Childhood on the farm
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
There are millions of us, and every one thinks he or she is an authority on the subject. "Us" being people who grew up on farms, and "the subject" being childhood on the farm. Every experience is different, but surely there are some common patterns, and there are people trying to sort them out.
The problem always has been, writers are more concerned with scoring points than with portraying things as they were. One writer is committed to the idea that the American West was a place of fascination and opportunity, and sure enough, in his history, children find western farm life full of fascination and opportunity. Another writer is committed to the idea that men are tyrannical and abusive, and sure enough, in her history, farm children are abused and deprived.
Now comes Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, author of "Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest," (University Press of Kansas). This author, born and raised in southwest Kansas, is grounded. Besides that, she writes from the remarkable premise that in order to understand how children lived, you have to read what the children themselves wrote and listen to what they said. And quite a bit of the evidence in "Childhood on the Farm" comes from Kansas.
Riney-Kehrberg, for instance, discusses the common division of labor in farm families — in other words, what things were girls' work and what things were boys' work. She cites Lottie Norton of Barton County as an example of how girls sometimes did boys' work.
This girl kept a diary in 1879-80 in which she recorded how she commonly helped her mother — cooking, sewing, gardening, washing, and even taking in washing from Fort Larned. When it came time to plant corn or sorghum, though, she went into the field to help her father. The odd thing is, Norton had four brothers old enough to go to the field. She must just have been the best hand when it came to planting!
The most interesting Kansas story from the book is that of Hermann C. Benke, the son of a German farm family near the post office of State Center, Barton County. Benke was an odd boy who occupied an odd place in his family.
Whereas the other Benke children worked hard in the family's crop and livestock operations, often being kept out of school to work, young Hermann sometimes lolled about the house reading or playing music. His diary one day recorded, "I write poetry etc., all day." His parents bought books for him, including the Cyclopedia of Universal History.
The Benkes in general favored learning on the part of the children, but Hermann was a special case. It doesn't seem he had any sort of physical disability. Rather, what was going on was the family saw potential in his bookish habits.
Large farm families had laborers, but they lacked reliable cash income. Teaching school was a way farm daughters commonly brought paychecks home to the family. Farm sons inclined to learning were an even greater economic asset, because schools with rowdy boys were willing to pay more for male teachers. Teenage Hermann Benke came into his own as a country schoolteacher. He loved books, he loved the public life of schoolhouse activities, and his exposure to manure was limited to that which entered the schoolhouse on the boots of his pupils.
Both Hermann and his sister Bertha kept wonderful diaries in the 1880s, recording their activities and making sketches of the farmyard, of expeditions to the Cheyenne Bottoms, and of meetings at the schoolhouse. What a trove these are, reposing in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.
Readers of "Childhood on the Farm" will be especially impressed with Riney-Kehrberg's discussion of children's work. It makes me want to retrieve from my mother that old family photo of me, age three or so, toddling across the farmyard with a bucket. It proves I was milking at a precocious age. Or maybe just catching tadpoles.
