Farmers Were Carpenters Too

May 7, 1931  We worked on the granary again.

The Siemens men continued building their new granary.  When they had moved here from Manitoba in October 1930, only seven months before, this was only bare farmland.  They had already built a barn, chicken house, and house.  In a couple months, they would be harvesting their first wheat crop, so they needed to have a granary ready to store the harvest. 

A farmer had to be a carpenter as well.  With the help of his sons (Cornelius was fortunate to have three teenage sons) and neighbors, a farmer had to be able to build a barn, a house, and many outbuildings, as well as do constant projects and repairs on the yard.  There were no power tools, so all the boards and beams had to be cut by hand.  They could not buy ready-made trusses at the lumber yard, so they had to be able to measure angles accurately.  Drilling and planing were also done by hand.  There were no air guns to drive nails.  Carpentry was hard work, but it must have been satisfying to see the buildings that they had built with their own hands rise up.