

Carol: "Well, all the kids had chores that we were responsible for. My dad was a strong believer in gender separation in terms of work. The boys and men worked out in the fields mostly, and my mother and I did the housework and the usual things of butchering chickens and cleaning chickens and vegetables. I was in charge of picking eggs and bringing them into the house. We sold eggs, and that was one of the worst things I hated was getting in to the—having to go into the chicken house and get underneath some of the clucks that didn't want to have their eggs picked and getting—they would peck at me and that kind of thing."

Dawn Benson

Dawn: “I'd play houses in the woods, and there were chickens and pigs and calves and things like that, cats, dog. So maybe when you think about it, maybe it was idyllic, but it was just what I knew.”