The property itself was quite a sight. There were nine buildings in all, none of which were in great condition. The buildings consisted of the old farmhouse, the garage, a washhouse, the outhouse, a machine shed, two wire corn cribs, an old barn, and a shed on the east side of the property. An old underground fuel tank was located near the corn cribs, and an orchard was just behind the house.
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| The farm as seen in 1955 prior to Robert Polley's purchase (owned by Maggie Houser) |
Because I had no machinery to work the land myself, I had the neighbor of the property (Galen Lessen) continue to farm the land as he had been doing prior to my purchase. However, after just two years, that would all change. In 1966, I purchased a 1967 John Deere 3020 tractor, a John Deere disc, a John Deere four-bottom plow, and a John Deere 495A four-row planter from Carl Lauer's John Deere Implement Company in Lincoln, Illinois. I bought these right after the Logan County Fair in August. I would hire Virgil Lessen from Emden to do the harvest.
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| John Deere 3020, still on farm today |
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| John Deere 495A |
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| John Deere four-bottom-plow |
In 1971, another opportunity presented itself. While driving just a mile north of the 80 acres, I saw a For Sale sign next to another piece of farmland. After inquiring about this land, I learned that 50 acres were for sale, split into 20 acres and 30 acres divided by a little creek. The current owners had just inherited the land and did not want it. And those fields were quite a sight...overgrown with weeds for as far as the eye could see. Not wanting to make a foolish purchase, I asked Mike Klokkenga from Emden if he would take a look at the land for me. After looking at it, he said, "Bob, all that land needs is a shave and a haircut." Heeding his words, I took out a loan yet again, this time from the Federal Land Bank, and purchased this land for $500/acre, for a total of $25,000. Also taking his advice, I purchased an orange Woods shredder, as that land really did need some attention.
I also had a Morton machine shed built in 1971 just south of the old farmhouse. I erected one grain bin just east of the machine shed in the same year.
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| The farm as seen in 1973 (property already cleaned up considerably, new machine shed already shown in top right) |
The farm was not strictly a grain operation, however. As a matter of fact, we ended up dabbling in just about everything! With Bobby in high school and Ricky in grade school, we purchased shorthorn heiffers off of Jim Klockenga (Mike's son) for $400 apiece. Jim was an Ag student/FFA member of mine. We also tried raising feeder calves at one time. I bought several weaned calves and raised them to market weight. This venture wasn’t too profitable, I found out. We had to buy the feed from B&B Milling Company in Emden—they bulk loaded the feed into the back of my pickup. We would then place a tarp over it and drive to the farm. Then Bobby, Ricky and I would unload the feed by hand using 5-gallon buckets and carry it and dump it into a granary. Then we would carry feed with 5-gallon buckets to the feed troughs. That was tremendous amount of work.
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| 1955 ad for The B&B Milling Company, Emden, Illinois |
Years later, I purchased an auger wagon that B&B dumped the feed in and I towed it behind my truck to the farm. We would then hook up the 3020 tractor and connect the PTO shaft and auger the grain out. That saved a lot of labor. Eventually, I got to the point where I bought my own feed grinder—and we would grind our own feed here on the farm and auger it out into the feed hoppers or granary.
We also tried our hand with hogs—and found out they were a better investment for us than those cows ever were. We started out by using a single-sow orange-colored farrowing house. One could lift the “roof” lid and look in on the sow and her litter. We had to open a door behind the sow in order to allow her to back out into an open stall where she could eat and get water. A few years later, we ended up buying a second single-sow farrowing house. We even set up farrowing stalls on the east side of the barn and had a kerosene heater in their to keep the piglets warm. However, in the early 1970’s, I purchased a 12-sow farrowing house—and we started farrowing pigs four times a year—we did this for about 10 years.
As a matter of fact, Rick's very first loan was not to buy a car...but pigs! He opened up a checking account and loan in Hartsburg with his first loan being $220 to buy a sow and eight or nine piglets! The pigs were Chester-Whites. When it came time to sell the hogs, we would put stock racks on the back of my pickup—stock racks that Bobby built as an FFA project in high school---and loaded the hogs and took them to the stockyards in Peoria. We could usually haul about (10) 220-pound hogs at a time. When those stock racks wore out, I purchased a metal set that one could slide in and out of the pickup bed.
The farm was work. There was always something to be done in those days. When we raised cattle, we had to feed them every day after school. I would go home from Hartsburg school where I taught, pick up Bobby and Ricky, and we would drive the eight miles out to the farm to feed the cows. We had to do this every single day.
At one point, Bobby ended up winning a dairy cow from the Rotary Club, and after she freshened, this meant we had to milk her every morning and night! This meant more driving! Ricky never did learn how to milk her, though, so this was left to Bobby and me.
With the cattle, too, we would often move them over to pasture from the 80 acres. The pasture was located a few miles away, so rather than load them up in the truck and make several trips, we would actually do a cattle drive down Lazy Row Road! At our peak, we had around 25-30 head of cattle. The pasture was located about four miles to the west, just across Kickapoo Creek.
Our pick-up truck during that time was a 1966 Chevrolet which was purchased for $2200. The truck had the "four-on-the-floor" transmission but had no air-conditioning or radio. It was definitely a work truck. We carried sideboards on the truck that Bobby had made when he built the stock racks. You don’t see it so much anymore except on business trucks, but those were the days when people put their names on both doors of the cab. Our truck said “Robert O. Polley and Sons/Hartsburg, Illinois"—and I had ‘Bobby and Ricky’ placed up near the top of the door by the window. In winter time, the boys had found a couple of round metal Coca-Cola signs and they tied a rope to the hitch and then to the first sign—and then another rope from the first sign to the smaller back sign. They would then hop on and slide around town on the snow. It wasn’t the safest thing to do, but they sure had fun.
Ricky learned how to drive the shift in this truck by sitting on my lap. I would work the pedals and he would shift. As he got bigger, he would start driving from the farm to home himself and I would sit on the passenger side—then we would stop a couple of miles from town—and then we would swap seats before getting to Hartsburg!
Of course, the land itself needed work, too. We would constantly have to mow the grass on the 80 and 50 acres. On the east side of the 80 acres, a fence-post line (no longer there) would get so overgrown with weeds. We would take the old Bachtold weedmower (sold in 2006) a half-mile down, then a half-mile back to keep our property line clean. We would also mow the very steep ditch along the roadside over on the 50 with that same mower. That was work.
Also, over on the 50, we took down a wire corn crib a few years after I bought the place. It was located right at the middle entrance next to the road. Before the combines became popular, farms used to harvest the entire ears at a time. Seeing as how we no longer did this, we took down all three of those cribs (two at the house, one at the 50). But before we took down that one on the 20 acres, we received a phone call from the police. We were ordered to cut down marijuana plants found next to the crib! We complied.
We also had to address an issue with the entrance to the back 30 acres. When I purchased the land, a bridge had already made access, but the bridge was old and constantly being eroded at the base. This entryway was straight back from the current middle road access. It was made up of seven old railroad rails that stretched from one side of the ditch to the other side—and very thick wooden planks were placed perpendicularly across the rails. But the water in the ditch would constantly erode the ground away from each side of the bridge making it unsafe. To support the rails, we made support pillars by digging out (by hand) a foundation and erecting pillars made from welding (3) 55-gallon hallowed drums on top of each other. We had 6 sets of these pillars—3 on each side. We then poured concrete into the foundation and the pillars. We placed an I-beam across each set of pillars and put the rails on top of these I-beams and then the wooden planks on top of those. This lasted for a while, but the water eventually eroded the dirt away from the foundations—and this bridge became unsafe again. I ended up having to buy an actual railroad tank car and having to build another bridge on the north side of the property (the one that still exists today).
This farm was work!
The land constantly needed attention, too. Before I switched to no-till in the early 2000's, we continually worked up the land. The farm was not tiled until the 1980's, so if I didn't work up the land in the fall after harvest, the dirt would be cloddy and rough when it came time to prepare it in the spring. In the early days of the farm, our work-horse was the 1967 3020. We would disc the land, then plow it with the 4-14 plow. The 3020 would always be the mainstay throughout the years, but we owned a John Deere 4020 with a square cab, a White tractor (very powerful but the engine mounts were cracked so I had to sell), a Farmall tractor used to shred the cornstalks while the 3020 came behind with the plow, a 4430 with the modern round cab, and finally the 4450 (sold in 2011).
The farm was always a work in progress, ever-changing year to year. After purchasing the 80 acres, I tore down the old machine shed and had a lean-to constructed with an opening to the south. However, a violent wind storm moved through and pulled those posts out of the ground and bent the lean to building back over on itself. After this storm, I tore that down and had the Morton machine shed built in 1971. I also had a grain bin built in the early 1970's. I would later add a second identical bin directly to the east of it. Both of these still stand today.
The machinery constantly changed, too. Over the course of the years, I acquired two more cultivators—one front attached and then a rear attached. I also bought a DMI plow that allowed one to plow without shedding the corn stalks first, a soil finisher, a John Deere 7000 Max Emerge six-row planter (with 30-inch rows opposed to the 38-inch rows on the 495A), two DMI grain wagons, a grain auger, and a John Deere chisel plow to use after harvesting soybeans. When we raised our own hay for our cattle, I purchased a John Deere baler, a hay rake, and very handy hay stacker made by New Holland. Bobby and Rick each built hayrack wagons as FFA projects in high school.
As far as those two DMI wagons...I basically had my hand forced to purchase those! During harvest one year, I had borrowed these two wagons from Rohlf's Implement. Rick was hauling the two wagsons full of grain over to the elevator in Hartsburg. He had just left the farm and was going over the bridge just to the west of the 80 acres. That bridge even today has a sharp incline followed by a sharp decline. Well, immediately after going across the bridge, Rick noticed that the two wagons were following him on the side of the tractor! Sure enough, the hitch pin had bounced out and the two wagons careened off into the ditch, spilling the entire loads of grain. Of course, with the weight of the load, the wagons were bent up, as well. We had to hire a farmer with a grain vacuum to clean up our grain from the ditch, and I had to pay to have the wagons repaired. I hadn't planned on it, but I ended up buying two DMI wagons that day.
In 1980, I had the current farmhouse built. I hired Bob Ford and Kent Young out of Atlanta, Illinois, to build the house. We moved in the day before Halloween in 1980. (I had also had my previous house in Hartsburg built, as well. I paid $8000 for that house and carried a mortgage of $150/month. We moved in to that house in 1955. It was built over a swampy area, though, and often had water in the basement until I hired someone to put tiling next to the walls.)
Sometime during the 1980's, I started raising Limousin cattle. I ended up selling my last one in 1992. I had my second heart attack, and Betty was left with three cows to take care of (feeding morning and night). Not wanting to do this work herself, she called Jack Knollenberg and asked if he would help. He graciously accepted the request, and Betty did not have to take care of the cattle. But that was the turning point with animals on our farm. We never owned another.
At one point in the 1980's, we even raised chickens...I think between 1983-1985. My grandson Andy would love to go out in the machine shed and retrieve the eggs. Betty was expecting some family company, and she was embarrassed to have chickens running all over the yard, so we rounded up all of the chickens, threw them into a grain sack, and dumped them on one of our neighbors farms who raised chickens! We never told him that it was us who did that!
I retired from teaching in 1986, a year after Betty retired in 1985. After years and years of sweat and labor, the house and farm was finally paid off in the early 1996, 32 years after we purchased the land.
I had the 80 acres tiled in the 1994. Sometime in the 1980's, I also had the current barn constructed. The old one was finally torn down, nearly twenty years after I uttered those now-true words:
"Every building goes."
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| "Every building goes..." |
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| The Polley Farm as seen today. Every building new. |
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