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
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