USA > Iowa > O'Brien County > Past and present of O'Brien and Osceola counties, Iowa, Vol. I > Part 19
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67
O'BRIEN COUNTY IS UNIFORM IN MANY WAYS.
In the first place, the county is uniformn in its shape, a perfect square, twenty-four miles each way. Its sixteen townships are each uniform in size, six miles square. Possibly we should make the exception that the city limits of Sheldon have been made a township known as Sheldon township. This was done that it might always have two justices of the peace within its corp- orate limits. Its highways also are practically uniform, namely nine-tenths of its road mileage runs east and west and north and south, and on section lines. The percentage of irregular roads is very small. This uniformity is made possible by reason of its being uniform in so many other respects. It is uniform in its topography. In the main it is a level county. It is gently rolling, but these gentle rolls or undulations are quite similar in size through- out the county. Its original prairie conditions were also uniform. The same prairie grass covered all its surface. Its surveys and boundary lines between land owners are in the main uniform straight lines. It has no meandering boundary lines. Its very soil is equally uniform and of about the same quality, being all a rich, black loam. The same prairie growths and
185
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
grass for thousands of years could produce none other than a uniform soil. Its underpinnings, or subsoils, are likewise of universal sameness, a clay slightly mixed with sand, that allows the rains and water to go down and up. These subsoils, or filtered underpinnings, form a continuous strata and reservoir for nature's supply of the purest water, and which renders the crops so uniform in both quality and quantity. While this strip or that may at times get a larger supply of water than another. yet inasmuch as there are such a variety of crops maturing at different seasons of the year, it is true to the fact that never in fifty years will these dry streaks for a month hit all the crops of the year. As a round up each year, taken separately, the crops are well distributed from farm to farm. As a result O'Brien county has never had a famine. Resulting from this sameness, its drainage in regularity and with scarcely a damage, follows. It does not have monster ditches to be dug like in many other counties, with heavy assessments to be levied for a seven-year period, making a lien equal to a mortgage. In the whole period of the county it has only had one county ditch, and that cutting across one single section of land, in the very corner section of the county, at the north- cast corner, in straightening out the Ocheyedan river, where it cuts across that one section of land. Both Osceola and Clay counties are burdened with many miles of this ditch. In many counties, even in quite uniform Iowa, these big ditches become very much of a burden. O'Brien county drainage is limited to mild tiling, small in comparison .. The land is all so very much alike in all its qualities and conditions that each eighty or quarter section is able to amply drain itself. Even each small farmer is king and manager of his own little farm and kingdom. In many extremely flat counties, even in Iowa, and more markedly in the extremely flat portions of northern Minnesota, the drainage of any one farm is so dependent on a co- operative drainage of a whole township or more that the small farmer is swallowed up in the swim and drowned out, and thereby ceases to be a full- grown director of his own affairs. Neighbors, it is true must yield to each other in the natural accommodations of drainage from little into big tile and paying the difference as will accomplish the movements of the surface waters and at same time keep every foot of soil in cultivation. But in O'Brien county this has been such a mild question that actual litigations relating to same in the whole period of the county could be counted on the fingers of one hand. This tiling becomes simply a part of ordinary farming. As a further result, its wells, both for the farm houses and for stock, are both uni- form in the fact that ample water is found on every farm and can be secured in the main on all parts of the farms, and at quite uniform and reasonable
I86
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
depths. Digging wells simply involves in most cases the mere value of labor in the digging. It is not a big problem, as in many states. The quality of all water in its wells follows suit with the other uniformities. Having no minerals or oils of any kind in the county, the water is free from acids or alkalis. It boundary lines all being straight, it follows that its fields for this and that crop are or may be made in square form or at least in parallel pro- portions. There are but few point rows in the corn. The wire stretcher on the corn planter can quite generally be made the length of the full quarter section. Its very few little fringes of timber, limited indeed to but a few tracts down on the Waterman and Little Sioux, conduce to this. Very few farmers need to build even a culvert, much less a bridge for the mere farm accommodation. Two of its main railroads run almost a bee line east and west through the county and cut those farms in square lines. Its rain falls are quite uniform from year to year. There is much sameness also in that the whole energies of the people are devoted to agriculture. We practically have no factories. The nearest approach to a manufacturing idea would be the Big Four mills at Sheldon, employed in the manufacture of flour, but even that is distinctly agricultural. Its people are uniform also in this, that as a mass they all Americanize. Our foreigners are all of the agricultural idea. becoming at once a part of loyal America, and satisfied with O'Brien county conditions and prosperities. Its farms in size are well distributed. Its large farms or ranches, as we have seen, are scarce. It is not. perhaps, uniform as a one-crop country. but it is uniform in its variety of its farm crops and stock. On every farm, large or small, may be seen something of the county- wide results, wheat, oats, corn, barley, vegetables, hay, pasture, farm homes, cattle, horses, hogs, sheep, a full line of farm machinery, with each farm and farm family sufficient unto itself. We have no frictional foreign ele- ments in the county, or divisions of people that fail to assimilate or to become a mutual part of the common mass. Its school houses even, in the main, are two miles apart. Often we hear the expression that this and that road through the county, and this, too, for the whole twenty-four miles, is a school house road, so regularly are they built. Its children are also uniformly in the schools for the uniform school year of nine months. and therefore its people uniformly can read and write. Its people are uniformly of the white race. Two colored men only homesteaded in the county, and one other colored man resided for some years in the early period at Sheldon. but they. even, are long since gone. At this date. 1914, and for more than ten years not a single colored man has resided in the county, and this, too, not because they have been notified to remove or have been driven out, simply the question never
187
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
arises. The county positively has no race question, colored or otherwise. Its people all freely affiliate and intermingle on all public matters. The county has always been free from chronic feuds. It is the very opposite of Breathitt county, Kentucky. As a result its courts, during all the years, have been uniformly free from notable criminal trials. Its public and private life fill no place in head lines of the daily papers. It can truly be said that ninety- five per cent of its people are independent and self-supporting within them- selves and their own efforts. This is uniformity calling for a record mark. Its towns, its townships and its individuals, like the county, have practically rid themselves of the serious debts and conditions in this history recited as part of its early pioneer troubles. Often do we hear the remark, that when you look at or inspect one tract or quarter of land in O'Brien, you have seen it all. It has no sand dunes, or sand beds, of miles in extent, not one single case, and no extensive gravel pits, to make the farms or country spotted or scabby either in appearance or for use. It is all the "same black stuff," in truth and fact, as we hear so many times stated, not by the mere land agent, but the sober owners of the farms. This one uniformity has deceived some good O'Brien people, or their sons, in later years, in attempts to purchase cheaper lands in other states, where it is spotted in all those irregularities of sand and gravel, swamps and lakes, jagged hills and pot hole sloughs, with perhaps neither outlet nor inlet, as seen in many other counties. Neither do we find those long stretches of hard pan, stumpage, lack of wells and water, big ditches and other bad features in farming communities. This expression. "when you see one farm you see it all," means much to O'Brien county. Probably there is not one county in fifty in the whole United States where uniformity in so many lines, and on nearly all agricultural lines, is so promi- nent. In result, its whole seventeen thousand people are uniformly contented.
FRUITS.
While O'Brien county is not a fruit county in specialty, it has surprised its own people in this line. In the raising of corn. it was long discussed in the early years whether it would be a corn country or not, yet now we are in the midst of the great corn belt. Likewise with fruits, it was similarly discussed. It is this much of a definite success, that practically three-fourths of all the farms have bearing orchards of good size, which makes the test. The culture of fruits has not. however, reached the stage wherein shipment of fruit has been seriously an item. It has no lakes, rivers or other waters to temper the atmosphere or weather. Our quite rigorous winters limit the
188
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
fruits to the hardier varieties. The local towns as vet consume the entire output that can be spared by the farmers. However, this item as a farm revenue producer is no sinall matter. The home fruits sold in the local towns have a freshness that is not always secured in fruits shipped in. On public occasions in the county many varieties of fruits of the larger and smaller varieties are exhibited. The home fruits raised do this much, they add decisively to the daily bread of our people within themselves, and insure even in this item the independence of our people.
WILD PRAIRIE FLOWERS.
A lady who grew up from childhood on the prairies of Highland town- ship handed us the following list of wild prairie flowers. There may be many others : Buttercup, blue bell, crocus, flox, golden rod, indigo flower, purple or prairie apple, shoe string, tiger lily, white prairie flower, sweet william, wild rose, lady slipper, violet. In the fringes of timber along the Waterman and Little Sioux there are also a few timber varieties.
PUBLIC FARM MODERNISMS.
The county has its full complement of rural free deliveries, telephones. cream stations, creameries, farmers' elevators and other organizations and facilities connected with farm life. There being ten towns well distributed in its territory where each of these modernisms may be found, it also follows that practically every farmer has access to each. Each town telephone ex- change, large or small, now has direct connections with from five to fifteen farm phone lines and each town has from two to four rural free deliveries. The farm elevators, while they do not handle all the grain or sell all the coal. maintain competition.
PUBLIC ROADS SHOULD REMAIN FOUR RODS WIDE.
The development of our public roads is a part of our county history. As time moves on this item becomes more important. The automobile and motorcycle and the movement of heavy machinery have each increased this importance. These new necessary movements prove that they should remain sixty-six feet wide. Yet how often do we hear it expressed that they should be reduced to forty feet, pointing out a few weeds at the side of the roads at the present time as a reason. Let the little items seen every day on any ten
189
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
miles of roads in the county give the answer. The farmer should be safe with his load of grain, as likewise the automobile man and transient.
We see automobiles everywhere, whirling on with momentum and speed, with flash lights to scare a horse, and human life on board, all at the mercy of the momentary emergency and of the driver who should have ample room to meet and dodge the other moving objects as he meets them. At one moment it is a horse and buggy, with a lady and a baby in her arms, who has dropped her lines. Next it is four o'clock, with a dozen school children on the highway ready to banter a dare with your auto or hitch on behind a wagon. Then the dare-devil motorcycle thunders by at sixty miles an hour. Just at that point in the road is a road grader with six horses and a half dozen men to pass, with tools strung along the road. A little further on is met a big modern traction engine, drawing a threshing outfit in three parts, one behind the other. Then of a sudden you see coming a big hay rack with thirty children out for a picnic. Then you pass a funeral procession, and all at once appears, out of a narrow lane between a row of willows, a couple loads of corn, with wagon beds three box high. Then all at once here comes the usual caravan and tribe of gypsies, with twenty horses, tied in bunches of four, with no block system to keep them on or off the track. Then you meet a farmer driving fifty fat steers to market, a bunch of sheep, a half dozen loads of hogs, then a well augur outfit, then fifty chickens, some guinea hens, twenty rapid moving ducks, and likely a fierce dog to race with the auto for fifty rods. The road tiling and drainage also needs space.
This sixty-foot road will all ultimately be graded from side to side, not in humps, but like Michigan avenue in Chicago, even and symmetrical, and the future history of road building of the now eleven hundred and fifty miles of roads in O'Brien county will record the fact that it is all needed in the future developments of travel and drainage and safe movement.
FARMERS' MEETINGS, INSTITUTES AND STOCK SALES.
This being strictly an agricultural county, farmers' institutes have been regularly and annually held, alternating in the several towns. These have been supplemented by farm festivals, harvest home gatherings, watermelon days, corn-judging contests, horse shows, nail-driving contests, and county, district and ladies' fairs. These sundry gatherings are on many occasions represented by specialists and instructors from our State Agricultural Col- lege at Ames. illustrating that this college bureau of farm information is in real touch with the actual occupations. The farm auction sales also occupy
190
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
somewhere in the county two-thirds of the days in the fall and early winter. and again in the spring, and rise higher than merely auctions. The public does not tire of them. Such auction sales as conducted by auctioneers W. S. Armstrong, John Cowan, Frank Myers, Charles Hopfe, Edward O. Evans, P. A. Leese, J. N Burson and J. A. Benson, become also schools of farming where the farmers and stockraisers meet and exchange practical ideas of farming, stockraising. crops, values and markets.
NO MINERALS OR COAL IN THE COUNTY.
The people did make two little staggers at the coal question. On Janu- ary 7, 1874, the board of supervisors of the county passed a resolution offer- ing a reward of one thousand dollars to any person who would make the dis- covery of a vein of coal not less than three feet in thickness and of actual merit. However, nothing ever came of it, and we mention it simply as an item to show that it was discussed. The geologist, however, has probably settled beyond a question that nature's great elements in the original up- heavals of creations of the crusts of earth in the county, did not provide for the county either minerals or coal. It is not in the cloth for O'Brien county. It is strictly agricultural. With no waste land, in this fact, it has its com- pensations. At the June session of the board of supervisors for 1889 the board offered a prize or reward of twenty-five dollars per ton for one hun- dred tons of coal at any time mined in O'Brien county.
LARGE RANCHES.
O'Brien county has been blessed in having its lands well distributed in small sized farms. She has had no colonies settle as renters on lands owned by large syndicates or nonresident landlords, like some of the surrounding counties. Practically all her large farms have been managed by actual citi- zens. We will make note of a few large farms
D. EDWARD PAULLIN.
In 1880 D. Edward Paullin, after whom Paullina was named, bought nine sections of land in Dale and Union townships and proceeded at once to put on very large improvements. It was all broken up. He expended from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars in improvements and machinery. Indeed his ranch buildings were little towns of themselves. He was an English-
191
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
man and was a stirring man. He farmed on a very large scale, until Novem- ber, 1883, when he sold to Hudson Mickley. He later resided in Lemars, in Plymouth county, where was a large colony of Englishmen, including the Close brothers, James B. and William B., who held large landed possessions in both Plymouth and Osceola counties. Mr. Paullin was killed in a game of polo about 1903 at Lemars. Hudson Mickley farmed all those lands on a similar scale for the seasons of 1884-85-86. These lands were later divided up into ordinary sized farms and sold.
FRANKLIN TEABOUT.
In 1874-75-76-77 Franklin Teabout, a man of much vim and energy, opened up several large ranches on sections 25 and 36 in Lincoln, and sec- tions 3, 10, 11, 14 and 25 in Summit and another ranch in Clay county. In 1877 he bought thirty-six hundred acres, at fifty cents per acre, with taxes on same to be redeemed of one dollar and fifty cents per acre, of Daniel T. Gilman, of Sioux City, same being part of the above lands. Mr. Teabout was an actual farmer and actual citizen. He erected quite extensive build- ings on his main ranch on section 36, in Lincoln, which, with its many renters and ranch hands, made up quite a colony. Mr. Teabout had had a remark- able and successful career in large farming in Winnesheik county, Iowa, the small town of Franklin, in that county, being named for him and the seat of his farming operations there. He and William H. Valleau were the first merchants and grain buyers in Sanborn and other points. He was the father of Mrs. George H. Valleau, of Sanborn. These lands also were long ago divided up and sold.
JOHN H. ARCHER.
John H. Archer has filled many large fields in the county. This item is but an enumeration of large farms and farming operations in a group. In extent of acres, being about thirty-five hundred acres in actual farming. in and around Archer, Iowa, named for him, his is the largest tract in con- tinuous farming for the long series of years in the county, farmed and man- aged by one man. Mr. Archer has personally superintended each tract, by direct oversight from crop to crop, item to item. He has carried it out from the basis of small tracts under various arrangements of rentings and other- wise, rather than as one farm. This is by no means the limit of his land holdings, he being the owner of sundry landed interests in other places. He came from England when a young man, and married the daughter of a
192
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
farmer. E. L. Ballou. He has bought land from year to year, and held on to everything once purchased. The gradual, if not to say phenomenal, advance in land values in the county during his time in the county has proved the wisdom of his policy relating to land.
CHESTER W. INMAN.
Chester W. Inman was, after Hannibal H. Waterman, among the first four real farmers who, in number of acres, arose above the quarter section proposition. He came in 1868. He was also one of the early actual citizens who became a county official, he being county treasurer and also was a mem- ber of the board. He opened up a large ranch of five hundred and eighty acres on section 26, in Grant township on the Waterman. The spot of his residence was one of the few really picturesque and scenic farm residences in this locality. O'Brien county was mainly a plain level of merely prairie sameness. The bluff here on the Waterman would even be somewhat of a bluff on the Missouri river. It was an ideal spot for the poetic or romantic. It seemed pitiful that his public turmoils and individual private property trib- ulations should have prevented the enjoyment of his dream, for be it said Mr. Inman and family were people who could have enjoyed the picturesque. He was a man of considerable breadth. He attempted to farm on a large scale through the grasshopper scourge and discouragements. He built what was in those times considered a mansion, costing in those cheapest of times somne thirty-five hundred dollars, and in truth was beyond the times, and big farming could do none other than fail, and he lost all. This residence was a three-story building, with a large hall in the third story, evidently constructed with a special idea of large entertainments and gatherings.
MISCELLANEOUS LARGE FARMINGS.
Among the large farms of a section of land in size we might also men- tion those of Joseph Hain and John Bowley, in Floyd, of Oliver M. Shonk- wiler and George W. Schee, in Hartley township, of Hector Cowan, in Dale, of Neil McKerrall and Frederick G. Frothingham, in Union, the Rodgers section in Caledonia and the farm of Mathern Brothers ( Frank and Antone), in Highland.
JONATHAN AA. STOCUM.
Jonathan A. Stocum had for many years been an instructor in Bryant & Stratton's Commercial School in Chicago, but at intervals had purchased
193
O'BRIEN AND OSCEOLA COUNTIES, IOWA.
sundry O'Brien county lands at tax sale during the years when its affairs were in trouble, but in 1871 he had procured many tax titles on same and pro- ceeded to open up a large ranch of eight hundred acres in Lincoln township, and farmed the same until his death in 1891. He resided in Sanborn and conducted his ranch from there. He was not simply farming, but was a breeder of fancy stock, the inventory of his estate showing some forty fine bred horses and other stock in proportion. His was among the earliest efforts at the better grade stock proposition in the county. Further refer- ences will be made to Mr. Stocum in the section relating to Sanborn, he hav- ing been the pioneer attorney there, and, with John Lawler, a high official of the Milwaukee road, having platted Stocum & Lawler's addition to Sanborn, and engaged in other of the early town of Sanborn enterprises.
SAMUEL J. JORDAN.
Samuel J. Jordan was among the early settlers in Grant township, and opened up. a ranch of eight hundred acres. He has been among the few of the large ranch owners who has continuously resided actually upon the land itself during all the years, and conducted in person his large farming opera- tions and stock raising direct from his family residence. As his sons, Ralph C. Jordan, now a member of the board of supervisors, and Clay P. Jordan, of Jordan's Bank at Sutherland, have grown up they have become a practical part of the broadening business of both farming and banking. They have also been among the few large farmers who have included in and incorporated as a part of their large farming all those modern, up-to-date and highly de- veloped devices in the construction of barns. buildings, water works, dairy- ing and machinery equipments, even in the details, on the lines as taught and suggested at Ames Agricultural College. Other items will appear as to this family under other heads.
(13)
CHAPTER XII.
EDUCATIONAL.
The educational feature was one of the earliest, as it is likewise one of the chief and present, thoughts of the people of O'Brien county. They adapted themselves to what they were able to do. Though they could not build a sixty-thousand-dollar brick school building, they insisted on the school nevertheless and built the shack school house, even as they themselves lived in the shack shanty. They even held school in the old log court house. But the primal fact remained that they kept school. In the simple town plat of Old O'Brien, the old county seat in 1860, on the first fly leaf of record deed book "A," the first deed record book of the county, a block is set apart for a school site. Clark Green and James Roberts did the same for Primghar when the town was surveyed out with a four-foot lath, which was the fact. Indeed the school block has been among the first blocks platted in every town in the county.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.