Relative Something

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.

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…

A few days ago I enjoyed the pleasure of visiting with cousins that I only get to see on rare occasions, and a couple of my siblings that I see only slightly more often, it seems. One particular bit of history that we share involves a 477 acre farm called “Intervale Ranch” that our grandfather purchased in the early 1950s. Though our grandfather purchased the property as an investment, my father ended up talking his dad into letting him actively farm for a few years. I always describe it as having pretty much been a no-risk proposition. The property was so close to the expanding ring of communities that would become suburbs of Minneapolis (MN), that its days as a farm were numbered. Even if Dad ran the farm into the ground, so to speak, it would not be a failure; in fact, it could actually be framed a success, as that was already the destiny determined.

As bits and pieces of memories from our days on the farm property as kids are shared, the inherent value of our stories get revealed. My sister suggested that we encourage family members to write some of their memories to be compiled together as something of a farm memoir. Lo and behold, guess who already did? I have slowly been in process of writing a variety of memories, from a variety of different angles, some historical, some for more personal reflection and introspection, and some as stories about my parents.

In order to share what I have already written, with cousins spread around the country, and hopefully to inspire others in my family to write their memories, I am going to post some of the stories here at Relative Something… some vignettes from my memory of life on this farm. With luck, I will get around to providing some back-story to provide context for those of you who are less familiar with tales of the Hays Farm. Time will tell.

These were probably taken sometime in the ’40s or ’50s, first on the left looking northwest and then on the right looking due west.

I did a cursory online search and found a document about the history of Edina’s (MN) Braemar Park & Golf Course, which is what the bulk of the farm acres were to become. It contains some detail that doesn’t match the way I have heard it told, but it is precious for the references it contains about ‘Hays farm.’

Excerpt: The Search For A Permanent Name

Although the Hays farm site had temporarily retained the “Intervale” name, most people continued to refer to the hilly acres as “the Hays farm.” In the five years between the purchase of the land and the opening of the golf course, a number of other possible names were actively discussed and debated. http://www.ci.edina.mn.us/PDFs/AboutTown/L4-91_AboutTown_2007Spring.pdf

Watch for stories here, about the farm, in the days and weeks and probably months that follow, inbetween rantings about the Tour de France and ‘Words on Images’ and whatever else ends up seeming somehow relative at the time. You know the drill.