My Life in the Little Brown House, part 21: Barn, Cow, and Chickens

Besides the house there were three other structures on the lot, the largest of the three being the barn. The barn was always there in my memory so it must have been constructed when I was quite young. The west end was the stall where the cow was kept (and milked in the winter months). There was a small loft or haymow in the overheard part of the barn where the hay to feed the cow during the winter was stored. I recall vaguely the hay being unloaded from a hayrack into the haymow via a small hay door at the east end of the barn. I think that Uncle Carl provided the hay but I’m not certain.

























Outside the barn on the west was a small lot where the cow was let out during the winter months — it was shielded on the north (and west?) by a board fence for protection against the winter weather. My father always did the milking; only once when he had one of his “sick” headaches did I try my hand at the task, without too much success. It takes a little practice to milk a cow with any degree of proficiency and it wasn’t until we moved to the farm that I really achieved the skill. I don’t recall specifically when I last milked a cow — whether it was the last summer I spent on the farm between my two years at the university, the two-week vacation I took after finishing school in the summer of 1942 and before I left for work at Shell in California, or on one of the annual vacations that I spent back in Iowa during the war years or the later years before my parents moved back to Gowrie. Milking a cow, or being faced with the prospect of needing to do so, has been an occasional, rather unsettling dream I have experienced in the past, although not in recent years. I have had similar unsettling dreams about having to harness a team of horses. Why I should regard these activities as unsettling dreamwise I don’t know. Both were accepted and normal tasks during the years on the farm.

The cow the family had during the early years in Gowrie was usually, if not always, a Holstein. Periodically of course, my father would need to take the cow off to be bred, and I recall wondering what was going on when my father, late in the evening, went off leading the cow. We had no need or use for the calf that was produced; I remember that on at least once occasion it was given to my Strand cousins, and I seem to have the memory of it being pointed out to me on a visit to Uncle Reuben’s homestead.

















Holstein cow

The remaining part of the floor or ground level part of the barn was originally divided into a room for chickens, a little storage area for garden and lawn tools and the garage for the car. The room for chickens was on the south side of the barn, sandwiched between the area occupied by the cow on the west and the small room for garden implement storage. Outside the barn there was a small yard for the chickens to scratch around in. It was not long tough before my parents acquired the lot (or lots) just north of the little brown house to be used as pasture for the cow. When this acquisition was made the chickens were moved to new and larger quarters in a separate chicken house located on the south edge of the pasture, not far from the barn.

Before the lots could be used for pasture they needed to be fenced in and I have a vague recollection of this happening. Inside the pasture there was a further fenced area for the chickens along where the cow was excluded; the chickens however also ranged all over the pasture. The pasture was never seeded to any particular grass — I think it was just the naturally occurring grasses. During the summertime the cow was also pastured at times in part of a community area called “Lindquist’s” pasture which was located across a lane north of the pasture belonging to my parents. Lindquist’s pasture was a large L-shaped piece of land, extending to the M & St. L tracks on the north and the road along the west end of Gowrie leading to the little town of Callender six miles to the north. It could easily have been 20 acres or more in extent. Various townspeople used it for summer pasturage for their cows — I guess having a cow for family milk was fairly common in the town. I recall one man Moberg having a rather obstreperous animal, with horns. This beast attacked one elderly person, by name Julander I believe, and I seem to recall he expired because of his injuries.