A Day of Work on the Farm

February 11, 1935  Corney worked on the road.  Jake and John helped in the garden.  I burned tumbleweeds.  Mama and Mary sewed.  In the evening we went to Mother’s.

It must have been a nice day in late winter because lots of work was happening on the farm this day.  First, Corney worked on the road.  Kansas has an unusual road maintenance system whereby counties are divided into townships that maintain all but the largest roads in the county.  (About a third of all Kansas counties still use this system, including Meade County; but the rest have opted out and have a county-wide maintenance department.)  The Siemens lived in Logan Township in Meade County, and there was a township supervisor who was responsible to make sure roads were maintained.  In order to avoid voting taxes on themselves, the farmers contributed work and machinery to keep the roads up.  Corney and John frequently worked on the roads.  They may have been grading ruts from the winter mud, graveling roads, or building new ones; but there was surely always work to do to keep the roads in their own area passable.  The township supervisor would appoint a day when every farmer needed to gather to work on a certain road, and so Cornelius sent his son Corney to work for the family.

Jake and John were working in the garden.  They may have been raking together and burning the old plants and mulch from the last year and getting the garden ready to plow for planting.

Cornelius burned tumbleweeds that had piled up in the fences, corrals, and hedgerows.  The tumbleweed is the dried Russian thistle that detaches from its roots and rolls across the prairie in the wind.  It is a noxious weed and a non-native species that was accidentally imported in flax seed shipments from Russia in the early 1870s.  It spreads seeds as it rolls.  The tumbleweeds get stuck in fences, where they collect blowing snow and dust, and have to be burned.  It is a lot of fun to burn tumbleweeds because they are so dry and suddenly flame up in a huge ball of fire when you burn them.  (I'm sure Cornelius would have been shocked to know that eighty years later people would pay money for tumbleweeds.)

Finally, Cornelius’ wife Margaret and Mary sewed clothes.  They made shirts and pants for the men, dresses for the women, and clothes for the babies.  They only clothes they did not make were suit coats and dress pants for the men, which they bought in town.  They had a collection of homemade paper patterns marked with different sizes.  They used these to trace the outline of the different pieces for a garment on cloth and then cut them out and sewed them together with a treadle sewing machine.  With six adults and three small children in the house, there was a lot of sewing that had to be done.  And of course, they cooked three meals that day and took care of Henry (3 years old), Elmer (2), and Anna (13 months).

It surely felt good to get outside again after being cooped up inside for several months.  And in the evening they could enjoy going to Margaret’s mother, Katharina (Barkman) Reimer, who lived only a mile and a half to the east, for some visiting.