"No
mail today and Mother said it would be a good time for me to write you, so here
goes....
"Mother
and Stanley started to school today, they just went till noon as it was labor
day, Mother just has eleven in her room, that will be some different from
Waverley where they have 26 pupils this year
I imagine Ella Myres will have her hands full, you know she is teaching
this year there.
"Mother
and Barbara washed this afternoon and Stanley and I sowed Rye, Stanley drove
the team and wagon to the field, thats the way we had of taking rye seed to the
field. It looked for awhile like it was going to rain us out, but outside of a
few sprinkles it has'ent rained yet."
-- Letter from my grandfather,
Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Notre Dame, Ind., September 4, 1944. My grandparents were still using horses on
the farm in 1944. 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.
(Sources: U.S. Census, 1900-1950; Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and
Youth [2008], 103, 105)
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