Gayla Marty

Bringing in the sheaves

 

When my grandmother, Viola, came to the Marty farm in the late 1920s, she documented the Marty farm with her camera. The quality of these photos is poor from the glaring sunlight, but you can still make out my grandfather, John, and his older brother, Sam, in their wide-brimmed hats. The trees in the distance are the woods along the north side of the farm.

Oats were an important crop for feeding horses, cows, and pigs. The straw made good bedding for the barns. The fields came ripe in July, turning from silvery green to gold.

Before tractors, the oats were cut and bound with an oat binder drawn by horses. Then, by hand, the bundles were set up into shocks to dry. The last photo shows stacks of sheaves behind the barn, like the grain stacks in Monet's 1890-91 paintings. I don't know how or when or exactly where they were threshed.

I am old enough to remember oats cut, bundled, and shocked in the fields. But by then, the early 1960s, horses had been replaced by tractors, and a crew came with my Grampa Anderson's giant threshing machine and made pretty short work of the oats. The thundering contraption stood behind the barn, wagons full of sheaves were pulled in from the fields, and men with pitchforks stood on the wagons and tossed the bundles one by one into the hopper. Out of one spout blew the chaff and straw into a loose stack, and out of another spout poured the oats in a stream, to be driven and deposited into the granary.

There's an old hymn I learned growing up:

Bringing in the sheaves,
Bringing in the sheaves,
We will come rejoicing
Bringing in the sheaves!

I knew it had a double meaning. The harvest metaphor meant bringing souls to Christ in time to be saved, before the apocalypse and judgment. The harvest of our oats meant anxiety for my dad and uncle because the ripe grain was so fragile in the fields, vulnerable to hail or even a hard rain or wind, capable of producing financial crisis or ruin. At the end of oat harvest they were smiling and laughing. Rejoicing.

Looking at these photos, I know my grandmother was honoring that heroic labor, verifying the anxiety of the men she worked for, especially the one she would marry, and rejoicing with them at the end, documenting the strength and faith it took to grow, gather, and arrange those dense towers of grain. She must have known that oat stacks and horses were vanishing from agricultural practice. She would save a picture for her children.

Oat harvest and stacks on the Marty farm, ca. 1930. From the photo album of Viola Hendrickson Marty.

Humid continental

 

Margaret and Gayla in a corn field on the Marty farm, early 1960s. Kodachrome. Photo by Gordon Marty.

Corn grows in Minnesota because we have hot, humid summers. We're not known for these, of course—our winters get the headlines. But corn originated as maize in central Mexico, and it was able to migrate north because Gulf air pushes into Canada, giving the Mississippi River watershed steamy, sticky days, with 15 hours of sunlight a day for a month.

My guess is that my dad took this photograph in early July, that he took Mom and me along to a spot where he'd noticed the corn was doing really well, where he wanted to measure it and take a photo for the record. "Knee high by the fourth of July" meant a good crop, and here it's up to Mom's waist, taller than my three- or four-year-old head—you can barely see me peeking through the leaves at Daddy's lens. The location is a forty we called Applegate's, east of the woods, on the west side of highway 61 and the railroad tracks.

Our family grew corn to feed the dairy cows in this picture, here grazing in the woods, as well as pigs. Some corn was chopped green into silage and the rest was dried on the stalk, the cobs picked and ground into feed. Our other two crops were hay and oats.

Agriculture began in river valleys, where flooding happened naturally. Crops like corn, potatoes, wheat, and rice first thrived in earth torn open by natural disasters. To plant crops beyond floodplains, humans have plowed up the earth and opened it to erosion, another sort of natural disaster.

The elm tree behind Mom is the site of the rock pile, the place we dumped all the rocks we collected from the fields, heaved up by frost and other mysterious forces. The rock pile was located on the foundation of a house that had burned in the early 1900s, yet another disaster, causing the Applegate family to move on and start over, selling this good land to the Marty brothers.

Marty brothers, July 4, 1940

My dad could tell you about the cars. But the point is, the family had two.

Sam and John Marty were first-generation Americans, brothers born in the 1800s. By the time this photo was taken, Sam (left) had raised a son off in the navy, buried a wife, and was about to marry again and build a little house across the yard. John (right) had married late in life and had two sons—my dad, the littlest, and Uncle Gaylon, next to him—who would take over the farm.

The country was not yet at war, but much of the world was, and I wonder what it meant to Sam and John that their first language was a dialect of German. The Great Depression was not entirely over, and Dad remembered that having two cars on the farm meant a lot. To Sam, it meant the Martys had arrived, but it was excessive to John, a cause for unease.

My grandmother undoubtedly took this photo. In her album, it's uncharacteristically blurry—hard now to know whether to make it small or large to see better what it contains. In the background, left to right, are the pig house, the big barn for horses and cows, the wooden silo (through the trees), and the old log barn.

Was July 4 on a Sunday that year? I haven't checked, but I know that Sam and John would dress up like this for the Hendrickson picnic with my grandmother's relatives, church or not. White shirts and ties were for special occasions and jeans were for work, not the other way around. The Fourth of July was like Christmas without coats—a feast and fun with cousins and aunts and uncles, honoring immigrant ancestors, celebrating America.

July 4, 1940. Sam, Gordon, Gaylon, and John Marty on the Marty farm. Photo from the album of Viola Marty.

Cooking contest

Hendrickson sisters, ca. 1940. Left to right: Viola, Effie, Ethel, Laura, Julia, Nina, Della, Amy. 

On July 3, for decades, this family of sisters was cooking and baking up a storm, getting ready for the annual Hendrickson July 4 picnic. I remember attending Fourth of July picnics with the Hendrickson clan at the homes of almost every one of them.

It was always a feast. Most impressive was the table of assorted pies for dessert—fruit pies and cream pies and lemon merinque—accompanied by ice cream from a big brown paper canister. There was coffee and lemonade, no liquor. We were Baptists.

For many years, the lemonade was made with real lemons, cut in half and squeezed, the juice combined with water and sugar in a big cold crock brought up from a cool cellar or basement.

Lawrence Bergfalk, Ethel's husband, was sought out by the kids to blow up firecrackers. He always had some, and he always had a new trick to demonstrate...carving whistles from willow branches, a visual trick of some sort (no cards), or an animal sound produced in an ingenious way. Kids and adults also played softball and croquet and Scrabble.

Every family brought a dish for the main course plus dessert, usually pie. For women who married into the family, deciding what to make and bring to the Hendrickson picnic was a challenge because it had better be good. I made my first lemon meringue pie for a July 4 picnic and it was well received.