Unbounded Love and Service on a Minnesota Farm
Few Know the Extent of Joseph A. Parent’s Gifts to His Family
A tribute by his son, Vernon F. Parent
Memories...
Hot summers, cold winters, little time taken off for
vacations. Six days a week, he farmed in the worn pale blue cotton shirt
and stripped bib overalls. At first dad plowed with 3 pair of horses, but was
quick to adapt to the mechanical age, and purchased a model “M” Farmall tractor, which had large triangular lugs mounted on
the steel rimmed rear wheel, and close set dual metal flanged rimed small front
wheels. Hand cranking the tractor with its cranky magneto, and stiff motor oil,
limited it’s availability in cold weather. Caring for his fields and animals,
which when I was growing up included, 3 horses, 3 milking cows, and some
heifers, three sows with litters of pigs a boar, a 4 dozen chickens, a Shetland
pony, two dogs.
The
farm had to be self sufficient in feed and seed. That meant dad had to raise,
wheat, oats, hay, and barley for the family flour and animal feed. Wheat and
Potatoes were the cash crops, which enabled him to buy gas for the tractor, and
other farm machinery and provide for the families needs. The vegetable garden
provided peas, beans, and beets which were canned in two quart bottles, while
carrots, cabbage, turnips, rutabagas and parsnips were stored in the root
cellar. Corn was parboiled and then cut off the cob, dried and stored in cloth
sacks hung up where mice could not eat it. Cabbage was also made into sauerkraut
in large crock jars, while cucumbers and beets were pickled in mason jars.
Enough
pigs were slaughtered in the fall to provide bacon and hams for the coming
winter-spring and were cured and stored in the smoke house. Dad built the
smokehouse a short distance from the house in the trees surrounding our house.
He chopped the hardwood from his wood lot, to maintain the smokehouse smoke
generating fire smoldered for weeks in a 4' deep pit in the 6' by 6' structure
which was made fairly air tight with only a small chimney. The pork bellies and
the front and rear shoulder hams were soaked in wooden barrels of a salt and
sugar brine solution for a while before the smoking process started. The excess
salt had to be rinsed out of the meat before it was cooked and eaten. Later
they had a Morton tender cure product with a sodium-nitrate version of salt
that we injected into the veins and arteries so the brine solution could more
quickly and evenly penetrate the meat and used less concentrated, this added a
sugar cured smoke flavor, and we did not have to rinse out as much of the extra
salt with that product.
Our
family had to be self sufficient in the winter, when we could be potentially
isolated for weeks at a time. In the fall, dad stored 600 pounds of flour, and
200 pounds of sugar. We purchased apples, peaches and pears for canning in 2
quart mason jars. We children separated the milk in a Devilabliss
hand cranked separator, Today people drink the skimmed milk, but then we used
it with table scraps to feed the pigs. The cream was churned into butter in a
barrel churn by we children, then Mother would ladle the butter out into 1 lb
wooden molds, which were then lifted up and the butter wrapped in wax paper.
The butter was sold to the local market. Mother made one of our favorite cakes
using cream as the shortening. She continued that practice in Utah
by skimming off some the cream from each long necked glass bottle of milk (this
was before homogenization).
Dad
spent his winters taking care of the live stock, cutting wood for the fire and
hauling ice up from the river to fill the 30' by 50' ice house. This building
was built into the hill with a cellar so that about 3 feet of sawdust was
beneath and on all sides of the ice, and some in between the 3' layers so the
blocks would not melt together,( although they often did). Dad would saw the
chunks of ice out of the Red River
adjacent to our farm, and then use the horses with block & tackles, and
large ice pikes to hoist the heavy blocks up on the sleigh. He did amazing
things with little help, using leverage and ingenuity. Filling up the ice house
would take several weeks and was very weather dependant. In the spring, dad
would have to shovel off the sawdust to take out one of the 2' x 3' x 4' blocks
of ice. He would then break it into pieces small enough to fit in the ice box
in the house and the milk cooler that also housed the milk separator, and our
10 gallon cans of milk.
Alphonse
Parent, my grandfather, settled on the Red
River point in about 1890 when the area was
covered with trees. He worked out on the North
Dakota prairie during the summer and then brought
grandmother and her 4 children from Québec. They settled on the tree covered
wood lot (that dad eventually bought from Grandfather Parent) for their
homestead. So each winter dad would cut more trees. He would notch the tree
with his ax and then saw it off about 18" from the ground, if the snow was
not too deep. He would then trim off the branches and use the horses to snake
the logs to where he had his saw set up. He had a one-lung single cylinder gas
engine, which had flywheels on each side and controlled its speed by a governor
opening up a valve causing missed combustion cycles when the load was removed.
He hooked this to his hinged 4 foot diameter (buck) saw which he used to cut up
the logs into firebox lengths. He had a set of wedges (which I still have and
are badly misshapen from continuous pounding) that he used to split the blocks
into useable sized chunks of wood. If the wood wasn’t too large in diameter,
dad had a knack of using his ax in a twisting motion that would split it
without sticking the ax in the block. (I tried to learn this but was never
fully successful). Dad also used the power takeoff from his tractor to perform
this wood sawing task. We children had the task of stacking the wood in long 8
foot high rows. Wood splinters were stored inside a shed to be used as kindling
to start the fire. As the tree lot become more thinned and we got the
convection flow air furnace for our “new house” coal became more important for
heating purposes. The coal was anthracite (“hard coal”) from Pennsylvania
and burned more intensely than the Utah bituminous coal (“soft
coal”) we used in Vernal.
Our
kitchen stove had a water jacket that dad installed on one side of the fire box
which was attached to a 20 gallon water tank and the hot water tap at the
kitchen sink. Natural heat convection would warm the tank during the all day
long cooking. On the other side of the kitchen stove had a warm water reservoir
which was warmed by the fire gases that circulated around the oven. The stove
pipe went up through the warming oven, which could be used to keep food warm,
or help the bread rise on a cold day. We had a pressure hand pump in the
basement to lift the water from the outside cistern up to a tank in the attic
which provided enough pressure to have hot and cold running water at the
kitchen sink.
One
of our childhood tasks was to go into the basement and pump the handle about
200 times for the day’s water supply. Our house did not have a bathroom as
such, but we had hand basins to wash our face and hands. The chamber pots took
care of our personal needs during the winter nights, while the outhouse was a
fast trip during the daylight, and good spot to read the Montgomery Ward’s
catalog in the warmer seasons. The hired hands lived in the old woodcutters
cabins, but ate their meals with us.
Dad
moved a large house from across the river in about 1934 and added onto the
upstairs and a basement, so we had a large living room, kitchen, and 5 bedrooms
plus the attic and full basement with a central hot air coal furnace. He
constructed a large hexagonal cistern adjacent to the new house with a hand
pressure pump in the basement to provide water for the house. Dad retained the
old Parent family house to the West and its circular cistern water supply for
use during the harvest seasons when we would have work crews harvesting grain
and potatoes. Mother used the old kitchen to do much of the harvest cooking to
keep the cooking heat and serving away from the main house During canning
season mother would can the fruit and vegetables on both kitchen stoves, and
have water boiling in 2 large 10 galleon oblong copper boilers on both stoves.
(Recently I have seen ads for these copper boilers made in India,
for use as wood holders at ones fireplace. I was almost tempted to buy one for
nostalgia sake, but my wife Elese thought it
impractical).
We
had a water well down by the collie a quarter mile to
the North of the house, and we children (Joseph, Elaine, and I) would hike to
the well house. We would push the vertical pressure pump handle back and forth
about 200 times to get water for the livestock and our family use, if the
cistern-stored water where dad hauled from town gave out. This water well was
not so deep as not to be affected by surface water, and river flooding could
inundate this low lying well, so dad did not trust its quality and preferred
the city treated water.
Our
house was insulated with sawdust in between the wall studs, and ceiling joist,
which is not too efficient and the bedrooms were generally cold in the winter
and hot in the summer. We could easily have ½" build up of ice permanently
on the inside of the glass window panes during the winter. We carried bricks
warmed in the oven and wrapped in towels or newspapers, and put them under the
blankets at the lower end, of the bed to help warm up the bed until we went to
sleep. Dad would have the family read from the Book of Mormon nightly and gave us his understanding of how the
scriptures applied to us in our day. He brought the Book of Mormon alive in our lives by relating incidents in his
family heritage of how on at least two occasions his direct ancestors in Canada
had been miraculously saved by mysterious strangers that Dad recognized as one
of the 3 Nephites. He had the impression that his
posterity had a great work to do in God’s Kingdom, and stressed to us the need
to live virtuous lives and remain steadfast against temptation. He would relate
stories of his youth on the farm and the hardships which his family had endured
to provide an honorable heritage and make our home a pleasant place to live.
I
have been impressed looking back in my mature years by his insight and wisdom
of the scriptures, and practical every day matters. Dad also was the first one
up in the morning. He had the kitchen fire roaring and the kitchen warmed
before mother and we children aroused. On bad winter days he would load up the
oven with rocks and bricks to have them hot so he could put them in the hay
under the blankets to help keep us warm in the box sleigh as he drove us to
school. We rode covered in quilts, but dad put on his seal skin cap and lambs
skin mittens with 12 inch cuffs, and drove the team to school. We had peanut
butter and jelly or honey on home made bread sandwiches. We occasionally ate
canned salmon, pork roast or chicken sandwiches. We often had hot coco in our
thermos bottles. Dad would also pick us up from school in the winter if the
weather was threatening as the school was 1-½ miles from home and in a
white-out storm one could freeze to death within 100 feet of the house and
never find it.
He
loved his family so much that the long days of toil in the frigid winter storms
and the steaming summer heat did not deter him. This entailed driving himself
relentlessly on tractor or team from dawn to dusk, not shirking, knowing he was
performing it for his family as he lead them on the path to Eternal
progression. He heated up his coal-fired blacksmithing forge when repairs were
needed, but he tried to plan ahead and have his equipment operational by early
spring. The tractor and farm machinery had to all be ready for the new season.
He constructed his large semi-buried potato cellar out of native timbers. It
held 13 carloads of potatoes, and was so well built that the loaded trucks from
the harvest field drove up onto the top and dumped the potatoes down through
several opening the length of the structure. The potatoes were guided in burlap
tubes down to the desired area in a gentle manner so they would not be injured.
When it appeared the best price could be attained, the side doors were opened
and the potatoes hand sorted and sacked ready for shipment. Often to obtain the
best price some of the potatoes were held until late spring. This meant the
sorting out and loading carloads of potatoes had been scheduled while the
spring planting was building in intensity. Cleaning out the rotten potatoes,
and cutting up, fungicide dipping, and planting the seed potatoes for the new
season meant long stressful days.
The
selling of last year’s crop must be delivered when the price was the highest.
The short growing season in Minnesota mandated
that when the weather broke you had to be ready to plant or harvest. Only a few
missed planting days could spell the difference between obtaining a crop or
losing it to the heat and rains of summer. The farm soil although of a rich
alluvial nature was extremely sticky when wet, and thus un-farmable until it
dried out. Spreading of manure had to be sandwiched into the schedule to obtain
the soil conditions needed for a successful crop. When dad took over the family
farm it had been farmed intensely for 26 years without much concern about
depleting the soil, so it had lost much of its original rich loam clay
nutrients. Dad read all he could about restoring the soil from the national
agricultural agency publications and put into practice modern soil restoration
practices. Since all the farming was and is dependent on the local rains,
haying required careful planning and lots of manual labor to cut and load the
winnowed hay into the wagon and then up into the hayloft in the top of the
barn.
Fertilizing
(the natural farm animal type), plowing, planting, cultivating, weeding,
haying, from spring until harvesting in the fall...always working from dawn to
dusk. Survival demanded careful prayerful planning, ridged execution, and then,
work, work, work, coupled with Divine providence to have a successful year.
Sundays
were special days on the farm. After the morning chores were done, dad put on
his blue suit and hat; mother fixed up her hair and usually wore a reserved
dress, while Elaine,
Virginia
and Marilyn wore bright colorful dresses. Joseph and I wore corduroy pants with
long-sleeved white cotton shirts. Most of these clothes had to be washed,
starched, and ironed Saturday before we were ready for Sunday. During extreme
bad weather we rode into town in a horse drawn sleight on the river, since the
roads were impassable. Usually we children all crowded into the Oldsmobile for
the 4 mile drive to church in Grand
Forks, North
Dakota. Dad had a standing offer of Sunday dinner
for the LDS missionaries. There were usually 2 pair of elders, and occasionally
a pair of lady missionaries. These were royal feasts, and our best meal of the
week. The elders would stuff themselves, gaining several pounds during the meal
according to our bathroom scales, and expect lean meals the rest of the week,
as some traveled without purse or script. The depression era and the
unpopularity of the “Mormon” Church was reflected in their not get many
invitations to eat out.
Dad
was the superintendent of the Sunday school, and in charge of the morning
service, which was held in a rented public library. Mother played the piano for
the opening exercises. We had a couple classes for the children a half a flight
of stairs down in the basement level, while the adult class was held a half of
flight of stairs up on the main floor, where the opening exercises were held.
Sacrament meeting was held in the evening and was conducted by the full time
missionaries, one of which was usually the branch president. Mother often led
the music or played the piano for this service also. Most of the members were
struggling to keep food on the table, however the elderly Benson husband and
wife couple were of very comfortable means (and gave gifts to my sister
Marilyn, who they adored having no children of their own). Some of the members
taught at the University
of North Dakota
and had a steady government-based income.
Because we had the available bedrooms, we
often had visiting church leaders stay at our roomy home. The Elders brought
Elder Joseph F. Smith unannounced to stay with us for an evening. Mother
apologized for not being better prepared with a meal, but he told her all he
wanted was a bowl of home made bread and milk, which he enjoyed greatly. Melvin
J. Ballard visited and spoke to our little branch, as his daughter’s husband
taught at the University
of North Dakota
there in Grand Forks.
I mentioned potato farming above, which dad
introduced to the area in order to diversify the crops and earn a greater
return. In 1929 he invented an automatic potato harvester, seen here in a 1930
photo. Dad received a U.S.
government patent in 1932.
This was back in the days when farmers just
plowed up their potatoes, and then field hands walked along the row picking up
the potatoes, hand cleaned them and placed them in a rubber covered wire
basket. They then dumped the baskets into a burlap sack and stitched the sack
shut. The sacks were winnowed into rows wide enough for a truck to go between them
and field hands would fill the flatbed truck from both sides, until the truck
was loaded and then the potatoes were dumped into a potato cellar. As I recall
it, dad’s invention dug up the potatoes, shook out the dirt clods, and them
presented them to a bagger who directed the potatoes into a burlap sack all in
one pass through the field. The sacks were tied at the top and dropped off for
a truck to pick up later.
I believe that dad took an old “Oakland”
automobile motor and chassis and built up the frame of the potato digger with
parts from other farm machinery. He did not have acetylene torches or power
drills of any kind. He had to form the parts in a hand powered blacksmith
forge, and used a hand cranked floor mounted drill that used a ratchet
mechanism to press the drill bit into the steel. It took many wintry hours of
hard labor to build and perfect his automatic potato digger. Since the
harvester could do the work of several field hands, it was a real labor saver.
After dad patented his machine and the ideas
that made it unique, he had a number of potential buyers inspect his finished
machine as well as his patent. There were several offers that he felt were just
attempts to steal his invention. But alas, the depression had made farming
equipment not the most profitable, and so the industry just adapted his ideas
and he never received any money for his design or the patents he had obtained
from the U.S.
patent office.
When we moved to Utah all
the equipment was left on the farm including dad’s potato harvester. Aunt
Tillie and her family moved into our new house, and Uncle Leonard tried to farm
but his efforts, as most others he tried, were a failure. When Uncle Charlie
talked Grandmother Parent into foreclosing on dad for the $2,500 note she had
on the farm (which dad could have sold for much more), she then gave the farm
to Uncle Charlie. He sold off all the equipment, and sold our new 6-bedroom
farmhouse to a family across the Red River
in North Dakota
for about the amount of the note dad had on the farm. (Note: This house was
still lived in when Joseph Jr. last visited Grand
Forks.) Uncle Charlie then razed our old
farmhouse and all the farm buildings to eliminate the extra taxes they represented.
04
April 2004
Vernon
F. Parent
I
copied the following write up as it stimulated my thinking about dad, mother,
and the early of farm life activities we experienced:
“There was little other social life. Grandpa and Grandma were
quiet, peaceful, unemotional people who every day did what they had to do. He
was my grandpa – he had been for 35 years. It was hard to picture him in any
other role.
“The nurse apologized for having to ask me so soon to please
remove Grandpa's things from the room. It would not take long. There wasn't
much. Then I found it in the top drawer of his night stand. It looked like a
very old handmade valentine. What must have been red paper at one time was a
streaked faded pink. A piece of white paper had been glued to the center of the
heart. On it, penned in Grandma's handwriting, were these words:
TO LEE FROM HARRIET
With All My Love
February 14, 1895
Are you alive? Real? Or
are you the most beautiful dream that I have had in years? Are you an angel –
or a figment of my imagination? Someone I fabricated to fill the void? To soothe the pain? Where did you find the time to listen?
How could you understand? You made me laugh when my heart was crying. You took
me dancing when I couldn't take a step. You helped me set new goals when I was
dying. You showed me dew drops and I had diamonds. You brought me wildflower
and I had orchids. You sang to me and angelic choirs burst forth in song. You
held my hand and my whole being loved you. You gave me a ring and I belonged to
you. I belonged to you and I have experienced all.
“Tears streamed down my cheeks as I read the words. I pictured
the old couple I had always known. It's difficult to imagine your grandparents in
any role other than that. What I read was so very beautiful and sacred. Grandpa
had kept it all those years. Now it is framed on my dresser, a treasured part
of family history.”
by Elaine Reese
Reprinted by permission of Elaine Reese © 1996, from Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul
by Jack
Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jennifer Read Hawthorne and Marci Shimoff.
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