MaryAnn Blanchette was born June 19, 1931, to Ann and Theodore Kack on the family farm south of Marshall without any physician or midwife in attendance. MaryAnn, at that time, was the youngest of four children. The eldest, Eleanor, was 18 years her senior.

MaryAnn’s parents were both children of immigrants. Her father’s parents emigrated from Germany to Iowa. He was fluent in several dialects of German. MaryAnn recalled that he could also speak with their Belgian neighbors in their own language. Her mom’s family had emigrated from Luxembourg and her mother could also speak some German, but was not as fluent as her father.

MaryAnn’s parents met and married in Iowa before moving to a farm near St. Leo with their baby, Eleanor. They farmed for several years near St. Leo and welcomed two sons to the family, Emil and Martin, both born on the farm. Tragedy struck the family, though, when Martin died as a child.

Her parents then bought land near Lake Marshall from the Addison family, who owned a hardware store in Marshall. The land was a mile and a half east of Highway 59 on County Road 6, commonly called the Milroy Road.

The land had no farm place, so her dad had to get to work building the most important structure for any farm. That was a fine, large, brick barn, of course. He also built a small brick structure, used in later years as a chicken coop. But the young family made that little building their home for three or four years until they could get a house.

The house they acquired for their farm was a matter of local lore for some years. MaryAnn explained, “It was a . . . Sears-Roebuck house in Green Valley and they moved it in the wintertime across the farm fields all the way from Green Valley to where the farm is.”

MaryAnn’s next older brother, Theodore, Jr. was born in the new home in 1927.

MaryAnn’s explained the freshwater system her dad designed for the farm.

“My dad was kind of an inventor. We had running water from all the time I can remember. He built a great big, brick — I called it a tank — by the windmill. And that windmill, when the wind blew, pumped the water in the tank and then it was pretty much just gravity flow and the hog house and the barn and our house had running water. But, of course, we didn’t have a bathroom.”

MaryAnn chuckled when she shared her earliest memory, “The earliest memory I think of is that we didn’t have a lawn mower. The sheep were turned out and we had fence all around the farm and the buildings and the sheep would be turned out in the house yard for a day or two and mowed the lawn.”

Her earliest farm chores related to her mom’s farming duties, which MaryAnn explained, “She did the chickens and the garden. She didn’t do too much else because she had a heart problem. They called it leakage of the heart.”

MaryAnn recalled her earliest farm responsibilities, “We had a big garden, so we had to help with the garden and then picking eggs. Yeah, I think I wasn’t very old when I’d go out.”

She explained that the eggs were income for her mom, “We sold them at the grocery store in a thirty dozen — one of those big egg crates.”

Her two oldest siblings were significantly older than MaryAnn, so they were no longer living at home during her childhood. As she grew older, her chores partner was her next older brother Ted, Jr. She described one of their responsibilities:

“We had dairy cows, too, purebred. My dad always raised purebred shorthorns and then, of course the horses were purebred Belgians. I think we had ten of them. The barn had stanchions and there were two horses in each stanchion. Our job was throwing the hay down and feeding them their oats.”

Chores weren’t always about work, though. MaryAnn chuckled while explaining how sometimes they led to fun.

“[O]n the other side of that (barn) entryway there was a big grain bin. They used to put corn or oats in there and us kids used to jump off of the edge of it down into the grain bin and goof off, which you weren’t supposed to be doing.”

She recalled another chore that was fun because they joined with the neighbor kids across the road.

“We used to herd cows. The Hoflock’s lived on the north side of the road. So their kids and us kids put the cows together in the summertime and then we’d herd the cows along the railroad track there, the one that came through Milroy. They just grazed along the railroad track and we’d have to watch them and make sure they didn’t run away too far.”

When I asked what they would do if they saw a train coming, she hesitated not at all, “Well, we just had to make sure we got them off, if they were up close to the rail line, we’d have to keep them away from it.”

Apparently the cows were used to rail traffic, as the line ran near both farms. MaryAnn pointed out, laughing, there was one, last responsibility on those days, “When we went home, we had to make sure we each got our right cows.”

It was not long, however, before MaryAnn had to grow up before her time.

I welcome your participation in and ideas about our exploration of prairie lives. You may reach me at prairieview pressllc@gmail.com.