Archive for July 2009
Farm as History
Many years later, I became curious about whether or not the city had any interest in the history of the land where the farm was located. I paid a visit to the Edina Historical Society. A woman greeted me warmly, listened with interest to my description of having lived on the property, and disappeared to see if she had any related records on the subject. She returned, wearing white cotton gloves and holding a single manila folder. In it was one simple sheet of paper. I don’t even remember what it was regarding, other than it wasn’t the least bit interesting. Entirely underwhelming experience.
However, she held out hope for me, suggesting I visit the Parks and Recreation Department at the city offices. Since the majority of our property went on to become a substantial city park and golf course, her suggestion made sense. Upon my arrival there, a clerk produced a box that was over-stuffed with documents relating to the old Hays farm property! She even invited me to take it home to review and return at my convenience. It was a Jackpot!
One of the documents I most appreciated was the handwritten original copy of a letter the city manager had written to the Mayor and city council detailing his meeting with my grandfather in negotiation over the sale of the land. He referred to Mr. Hays as being a shrewd businessman.
Back during that time period, the local newspaper published a brief article detailing the city’s proposed “Hays Park”. I know the city was trying to appeal to him to donate the land at one point. In the city manager’s letter is a detail of the offer indicating how much the land would likely be worth to developers and the price my grandfather was willing to accept from the city. The manager recommended the city meet the price.
There were vivid descriptions of the property’s rolling forested hills, meandering creek, and abundant wildlife. Initially it was made available to Girl Scout troops for camping excursions. Eventually there were some primitive facilities added. In the long run it was developed primarily as a golf course but it also included an indoor sheet of ice for hockey and figure skating (later, expanded to multiple rinks) and beside that a soccer field and a circle of three full size baseball fields with a building in the center hub. Dad used to point out that the fields were down near where the pigpens and chicken coop were at one time located. That was so far before my arrival, I marvel at the significance of the change.
In front of the fireplace and mantel
Fireplace of that Italian stone
Our grandparents, Forrest and Helen Hays in the dining room
Christmas in the living room. You can see a hand-hewn beam in the ceiling
Burning Barns
We received advance notice about the scheduled destruction of our barns and Mom drove us there to see it and take some pictures. For some reason, Dad wasn’t available and so Mom had to do the picture taking. Photography was his domain and she felt a lot of pressure about it, I could tell. Most of the pictures she took did come out a bit over-exposed and she mentions her regret every time she sees the images.
It was really strange to be stopped on the shoulder of this freeway, where no stopping was allowed. We couldn’t get out of the car, but we sat on the opened windows of the passenger side and looked over the top. I saw a man go in one of the bottom doors with a can. Then he appeared at the big opening of the upper floor. He threw the can out and he jumped. Soon there were billows of flame and clouds of dark smoke. Ours wasn’t the only car on the shoulder any more as others stopped to take in the spectacle.
I wish I had been old enough to fully realize the emotion of the moment. I knew it was something dramatic, but the full depth of it was beyond me. It was the biggest fire I had ever witnessed, so that was sure something, yet I knew it was more than that and it was beyond my capacity to comprehend the full extent.
They burned the two large barns, one right after the other. That left just the house. For some reason, they didn’t burn that down. Whatever was salvageable was removed. Windows were taken out. The huge hand-hewn beams in the living room ceiling were saved and claimed by a neighbor who had asked for them. My older brother has some of the ornate hardware from light fixtures and door handles and has incorporated it into his current home. I think he has the chandelier too.
They cleared out almost every last tree. That may have been the most monumental task of all. There were plenty, and the majority, mature. We stopped by to capture some shots of that phase. With the house nothing but a shell, they collapsed it and buried it. The land was graded so that the rolling hill terrain became a flat plain, ideal for an industrial park – a series of one or two-story brick and concrete, flat-roofed buildings. One of them has the address number 7601 on it, the same as our old farmhouse: 7601 Washington Avenue.
Washington Avenue is where the Minnesota Vikings NFL football team home office and workout facility is now located, just down the road from our old spot. For 18 years I worked for a company located just around the corner from where our old farmhouse stood. And across the freeway from the old place, next to the golf course and park, Cyndie’s childhood home, that her family had built and lived in for 35 years. I always found it interesting to have my work and my in-laws so near to the place where I lived as a kid. It has changed immensely on the surface, but it still remains at the same geographic coordinates.
I don’t have strong regrets about the loss of that farm, but I do miss it.
The back porch, before and after
The industrial park that replaced the house and barns
Back to Farm Stories
I uncovered some additional writing I did years ago, describing my memories of the years I was on the farm, Intervale Ranch, or ‘the Hays farm’ as it was referred to at the time. In reality, my years there are better described as ‘after the farm’, 1959 to 1968. Since these were written at different times, there may be some overlap of detail that I hope you will find acceptable.
During the time I was on the farm, most of the tractors and machinery were already gone. My dad had built a milking parlor. Gone. There were no more animals, except for the one, or briefly two, horses that we boarded for a neighbor. The chicken coop had been turned into a clubhouse, complete with curtains on the windows. There was a rope swing in the barn hayloft, and plenty of left over hay as I recall. Other barn space seemed to be filled with junk. More of my time was spent in the house than in the outbuildings; there, and the grounds around the house and barns, …climbing trees, playing ball, swinging, running, exploring.
Far beyond the innocence of my young perspective, there were deals being made. Before I was even born, the majority of acreage had been sold to the city of Edina and earmarked for parkland, an eventual golf course. A freeway had been built right behind two of the main barns, which cut off the house and closely associated buildings from the rest of the property that had been sold. The property I grew up on was a fraction of what was once Intervale Ranch.
It seemed like we just woke up one day and there was a line of earthmovers facing the house, parked side by side on a huge square of freshly leveled ground. It was kind of scary. They looked so menacing. My little brother and I went down to get a closer look. I’d never been so close I could touch a piece of machinery this size. We climbed on ‘em, because we could. It was a way to act defiant, even though it so wasn’t. We were as harmless as ants on these monsters, the coming task a foregone conclusion.
I don’t remember the duration of days we were still there while those machines waited. It felt like they were rushing us. I have no recollection of the move, except for the first night in the new house with just my younger brother and two oldest sisters and no furniture. There was a storm that night, fiercer than I had ever experienced. This house was much more prominently exposed than the farmhouse, which was protected by surrounding hills and many trees. That night one of the crank-out windows in the new house didn’t get closed and the wind caught it and pulled it off. That made an impression.
Just Curious
I’m curious. If we were to plan a Hays family reunion weekend of camping, and pick the date a year in advance, what are the odds that it would turn out to be forecast for cloudy and good chance of rain showers? Just askin’.
And another thing, …what is it about the tendency to come up with a word for a sentence that I am composing that–surprise!–I just used about two sentences before, yet I don’t have a clue I have done it until I read it back later? I guess it should be no surprise that a particular word would occur to me again shortly after it already did moments ago. The part that gets me is when I don’t notice at the time it happens.
I don’t know why I would wonder about it. It fits right in there with the times when I think of something I intend to tell Cyndie, get her attention, with an introductory statement, and then stare helplessly when I find I have no idea what I was going to say. Let’s not even count the number of times I walk into a room and discover that I have no memory of what I was headed in there to do.
I love how issues like this are so often related to aging, even though it has happened to me my entire life. In the end, it probably falls back on being related to the level of hydration or something. What!? The brain is sensitive!
And this just in… I know how to tune a guitar and focus an image, but I have no clue how to know when to harvest something from a garden. I can tell you when it is finally too late. I’m pretty uninformed about growing food, but now I know what broccoli looks like when you let it go to flower. When you tune or focus, you go past the perfect spot and then come back again to the place that is optimal. With growing vegetables, you don’t get to go past perfect and then come back. I’m not really all that curious about this one, except maybe how a perfectionist manages growing food. The garden needs your supervision, Elysa!
And as long as I’m being curious, I don’t know how to decide whether to replace old appliances that have outperformed their life expectancy, before they finally give up and die at an inopportune time, especially when it is the furnace/AC and the clothes washer & dryer that both fall into that category? I usually fit it into the category of, “the money will need to be spent one way or another,” but that one always fails me because it gets stuck on the, “I’m a procrastinator” problem.
I tell you, it is amazing that I get anything accomplished in this world. You could even say it is “curious.”
Mind Boggling
I have survived another return trip from the lake. Just about the time I am expecting to readjust to life in the suburbs again, I ended up taking an unexpected trip to long past school days. We were giving Cyndie’s dad a ride home and when we got to her parent’s house, were expecting to have dinner with family. What we didn’t expect was the inclusion of a long-time-gone childhood friend that was in town for a high school reunion. In the middle of the exchange of funny stories, someone pointed out that we had 5 consecutive years of graduates from the same school, sitting around the table. We had a lot of common experiences that served as fodder for a wealth of tales that spawned much laughter.
When I finally reached my own home, I was behind my timeline to accomplish my comfortable Sunday routine, but my mind was still cluttered with the fragments of 40 years ago. I glanced through the mail pile and saw the new edition of the National Geographic magazine. Scanning just bits of features I see an idea about how to shade the earth from the sun to mitigate the over-warming of the planet and read accounts of the dwindling numbers of salmon.
It all just seemed to strike me in a way that boggled my mind. On any given day, I might contemplate whether I need to trim my finger nails or not. At the same time, someone is trying to imagine a way we can intervene on a grand scale to reduce the impact of global warming, while tribes of people who have fished salmon for generations are witnessing the decimation of that resource.
I remember when I was in high school in the ’70s, being taught that it was quite possible that we would not be buying single family homes when we grew up and started families because of concerns about the limits of energy resources. The thinking was, that people would all be living in multi-family dwellings that are more energy efficient. That didn’t end up becoming true, in my experience, but it could be that they were just off in the timing. I know the available real estate for new development in my suburb has almost been exhausted. For generations, people have assumed they will have more than those who have come before them, but logic dictates that this pattern can’t continue forever.
It’s like this state of mind where children misunderstand when parents and educators tell them that someday they could grow up to be President, by thinking they could actually all be the President, not that they all have the opportunity to accomplish the feat. I don’t know if it compares with challenges faced by legions of people in centuries past, but I can only assume they face mind boggling moments of their own. And we continue to have children, raise families, schedule our days, put one step in front of the other, and forge on, regardless the challenges faced.
It’s Monday. I guess I will go to work and see what needs to be done today.
Special Powers
It’s the weekend, and a relatively calm and quiet one. We are at the lake and sleeping in our usual basement room that currently is anything but usual. Carpets have been pulled up and doors removed from closets and rooms, as a result of our little flood mishap a couple of weeks ago. I am able to report that I brought up a replacement drain cap for the wet vac, so that fiasco is behind me.
We watched the big finale of le Tour yesterday; the climb up Mont Ventoux. It was sort of exciting, yet, also not. No real impact resulted from the monumental climb. Now I am faced with withdrawal from watching 3-weeks of racing. I have never really appreciated the final day’s stage of riding into Paris, but I’ll probably watch it today, anyway. How could I not?
Yesterday, it seemed like I had special powers. The weather was a random mix of sun and rain. A large gang of kids and their parents were out playing soccer and invited me to join in. We played right through the rain. It was great. Afterward, I joined some of the kids in a swim and then came up to satisfy my hunger and a longing to lounge in a hammock.
The hammocks in a brief moment of sunshine
The regular rope hammock was wet from the rain, so I rigged up my favorite portable one to hang from the beams holding up the deck, just outside our bedroom door. It worked perfect! So perfect in fact, that when I climbed in for an initial test, I found I could reach the table nearby, so I could have my water and a snack within reach while I read. I went back inside to get something for a pillow behind my head and upstairs to find a snack, fill my water glass and get my book. Everything was in order to completely fulfill what I was craving and I performed the precise gymnastics to climb aboard and get settled.
It started to rain.
I pondered just a brief moment, considering the possibility of holding my ground, but luckily chose to bail out. It turned out to be one of the intense pours that last just a few minutes and then are followed by brilliant sunshine. I was so inspired to take advantage of my new setup that I got a broom and swept the water off the deck above to hasten the end of the dripping below. Once settled in the hammock again, I could see above me that I should have also swept the bottom of the deck because there were a lot of drips clinging to the bottom of the boards. I decided to tough those out.
I did get enough reading in to become sleepy and put down my book, but hardly slept enough to qualify calling it a nap when I heard voices that brought me back to reality. It’s a good thing. It started to rain again. I bailed out. This time, I knew enough not to waste time sweeping the deck. I devised a plan to remove the rope hammock from its frame and put my portable one out there. It took some trial and error, but I got the other one hung where it can dry and mine supported just the right height off the ground. I went back in to get my book and that pillow and then swung myself onto the hammock. It started to rain.
There was something about the timing I had for getting settled in the hammock and the movement overhead of clouds filled with more water than they can hold, that made me believe I must have something special going on. I wonder if I could market this ability to some farmers who have been unable to coax rain from the sky when they need it. Special powers, indeed.
I believe everyone has probably experienced this type of thing happening to them at one time or another. I suppose there is a possibility that the universe has a bit of a practical joker’s sense of humor to it. That could explain a lot of the situations in life we end up dealing with, don’t you think?
Deep
deep, deep breaths
that have nothing to do
with the reason
they are being breathed
inspire
wonder beyond the seen
close to the way
your left hand is resting
so lightly
as if I were too hot to touch
and the sound
of the clock ticking
almost vapid
though fascinating nonetheless…
ideas wiggle
to gain footing
when the breath,
the hand,
the clock ticking
align
to fall flat
in a pile
no thicker than
the space between time
but deep,
deep as a mind
can be mined
One Thing to the Next
I recently pulled a box from storage that holds much of my collection of family history, to revisit the documents related to Intervale Ranch. The box also holds a lot of stuff related to my sporadic forays into the genealogy of my family. That reignited my urge to again look into some of the dead-ends on my family tree. With no memory of where I left off the last time I was working on this project, I just tried starting fresh and simple. I did a Google search on a name. Sometimes, simple is good.
The second link on the list of results turned out to be a post on a message board requesting information about my great-grandparents. Wa-laa! The query that I discovered had been posted originally in 2005, so I suspected my results would be limited. However, in composing her query, the person provided so much detail that I had more answers than I could imagine. I didn’t really need to pursue her any further. However, I did have the information that she was seeking, so it was the least I could do to respond, even if it was four and a half years after the fact.
To my surprise, I got a reply within the hour. Today, I met one of our 4th cousins, once removed, online, and learned that one of our ancestors was a sharp-shooter in the civil war. I haven’t verified anything she told me, but it is fun to add these threads to our story. She mentioned, “…Hannah descends from the founder of Hampton, Rev. Stephen Bachiler quite famous and he has many famous descendants from actor James Dean to Pres. Richard Nixon and us.” My newly discovered distant cousin reported that she is in touch with other descendants, but I am the first one to contact her from this branch of the family.
It gives me the feeling that if we looked thoroughly enough, we would come to find many of us are more connected than we ever imagined. It’s the kind of thing that can lead from one thing to the next… from farm to family ancestors.
A work in progress
More About the Farm
In reviewing what I have written over the years about my memories of the farm, it strikes me how different an experience I had from my two oldest sisters and also the next two older siblings, though maybe to a lesser extent. (For reference, I am the 5th of 6 kids; not counting a sister that only survived 19 days.) When my grandfather took my dad out to see the property for the first time, I don’t know how long it had been inactive. It is my understanding that it had become available due to a tax forfeiture and wasn’t actually in operation. My oldest sister was about a year old and still an only child at the time.
As my mother described it to me back in 2002, my dad actually got the place functioning again. Mended fences, brought in livestock, built the milking parlor. Mom said the hill house had one toilet, in the dirt-floor basement. She refused the idea, Dad promised to build a bathroom and the rest is history. Our grandparents moved into the main house and my mom, dad and oldest sister got the house where the farm superintendent had lived.
It probably deserves to be said here that my parents were city kids, growing up. They lived in some pretty nice neighborhoods around the lakes in south Minneapolis. I marvel over the fact that my mother’s family employed a live-in house servant. I think their jump to raising kids while working a farm is pretty significant. I understand why my mother would at least put a limit such as requiring a decent bathroom.
Well, they kept having kids while up at that small house on the hill until it was obvious they needed more space, and conveniently, my grandfather was doing more work downtown than nearby, so everybody moved. The grandparents went back toward the city again and my parents and siblings got to move into the main house. All this happening before I was born, and so it is not any part of my actual farm memories. I find myself telling stories about little things I remember doing around that house, or the grounds nearby, thinking I am telling stories about the farm, but it doesn’t have any relation to what my older siblings would remember about the time living in that “hill house” or the actual activity of tending to the milk cows or the sheering of sheep.
The total acreage of Intervale Ranch was 477, and we have a map that shows 37 structures consisting of multiple living quarters and barns and sheds and chicken coops and the like. By 1957 my grandfather had struck a deal to sell 414 acres to the City of Edina and the days of my dad’s farming were allowed to wind down toward an end date of April, 1959. A 4-lane divided roadway, County Road 18 (now identified as 169) was built in the early 1960s. It runs north/south and was located just off the end of one of the big barns, separating the acreage that had been sold from the 63 acres remaining that included the main house where I eventually would create my “farm” memories.
This is how the tennis court appeared before I was around.
Notice how nice the landscape looks
This is the way I remember it, with Dad doing much needed cutting.
Farm Memories
This may be a bit random, but here are some excerpts of thoughts I have written about the farm and my childhood memories:
When my family finally moved from my grandfather’s farm property, I was about 8 years old. I don’t recall many opportunities to wander the property unsupervised during those years. When my Dad would set about the protracted chore of managing the growth around the house and driveway, such as cutting back overgrown shrubs, my brother David and I would lose ourselves playing in a dirt hole. We would create a world of our own, driving toy trucks up and down a road carved out of the edge of the hole. I remember losing all awareness of what anyone else was doing outside of our play. 
This property that I completely took for granted at the time, was once graced by a lush garden around the house and the nearby tennis court. The long driveway with the circle to the living quarters was paved in cement and trimmed in stone similar to sites landscaped by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and late-depression era work crews. As the driveway continued toward the barns and the garage that was dug into a hill, the cement ended and it became packed gravel. I haven’t found anything to indicate those work crews had anything to do with this stonework, or not, but there were significant retaining walls out of this stone. Along one, near the front entrance to the wrap-around screen porch, there was a trail that led down to the cement tennis court.
By the time I had grown old enough to wander out and play, most all of this had begun to fall to disrepair; unknown to me, due primarily to the fact it was soon to be sold to a developer for an industrial park. The farming activity had stopped by the time I was born. My playground was like a rich kid’s retreat next to a farmyard, yet in a ghost-like state. There really was nothing we could hurt, because it was all doomed soon anyway. There were barns full of a variety of past pieces of the grand machine. There was still some hay up in the loft of the big barn, where I recall there being a rope swing that had been rigged up on which the bigger kids would play.
For a while during the years I remember, there was a man who boarded a horse in one of our barn buildings. I would pull fists full of tall, wide grass blades to feed through the mesh of a window to the stall for the eager lips and chomping teeth. I also remember the extreme drama of the temper of this animal and how he would kick at the doorway wall of his stall. One day he did get out and there was all sorts of excitement on the property. Just behind the back barn there was a divided four-lane expressway, unfenced to the traffic, and that fed the greatest of fears, I think, that the horse might run that direction. Outside of the barn this animal appeared HUGE to me. The fact that he continued to display a fierce temper, rearing up on hind legs, and eventually stomping on the foot of his handler, may have something to do with my tendency toward apprehension around the animals to this day.
I remember running down dirt trails to the chestnut tree to climb and play; a favorite place, just off the area of the tennis court, to while away the hours. Sometimes we rode our bikes and tricycles on the old cracking court surface, but that meant we had to haul them down there. It was much easier to just ride around on the long sloping driveway, and around the circle. There was just enough hill to be very entertaining, but not enough to be too hard to climb back up. Riding around on that driveway was another way I remember getting so lost in my imagination of the games we were playing that there was no other world around…
Relative Something 