The Family Farm

The first picture is Dave Hannon and some of the horses on the Hannon family farm in 1944. The bottom picture is my Grandfather, his sister and parents in front of the house on the farm in Kouts, Porter, Indiana.

The Hannon family has lived on this property since 1842 when the Irish immigrants settled in northwestern Indiana. When they came to this particular piece of land, this area of the world was quite different from what it is like today.

The horse photo was included to help us understand that even with modern farming and farm equipment available, my ancestors will still farming with horses within the past 60 years. Thinking about that today and realizing how few people have even been to a farm compelled me to share these thoughts.

When the Hannon family was farming, there were a variety of animals and plants on the farmstead. Horses were the primary species because every farm needed animals to work the land. Cattle, chickens and hogs were also critical to the success of the family farm. In addition to the livestock, corn, apples, hay, oats, potatoes and cherries were available on the land. You can see the markings for the fruit tree grove marked on the various plat maps. My mother recalls some other crops and thinks there was wheat and some possibilities of additional fruits like grapes, plums and pears. This arrangement allowed the farm to care for the family -- and extended family -- the livestock and the land too.

As I look through old photos of the farmstead, I see lots of grass and fences which would be used by the various animals for grazing. Also seen with regularity were wild animals that shared the grazing spaces with the farm animals. In many of the old pictures, there are any number of farm animals in the background -- and strangely enough, one monkey that apparently visited for a weekend of photos.

As the 1950's approached, the photos start to show more and more mechanical farm equipment and less and less horses. This likely changed some of the crops being planted too as there was less need for oats to feed farm horses and less need for pasture to keep them in. In the pictures from the local newspaper showing modern farming on the Hannon farm, corn seems to be the dominant crop. Is this really the case or was that the crop that happened to be in the fields when the newspaper came? I'll probably never know that with certainty.

When we visited last summer, corn was certainly king in the Porter County countryside. There is less evidence of livestock, and there are ribbons of asphalt woven through the corn in the Indiana farmland.

Links:

http://www.kouts.org/ Kouts, Porter, Indiana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kouts,_Indiana Kouts, Porter, Indiana

Hannon Family Reunion

Here's a crew of Irish folks form 1935 at the Hannon farm in Kouts, Porter, Indiana.

A smaller gathering of some descendants of the 1935 crew in 2005 in Kouts, Porter, Indiana.

From Whence We Came

Mary and John Hannon

One of my cousins -- and I hardly have any -- asked me why our ancestors came to this country. I have some information on why, but as with all things in research, the more information the better on that front. The family she was asking about came to the United States in 1842, slightly ahead of the massive 1845 potato failure. Perhaps they had insight or perhaps they were just lucky.





I still see in my extended family a sense of loyalty that may not be visible on the surface, but exists in ways that surprise many. We come together for events and occasions, and especially those surrounding births, marriages and deaths. This is something that I imagine comes down to us from the boggy western Ireland countryside that much of the family came from.





In Ireland, where our ancestors are from, the majority of young men would have been farmers. By the age of about seven, these youngsters would have learned how to dig trenches for potatoes and a few years later they would have been involved in sowing the fields. The young men would have been working with their fathers. The young girls would have been working alongside their mothers feeding chickens and pigs, tending to the fire and making the noon meal for the men and boys as they returned from the fields.





Every family member would have been participating and all ages would contribute to the cultivating the soil and developing a bond with each other and the land. That bond with family and land continues today.





1845 - Ireland
As most people are aware, the potato in Ireland failed. The potato blight in 1845 caused four successive crop failures. This meant that 1 in 6 peasants died of starvation and that about 25% of the Irish population emigrated.

The potato blight was caused by a fungus that can be treated by spraying a copper compound, however when it first appeared in the fall of 1845, there was no understanding of how to stop the fungus. Weather also factored into the potato blight with unusual warmth in January and February and an unusually wet Spring in 1846. The additional moisture forced farmers to leave potato shoots in the ground longer which then formed millions of new spores. These spores spread through the underground canals which caused rampant spreading from field to field until all the healthy plants had becoming decomposing, blackened, useless, stinking and rotting plants.



The first major exodus from Ireland took place in 1846 and 1847 when the Irish were fleeing the famine and fever. They found their way onto the "coffin ships" to escape a land that they now thought was cursed. The ships were aptly named because of the great numbers of people that died on board.



In family lore, there are stories about Michael Hannon and Mary Ann (Fitzgerald) Hannon being related to our Hannon family. They arrived somewhere around 1848 to 1849 with James Fitzgerald and moved into the small farming community of Acton which is about 25-miles west of Boston. Interestingly, there are also Heffernan families connected to both this family and ours.

Irish Homes
What was a family home like? For the home my mother grew up in, there was a door into the kitchen and that progressed into the main house. The kitchen, however, was the main focus of the house and was the room where most people congregated and most of the entertaining took place. The old house has a steep staircase that leads to the upstairs where there were bedrooms for the children. In her family, there were seven that lived to adulthood.

There was a parlor where other activities occurred. She recalls wakes being held there, piano lessons and Christmas. Seems that this was a special room that was not really utilized for day-to-day activities.

That old house still stands in Indiana and is in the family.

Hannon Family Reunion - 1935 Kouts, Porter, Indiana

If you know any of these people, please let me know and I'll add the names. Thanks!