The Campbell Family Farm

I didn’t grow up on a farm, but my mother did. I grew up near the old farm and the last time I made it to Northern Michigan, the house was still there. Each time I do make it by, I slow down to get as good of a look as I can before the road turns. I imagine my grandparents, mom, aunt and uncle, and their pet donkey Herkamer all out and about doing their chores. Tending to the chickens, milking the cows, growing the gardens.

Grandma, Aunt Bev, Uncle Jim, my mom... and Herkamer.

Any time I ever complained about something as a child my mother would remind me that she didn’t have an indoor bathroom until she was thirteen. The indoor plumbing came when they left the farm. Shortly after that she got another brother. Wherever they went, a part of the farm was always with them, so in a way it is with me too. Even to this day when I have the gift of visiting with one of my distant Michigan relatives all the way out here in Missouri, the farm always comes up. If they grew up there or spent time there as children, it is still a part of them. Family land is like that.

I waited too long to write down everyone’s stories and I regret that. When my mom and grandma, Mary Lou Campbell and Sharon Mason, came to visit last fall, they shared the details of Life on the Farm.

The farmhouse was built in the 1920s by my great-grandparents.  My grandparents moved back in 1955.  The farmhouse itself was made from used lumber. The house was built out of wood from a razed apartment in Johannesburg, the town my great-grandfather worked in. To put this feat into perspective, that’s around 36 miles of travel between where the wood came from and where the farm was built. They reconstructed the apartment, leaving out the staircase that originally allowed tenants to get to the units as the units had become rooms.

While it didn’t have indoor plumbing, it did have electricity which was installed in the late 1940s. They carried water into the house from the well until a pump was installed in the kitchen. Before the electricity came, a couple of my grandfather’s older brothers cut ice from a nearby lake and stored it in sawdust in a cement block in town.

They had a woodstove in the living room and a wood range in the kitchen for cooking and canning. In the winter, everyone slept near the chimney to be closer to heat. Clothes were washed in a ringer washer and hung out to dry year-round, freeze drying on the line when it was cold. Much of the children's clothes were made by my grandmother.

The basement had a dirt floor and was used for food storage. They stored potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage and apples. Eggs were kept there as well by layering them in a barrel of salt. My grandfather cured pork in Morton salt then boiled it for a bit before eating it. Other meats such as fish, chicken and venison were canned. They canned everything, including berries, because at the time that was the only way to preserve them. Being before the plastic-apocalypse, foods like mayonnaise and tomato juice were sold in glass quart and pint jars. My grandmother sanitized the jars when they were emptied and reused them for canning. Fair warning if you do find a glass jar that fits canning lids and rings, they aren’t the most reliable glass for the canning process. You can however save plastic mayonnaise jar lids for storing dry goods or refrigerated foods in glass regular mouth sized jars.

The cows had to be milked twice a day, 6am and 6pm. They put the milk in five-gallon cans by the road for the milk man to pick up who then took it to the creamery for pasteurizing. They made their own milk products including cottage cheese and butter. My grandfather would drive the milk around in the truck for a while to start the curdling process. Grandma kept the milk warm on the back of the wood range until curds appeared then removed the curds, added salt and pepper- viola, cottage cheese.  In the summertime, they made ice cream with a hand crank.

Great grandpa had large horses for tilling and pulling logs in for firewood. He used a horse and tractor for pulp wood such as poplar that was sold for making paper.

They had a hundred chickens both for eggs and for eating. Grandpa would butcher ten chickens in the morning before he went to work. Grandma would wake up and go straight to processing them. Manure from the animals was used in the garden as fertilizer and compost. In all, they had chickens, dairy cows, pigs, ducks and that infamous pet donkey, Herkamer.

They also relied on hunting and gathering to some degree. They ate and preserved rabbit, venison, partridge and wild turkey as well as wild mushrooms, berries and fiddle heads (a type of fern).

Five generations here- Grandma and our grandson, Orion. My Grandmother has dedicated her entire adult life to her family. It is such a beautiful, beautiful thing to know Orion is the beneficiary of some of her love and knowledge. Orion refers to her as "His Mary Lou"

While we are nowhere near living as self-sufficiently as my grandparents did, it’s almost ironic that we have spent the past almost twenty years trying to get that way. We’re far from alone in this endeavor. It’s hard work, but it usually pays off. Once the infrastructure of fences, coops, rain barrels, garden boxes and clothes lines are in place, our food cost less AND we watched it grow. It’s healthier and more meaningful. It’s not about wanting to live in the past, it’s about wanting to live better in the present. And Mom, don’t worry, I have no intention of giving up my indoor bathrooms.

Fourteen Acre Wood

Audrey L Elder