Sun, Jan 18, 1942: sorrell colt

“Vernon Peterson and Jay Peterson have started to defense school at Wichita, it kinda leaves Lloyd without a man now, I don't know who is doing the chores for him.
“I sold Mickie and Minnie to Geo. Dennett at Rose Hill yesterday, got $200 for them.  Will have to break that sorrell colt and use Bessie....

“Expect I had better close and get in on the Popcorn or Stanley and Mother will have it all ate up.”

-- Letter from my grandfather on the farm in Bloomington, Kans., to my father, a freshman at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, January 18, 1942.

The transition from horses to tractors for farmwork was very gradual on my grandparents’ farm as in the country at large.  The number of farm horses in Butler County, Kansas, peaked around 1910 at 22,752, roughly the number of people in the county (23,059).  If you add in the town horses, there were likely more horses than people in the county then.  The number of farm horses gradually declined to 8,479 in 1940 and to 4,666 by 1950, while the human population grew slightly and the acres of farmland stayed about the same.  My grandfather gave up horses in fits and starts.  He acquired a Fordson tractor, probably during the 1920s, but tired of its gas consumption and unreliability and returned to using horses in the early 1930s.  He got a new Farmall F-20 tractor in 1937, yet continued to use horses for some tasks.  The sale of Mickie and Minnie may have been part of reducing his reliance on horses. By the 1960s, he had only one horse, for his grandchildren to ride or to pull them in a buggy.  He sold off his last horse, Sugar, around the late 1970s.  (Sources: U.S. Census, 1900-1950; Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 103, 105)