Gayla Marty

Farm from above

Almost every farm I've known has an aerial photograph of the homestead displayed somewhere in the house, usually in the kitchen. This practice certainly arose because airplanes and cameras were born in the days when America was a nation of farms and there was money to be made documenting so many families' pride of place.

This photo of our farm was taken in the 1950s before the roof of the old barn was overlaid with asphalt shingles, so not long before I was born. In the driveway is my parents' first car. The big house is barely visible through the trees. It was taken in early summer—the fields are still bare. This is the farm of my earliest memory.

The family ordered not only an 8 x 10 for the wall in the big house, but postcards. Over the years, I've accumulated little stashes of these postcards left by my grandmother as well as her sons. The photographer and studio are not identified.

I remember a day, probably 10 years later, when Uncle Gaylon noticed a small plane flying back and forth in the area and spotted a photographer inside. It made him happy, excited to see documentation of the new barn. A few days later, sure enough, someone drove into the yard with proofs and an offer and we bought an 8 x 10. Postcards from home were on the wane by then.

The photo right was taken in the 1970s, probably later in the summer, judging by the clean-cut hayfield and all the hay wagons sitting around. Who knows, maybe I raked and baled that hayfield in the foreground.

By this time, you can see not only the new barn (1963) and silo, but the pole barn. The big house peeks through the trees on the very left edge of the photo, and our house has been remodeled, the roof transformed. The twin spruce trees in front of it have grown tall. An old corn crib has been replaced by two new, round corn storage bins. The log barn, chicken coop, tractor garage, and Sam's little car garage are all gone. The young elm tree by our driveway in the 1950s photo has already grown up and died of Dutch elm disease. The original 8 x 10 of this photo bears the stamp of National Air Studios.

This is pretty much the farm as I left it for college in 1976, though by then a storm had snapped off the top of one of those spruce trees. Still to come were two more silos.

As a postscript, Sam Marty's little red car garage still exists. Mom and Auntie's brother, Duane, who lives less than a mile away on old Highway 61, adopted and moved that garage. Now it's part of an amazing repository of old machinery where Andersons' Rock Creek Relics Threshing and Sawing Show is held every year on the weekend after Labor Day. This year, it's September 11-12, 7:30-5 or so each day. I'll be there.

August birthdays

Photo of the Marty house, ca. 1900, rediscovered in the attic in the 1980s. Left to right: Jacob, Susanna, Anna, Minnie, Sam, Lizzie, John.

Two August birthdays were celebrated in this family of immigrants—Jacob himself on the left, August 27, 1855, and his younger son, my grandfather, John, on the right, August 10, 1892.

Uncle Gaylon and I dated this photo mostly by the size of little Anna, who was the only one of Susanna's children born in this house rather than the cabin, in 1897. It's a guess that the family had the photo taken in 1900 to mark the new century. Jacob had been in America 20 years. The son of a miner, he had learned a new trade—dairy farming—from an uncle who immigrated a generation before him. Jacob and Susanna had acquired at least 120 acres and cleared more than a third of it.

The big red barn would be built in 1902. Grampa John would be 10 that year, and he would remember the story of the barn raising to his sons.

Swiss day

In 1974, I got to walk in the valley where my great-grandfather, Jacob Marti, was born. And I discovered relatives!

In this photo, you see Verena Gerschwiler-Blumer on the left and her husband, Ernst, on the right. Vreni's grandmother and my great-grandfather were siblings. Ernst and Vreni lived in a little wooden house down the path from the village, in the middle of a hayfield so steep that it pretty much had to be cut by hand.

My student exchange that year was ad hoc—I went to stay for three months with a French-speaking family near Lake Geneva while their son stayed with my family in Minnesota. My host family took a camping trip through the canton Glarus and the little town of Engi, where Switzer-Deutsch is spoken. Until that day, I had only a few dates and names of my Swiss ancestors copied from other books and letters and newspapers. The man who worked in Engi's civic house took me to meet Vreni because she knew the valley's oral history, and then we discovered our connection.

Six years later, I returned to Engi with my dad, mom, and youngest brother. Vreni's family was prepared for that visit! What great hosts they were. Ernst and Vreni have both passed away now, but today I honor their memory and the joy and generosity they showed to their American cousins.

Swiss National Day is August 1, anniversary of a charter among three alpine cantons—Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden—in 1291. William Tell's heroic tale dates from that time. Glarus joined the confederacy in 1352. August 1 didn't become an official Swiss holiday until 1994, but it has been celebrated for decades if not centuries.

In 1974, I celebrated the day for the first time with my host family in a village by Lake Geneva. It was a party at dark, with a bonfire set just off the shore. Across the lake in every direction we could see bonfires burning on the water and up the mountain sides in villages everywhere. Years later I learned that the first of August is also the pre-Christian holiday Lughnasa, celebration of harvest's beginning.

Engi, canton Glarus, summer 1974. Kodacolor. Photo on my camera taken by the Magnollay family.