A Windstorm

While my father’s principal employment was at the bank, he was also the part-time bookkeeper for the Johnson Lumber Company. Typically he worked at the bank from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an hour off for lunch. He always walked home for this. Then we would spend about two hours at the lumber company before coming home at about 6 p.m. I have the vague impression that he followed this schedule more rigorously in the winter than in the summer. In the summer months he would more frequently use these late afternoon hours in yard work etc. about the house. A substantial part of the remuneration from this second job was used to pay for the modifications to the house, and also in construction of a small barn, a chicken house, and a playhouse for us children.

The barn was the first of these to be made and contained initially a stall area for the cow we always had, an area for chickens and a garage. Upstairs was a haymow for feed for the cow in the winter. After the chicken house was constructed, the area in the barn that had been used for chickens was converted into a utility area for tools etc. (actually now that I think of it there had been previously a small room for garden tools etc. but this had been expanded to take in the chicken area as well).

The playhouse was quite good-sized, perhaps 12 or 15 feet square, with the top half of the walls being latticework. It ended its existence by being moved out to the Peterson farm after the family moved there and was converted into sort of a secondary chicken house for young chickens.

During a windstorm in my junior year in high school it was picked up and blown against the large hay door of the barn, damaging it (it landed upside down in front of the barn) and the hay door. It occurred during the evening of the annual junior/senior banquet at the high school. This even had the mothers of the junior class preparing and serving the meal so both my mother and I (as I was in the junior class that year) were not at home that evening.

As we were driving home after the banquet, I suppose at about 10 p.m. or so, we passed a farmstead about a mile west of the Peterson farm and slightly to the south. There had been a new barn under construction at the time and the work had progressed to the stage where the rafters had been erected but not as yet firmly tied together. We noticed that the rafters were all blown down, and I think this was the first real indication we had of the storm (at the school house we were more or less insulated from the noise of the wind etc.). When we arrived at home we of course learned of the storm damage. The story was freakish in a way — the playhouse had been lifted up and carried over some electric lines between it and the barn before it had been blown at a lower elevation than the wires against the barn door.

This was also the storm with the barn on the Strand farm was damaged — the path of the storm seemed to be in sort of a northeast direction. The Strand barn was repaired since at that time a barn was still an important farm building. Sometime in the 1980s, after Vincent owned that part of the Strand farm, the barn was again damaged in a windstorm and this time it was simply demolished as the need for it had mostly disappeared.

There seems to have been a “storm track” that tended to funnel storms near the Strand farmstead. I can recall either my father or my grandfather relating the conditions of a tornado in the early 1900s or late 1800s. The family had retreated to the storm cellar, which was entered through an external entrance on the south side of the house. Some member of the family stood in the entrance watching the storm about a mile south of the house and seeing a neighboring farmhouse blown up into the air. I’d guess this had been my grandfather.