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The Elevator

By Bernie Hunhoff

A skeleton of the Rauville Grain Company still attracts attention north of Watertown.

Dave Goos recalls walking into Lampert Lumber Company in Sioux Falls and buying 9,000 pounds of 20-penny coated sinker nails.

“We were building a new wood crib elevator in Cavour and that’s what we needed,” says Goos, who designed some of America’s last wood structures before concrete and steel grain facilities became the norm.

He has fond memories of the Cavour project and others like it.”They’d already shipped rail carloads of rough lumber to the job site. We would hire local guys — hopefully some young farm boys — and take our foreman and together we would build something that was a key to the economy and the culture of the area.”

What they built has stood the test of time. Grain elevators — some more than 100 feet high and a century old — continue to tower over Cavour and other towns in America’s grain belt. Many wood elevators are still used for grain storage. A few have been repurposed into lodges or homes. Others, though abandoned, are built so solidly that they’ve thwarted all attempts by nature or man to take them down. They represent farm country’s tallest icons of yesteryear, beloved by photographers and painters and every farmer’s son or daughter who ever unloaded a trailer or truck full of grain and then drove home while carefully clutching a handwritten check from the manager.

Some call them the skyscrapers of the prairie or cathedrals of the plains. To farmers, however, they are just The Elevator.

Dave Goos designed classic crib elevators.

D&W Construction, the company that Goos worked for in the 1980s, still exists on the western outskirts of Sioux Falls. He says he loved the chance to build something that was so vital to a town, and he still relishes the stories that developed from such an unusual and rugged occupation.

Like the day Pete Puterbaugh,”a tough as nails ranch boy from North Dakota,” fell off the elevator at Burke and landed on a lumber pile.”He got busted up pretty badly, but he walked away from the fall,” Goos says. On another occasion, Goos says Puterbaugh saw a badger digging a hole in a pasture.”As Pete told it, he got ahold of the scruff on each side of the badger’s belly and tried to pull it out of the hole, but he said it seemed like the badger ‘turned around inside his own skin’ and came at him, looking like it had two fistfuls of 16-penny nails for claws buzz sawing for his chest. All Pete could do was pick it up and throw it as far away from him as he could and run.”

Goos recalls an occasion when a few of the workers painted a picture of a scantily clad lady atop a new elevator.”It didn’t take long for the phone to ring in the office at D&W,” he says.

At yet another worksite, they were addressing a rat infestation, a common problem for grain facilities.”The manager had read about some powerful sonic device that would drive the rats crazy, so he bought one, wired it to a 2-by-6, plugged it in and shoved it up under the backside of the elevator on a Friday night. On Monday morning he was wondering if it made any difference when the guy who maintained the buses at the local school came and hurriedly asked for every shovel and broom they could spare.”

“My god, do we have rats!” said the bus man.

Goos says elevator projects always drew onlookers, but a job at Jefferson attracted an unexpected crowd.”A tornado had come through and taken down two 36-foot diameter bins. We made a mock foundation in the parking lot and built new bins to go on the old foundations. Then we dropped a cable through the bin top openings so we could hoist them with a crane onto the old foundations. But the day we moved them just happened to be homecoming day and they had a parade going on. People left the parade and brought their lawn chairs to sit along the railroad siding and watch us lift the bins into place. It was the last thing we wanted because we didn’t know if it was going to work.”

Goos studied mechanized agriculture at South Dakota State University and worked for GTA Feeds before joining D&W Construction as a project engineer. His job was to design the elevators.

“One of the first things you’d do is meet with the elevator’s board of directors, which was usually a group of farmers,” he says.”They always farmed and did chores until dark, so you’d be meeting late at night when everybody else was in bed. We would already have the place all measured out and we’d present a design. So often, they didn’t know exactly what they needed, but they trusted us — and we felt the weight of that responsibility because the elevator was such an important part of their community.”

The trust was well-placed. Most of the D&W-built wood elevators still stand. Many still hold grain.

“We still help to repair the old wood elevators,” says Jason Hiemstra, who started with D&W in 1987 when it was transitioning to steel construction.”We’ll still replace the siding or the cribbing. The wood elevators are actually the best way to store grain because the wood absorbs moisture while corrugated metal actually sweats and adds moisture.”

D&W Construction of Sioux Falls built wood crib elevators for decades. Jason Hiemstra, who has blueprints of the jobs and a carpenter’s cribbing hatchet, says crews still repair the sturdy structures.

Hiemstra, now one of the company’s owners, says insurance actuaries are the major threat to wood elevators.”They are starting to kibosh them because they see them as a fire hazard.” Grain dust is explosive; even a spark from an overheated bearing is sometimes enough to create an explosion.

He says old elevators also face problems with everything from mice to worn and frayed electrical wiring. Still, he appreciates Goos’ nostalgia for the elevators.”If I had built them, I’d probably feel the same way.”

An artist’s painting of an old elevator hangs in the entryway at D&W and Hiemstra keeps a cribbing hatchet — the main tool for carpenters who built wood elevators — in his office.

Dale Kelling joined the D&W crew in 1969 and retired as company president in 2011. He says D&W constructed its initial wood elevator in 1955, but the crib-style dates to the late 1800s when grain elevators were first built along the railroad tracks of the Dakotas and neighboring states.”Farmers didn’t want to haul the grain any further than they had to in those days,” he says.

Wood construction required skills that are rare today.”That cribbing hatchet was the weight of a heavy hammer,” Kelling says.”We tried air nailers back in the 1970s, but they wouldn’t pound the nail tight enough to cinch the wood together. That’s where the cribbing hatchet came in.”

He says the main purpose of the hatchet blade was to provide weight for the hammer head.”I don’t know if they actually used it to cut the lumber at one time, but we used hand saws. We bought saws by the dozens before we went to circular saws.”

Cribbed elevators were built by stacking 2-by-4, 2-by-6 and 2-by-8 boards horizontally, like logs in a cabin. The widest boards were used at the bottom, and the narrow 2-by-4s finished off the top. Steel rods were used as corner braces to reinforce the walls by resisting the pressure from the grain inside the bins.

Horses powered the grain-moving systems in the 19th century. Gas engines replaced the horses; electrical motors move the grain today.

In the heyday of small family farms, the grain elevator was the hub of most towns.”That was the gathering place,” Kelling recalls.”Some would come for coffee in the morning or to play cards in the afternoon, especially in the winter.”

Many elevators stocked livestock feeds and medicines, seeds, fertilizer, hardware and other farm supplies. They were also an entry to international grain markets. When farmers sold their grain to the local elevator, they drove away with checks that were hopefully big enough to keep a family on the land for another year.

Family farms are fewer in number, but many have survived even as other institutions deserted rural America. Railroads abandoned most of their tracks. Automobile and farm machinery manufacturers consolidated dealerships. Bishops closed churches. Politicians shuttered schools. Bureaucrats eliminated post offices. Consequently, much rural architecture — church spires, train depots and automotive garages — are disappearing on the Great Plains. Wood grain elevators are also fewer in number, but they are outlasting the other structures.

A few have even been repurposed. The Wik family converted a Faulk County elevator near Wecota into a private home. In the Gregory County town of Herrick, a 1907 elevator serves as a local bar and grill called Run of the Mill.

Jenna Carlson Dietmeier, interim director of South Dakota’s State Historic Preservation Office in Pierre, says grain elevators may not appear historically significant to people unaware of the heritage and unique construction.”They are not often seen as exemplary architecture. They are very utilitarian, and they don’t always stand out to the untrained eye. But they definitely tell the story of South Dakota’s agricultural history, and they are worthy of preservation.”

A wood crib elevator is one of the few remaining structures in Esmond, a Kingsbury County ghost town.

Carlson Dietmeier’s office is doing county-wide surveys of buildings that qualify for the National Register of Historic Places.”There are multiple grain elevators that are eligible,” she says. However, many exist in small towns where it’s difficult to find a new use. Some sit alone on the prairie because, thanks to their sturdy crib-style construction, they are the last structure standing.

Neighboring states’ historians are also eyeing elevators. The Montana Preservation Alliance has embarked on a major study of the issue, hoping to not only frame the problem nationally but to also develop models for repurposing vacant elevators.

Bruce Selyem started the Country Grain Elevator Historical Society in Bozeman, Montana, in 1995. He and his wife Barbara research and photograph old elevators; they hope to someday create a museum-quality interpretive site in an old grain facility.

Last year the Alliance for Historic Wyoming developed a tour of historic agricultural buildings that are typically off-limits to the public. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming, entrepreneurs are converting a century-old wood elevator into a bar and entertainment center.

North of the U.S. and Canadian border, preservationists in Saskatchewan were alarmed to discover that 94 percent of their province’s historic grain elevators have disappeared. Government officials counted 2,878 elevators in a 1962 study; today they estimate there are less than 180, though efforts are now underway to save some.

Carlson Dietmeier, the preservation officer in Pierre, says 133 elevator properties have been identified in South Dakota’s recent Cultural Resource Geographic Research Information Display database. She believes there may be additional structures not yet surveyed or recorded. Fifty-five of the 133 were recorded as being eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Six are already listed. They include the Herrick elevator which has been converted to a lodge; an elevator on the Barber farm near Lily; an elevator on the Lyons property in Lake County; two elevators at the Sexauer Seed Company in Brookings; and Central Dakota Flouring Mill in Arlington.

“The elevator and the local restaurant were the two hubs of activity in a small farm town,” says Dave Goos, the engineer who helped to build them in the 1980s.”If you wanted to know what was going on, that’s where you went.”

Farmers and ranchers often laud the importance of land by noting that”God isn’t making any more of it.” The same might be said of wood cribbed grain elevators.

While the grain elevators outlasted churches and other iconic rural buildings because of their ridiculously strong construction, even 9,000 pounds of nails isn’t enough to ward off fire worries, insurance actuaries and the vagaries of nature and time.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Buzz from Prairie Moon Farm

By Laura Johnson Andrews

The Freemans of Prairie Moon Farm include (from left) Harry, Willa, Elena, Grace and Harrison (not pictured).

Grace Freeman might be one of the calmest people we’ve ever met. Nothing seems to faze the Clay County beekeeper. When a mouse jumps out of the brome at her, she doesn’t blink. If she’s posing for a picture with a chicken and the bird leaves a deposit on her shirt, it doesn’t erase the friendly smile from her face. Put her next to a hive with thousands of stinging insects, and she’s happy as can be.

A Cincinnati native, Freeman fell in love with beekeeping in 1985 through a work-study job with an entomologist at the University of Montana.”We would go and collect bees and study them to see if they had picked up pollutants,” she says. When she and her husband, Harry, moved to Madison, Wisconsin for grad school, Freeman worked for a large-scale beekeeper, managing up to 1,000 colonies. After Harry took a job in the psychology department of the University of South Dakota, the couple settled in a farmhouse on Frog Creek Road, where they have lived for 21 years with their children, Elena, Willa and Harrison.

The Freemans’ home, Prairie Moon Farm, is a back-to-the-lander’s Eden. Chickens and guinea fowl roam freely, a trio of penned-up rescue llamas provide manure to fertilize her garden and scare away deer, and a friendly dog named Saige welcomes visitors. There’s a shed full of kayaks for paddles on the Missouri, a greenhouse and a small but fragrant structure where Freeman creates tinctures and blends herbs for teas she sells at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market.

Freeman’s hives are in a little glade a short walk away from the buildings, past a pond and a stand of honeysuckle bushes. She puts on her veiled beekeeper’s hat and sets the smoker filled with smoldering brown paper scraps and wood chips on the ground. The smoke fools the bees into letting their guard down, making it less likely they will sting.”They think there’s a fire and they have to travel,” Freeman says.”They fill up on honey, and get so full that their stinger goes down.”

When working with bees, Freeman recommends wearing white or light-colored clothes.”Bees get angry if you wear dark colors,” she says.”It reminds them of bears.” And be sure to tuck in your clothes.”You don’t want them crawling in your shirt,” she tells us. Some beekeepers wear a protective suit and gloves, but after decades of working with bees, Freeman has developed a more casual style — a long-sleeved white shirt over a tank top and shorts.

Freeman uses Langstroth hives, which consist of a stack of wooden boxes, each of which contains hanging wooden frames upon which the bees build their comb, raise young and store honey. The supers, shallower boxes at the top of the hive, will hold harvestable honey. The queen, the brood and the colony’s food storage all go in the deeper, lower boxes. A metal rack called a queen excluder separates the two portions of the hive. The rack’s slats are big enough to allow worker bees to pass between sections, but keep the larger queen down in the brood cells where she belongs. After all, no one wants bee eggs mixed in with their honey.

Freeman inspects a frame from one of the hive’s supers. She harvests honey in late summer.

The hive’s lid is stuck on tightly with propolis, a gluey yellowish-brown substance that bees make from tree resins and beeswax. Freeman uses a mini crowbar called a hive tool to break through the glue and help manipulate frames as she checks on the bees and their activities.

The queen is the only female in the hive that mates and lays the fertilized eggs that develop into worker bees, so Freeman looks for fresh eggs to make sure the queen bee is doing her job.”Eggs change every day,” she says.”If you can see the one-day-old eggs, then you know you have a viable queen. Even if it’s a two-day-old egg, something could’ve happened to her.”

Bee society is fascinatingly complex and overwhelmingly female. The only males are the drones. They have no stingers and do no gathering — their only job is to be available to mate with a virgin queen bee. After mating, they die. The worker bees, all female, cycle through a series of roles — foraging, building, housekeeping, childcare, attending the queen, guarding the hive. There are even mortuary bees, who haul the colony’s dead away from the hive. With so much to do, it’s no surprise that the life of a worker bee is short. During the busy spring and summer seasons, they might live a brief four to six weeks.

Under most conditions, bees manage themselves, but there are critical points during the year when a beekeeper should pay attention. In spring, Freeman helps the bees get ready for the season, making sure that they have food to last them until the flowers really start blooming and that there’s plenty of space to make new honey. In June, when the clover blooms, she watches for signs of swarming.”If you haven’t provided them with enough room, then they’ll divide,” she says. The bees will create a second queen and fly off in search of a new hive, leaving the old queen with a few guards for protection. A divided colony means less honey, so Freeman destroys any potential new queen cells she spots.

Once the fear of swarming is over, Freeman’s bee work slows down a bit. When the bees fill up the existing frames, she adds supers. Honey is harvested in August.”Then they have time in the fall to put on enough winter weight so you don’t have to feed them so much sugar water,” Freeman says. After that, it’s time to winterize the hive.

Winter and early spring are tricky times for beekeepers. Freeman lost one of her two colonies last spring due to uncertain weather.”I can get them through until March and then the temperature warms up and they start moving more — they get excited,” she says.”Moisture builds up, the temperature drops and they freeze. I have really been trying to figure out how to ventilate and still keep them warm enough.”

In a good year, Freeman harvests 50 to 100 pounds of honey per hive, selling it at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market along with garden plants, culinary and medicinal herbs, teas, tinctures, salves and lip balm made from her own beeswax. When she’s not gardening, marketing or beekeeping, she works as a registered nurse. How does she juggle it all?”Oh, I’m not very good at it,” Freeman says.”We’re always busy. My summers are just nuts.”

But no matter how crazy life gets, the bustle of the hive serves as an oasis. Bee stings hold no fear, and the sounds of the hive have a calming, meditative effect.”For me, it’s very relaxing to have that noise going all around you, all the bees flying,” she says.”It’s very loud, but you’re focusing so hard on looking for those eggs that you don’t even hear them, and it gets very peaceful.”

Meloamak·rona (Honey-dipped Cookies)

Honey is a major component of Greek cooking. Freeman’s husband, Harry, who is half-Greek, makes baklava and meloamak·rona, or honey-dipped cookies, using recipes found in a community cookbook from his mother’s hometown, Seattle.

Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup salad oil

6 tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon fresh
orange juice (divided)

Grated peel of one orange

2 eggs

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3 teaspoons baking powder

6 to 6 1/2 cups sifted flour

Nut Topping

1/2 cup very finely chopped nuts

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon cloves

Honey Syrup

2 cups honey

1/2 cup water

In large bowl of electric mixer, beat butter until light and fluffy. Add oil slowly and continue beating for 10 minutes. Gradually add sugar, 1/2 cup orange juice and peel. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat an additional 5 minutes.

Combine 1 tablespoon orange juice and baking soda; add to butter-oil mixture. Add baking powder and enough flour to make a soft dough. Remove beaters; knead slightly to make a dough that does not stick to hands, adding more flour if necessary.

Roll a heaping teaspoonful of dough into an oval-shaped cookie, tapering the ends slightly. Press the melomak·rona lengthwise with fork tines to make indentations to hold the nut topping. Bake at 375 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Remove cookies from baking sheet and cool on wire racks.

Mix ingredients for nut topping and set aside.

When cookies have cooled, bring honey and water to a boil. Dip melomak·rona into honey syrup, being certain to thoroughly soak the cookies. Sprinkle tops with nut topping.

From Greek Cooking in an American Kitchen (Makes about 5 dozen)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Joys of Farm Toys

By Bernie Hunhoff

Ken Girard (above) and his brother, Mike, understand the human impulse to collect. Their office walls and warehouses are adorned with their own treasures.

Travis Hughes roused two of his sons early on a Saturday last spring, but instead of working on their Andover farm, as they might normally do, they drove south four hours to the little town of Wakonda for a toy tractor auction.

More than 100 farm toy aficionados were already in the Wakonda Legion Hall when the Hugheses arrived at mid-morning. The Legion ladies were serving coffee and homemade sweets from behind a long counter as the auction-goers — most of them wearing blue jeans and farm caps — admired and inspected hundreds of toys on several rows of tables. Some were in their original boxes. Sometimes there was only a box for sale.

Travis, 43, was among the youngest to register as a buyer that morning; his boys Scott, 14, and Orin, 11, were the only school-age youth in the metal folding chairs of the Legion Hall.

Rural South Dakotans are familiar with auctions and markets, but Wakonda’s toy tractor sales are quite unlike farm country’s somber sales of grain and livestock. Frowns are rare and nobody loses.

“Like one buyer told me, ‘It’s toys!'” laughs Ken Girard who, along with his brother Mike and a small team, has turned antique farm toys into the biggest attraction in Wakonda. The family business operates from 11 buildings within the city limits, including several large warehouses where a Clay County farmer may walk in the door with a single toy tractor while the Girards and their crew are unloading a semi-trailer load from Canada.

Walls in several of the buildings are adorned with the Girards’ personal collections. Ken’s office is a maze of marine memorabilia and plastic toys from the 1950s. Mike likes vintage root beer advertising signs. Parked throughout are antique tractors and trucks, outboard motors, hunting paraphernalia and other artifacts of America’s great outdoors.

Wakonda, a town of 300, lies northwest of Vermillion in Clay County. Its name comes from a Santee Sioux word that means wonderful. Wakonda’s most recent claim to fame is the 101-game winning streak by the high school girls basketball team from 1987 to 1991. The school has since merged with nearby Irene. The only restaurant in town, modestly called The Pit, operates from the basement of an old hotel. The big Legion Hall is the social center, home to everything from wedding receptions to fundraisers and funeral dinners.

Wakonda’s auctions attract collectors and spectators from throughout farm country, including brothers Scott and Orin Hughes of Andover.

Ken and Mike’s parents, Marvin and Pat, started the family auction business at Wakonda in 1970. For years, they kept busy with farm and household auctions, and the sons spent weekends lining up furniture and appliances on the lawns.

“Back then, I had no desire to be in the auction business,” admits Ken.”But I spent one year in college and I didn’t like that, so the next summer, in 1998, I started auctioneer school.”

Just as he and Mike joined the business as adults, farm auctions began to dwindle.”Once there was a family making a living on 80 acres or every quarter section,” Ken says,”but they are all gone. We had to find some other specialties.”

The Girards began to focus on real estate auctions, and they also investigated the Internet.”I took a class in online auctions from Kurt Aumann of Illinois,” says Ken.”Kurt also specialized in toy sales so I figured if he can do it, so can we.”

In 2001, the Girards invited consignments from friends and neighbors in southeast South Dakota. Local families brought a few tractors and trucks, and Harrisburg toy dealer Cam Lind brought a few hundred items.”I don’t remember the prices that day,” says Ken.”All I remember is that we had a lot of really happy sellers and a lot of smiling buyers. I thought, heck we are in farming country so maybe this can work.”

The Girard brothers have also gained a reputation for firearm auctions, but they can only schedule a few every year.”Guns take a lot of space and they require a lot of paperwork,” says Mike.”The ATF keeps track from the time we log in a consignment until the buyer takes it home.” Federal agents seem far less interested in toy tractors and the people who collect them.

The brothers hold toy tractor auctions nearly every Saturday at the Legion Hall. Sometimes, the sale spills over into Sunday. Many of their consignments are shipped from hundreds of miles away, sometimes by the truckful. When the bidding stops, the auction crew spends the next few days shipping hundreds of toys to buyers from all 50 states and foreign countries. Through the years, Wakonda has become the national hub of farm toy trading.

Marvin Girard died two years ago, but his wife Pat still helps to clerk the sales. Scott Moore, a Centerville auctioneer, takes a turn at the microphone along with Mike and Ken and they all perform as ring men, meaning they roam the auction floor, looking for bids and encouraging the buyers.

The live auction is a show, and most of the people in the seats are there to watch.”We get that,” says Ken.”You don’t have to buy anything and we don’t charge anything to attend.”

While online bidders are a major reason for the Girards’ success, in-person attendees like the Hugheses are still a big part of every sale. Travis Hughes and his boys farm with”green equipment,” meaning John Deere. They have a few antique Deere tractors in a farm shed, and they collect the company’s old toys, especially the early grain combines.

When the bids for toy tractors began to exceed $1,000 at the Wakonda auction, Scott Hughes leaned over to his dad and said,”We could buy the real equipment cheaper than we can buy the toys!”

Scott is correct, says Ken Girard.”That was hard to wrap your head around when it first started happening, but now I completely understand.” The toy is easier to maintain and store than a full-size tractor. Also, perhaps there’s more nostalgia for the toy than an exhaust-spouting, back-breaking, hard-to-start two-ton pile of bolts and metal.

The Girards’ own collections range from tractors to boat memorabilia.

Even stranger, the cardboard box that came with the toy from the factory can be worth more than the toy and the real tractor.”We’ve seen that the box can often double the value,” says Girard.”We’ve sold a toy tractor for a few hundred dollars and then turned around and sold a mint of the same toy in its original box for thousands of dollars.”

Ken says farm toys are like a lot of things in life, from bitcoins to pork bellies and baseball cards; it’s hard to decide what’s a fair value or a good investment.

Consequently, the young auctioneer — who now knows the values of farm toys as well as anyone in America — has simple advice for buyers who join him in the Wakonda Legion Hall or online:”Buy it if you like it. Don’t do it to invest. You have to be pretty savvy to invest in toys. Just buy what you like. Don’t buy if you’re worried about what it might sell for later.” He believes few of his bidders bank on the notion that their purchases will be good financial investments.

Still, the toys keep gaining value. The national record for a toy tractor is $74,000 for a rare”Coffin Block” John Deere Model A pedal tractor.”We haven’t had a chance to sell one of those — yet,” says Ken. The Girards’ highest bid was $9,000 for a gold-plated Farmall 560 1/8th scale.

“There’s been an ongoing argument among toy dealers that there’ll soon be no young guys in the hobby and then the stuff won’t be worth much of anything,” says Ken.”But the fact is there’s never been any young people in the hobby. Almost nobody collects until they have space in their home, maybe because the children have grown and gone, and that’s also when they have some disposable income.”

Bidders are generally males who were raised on a farm, or at least have good memories of summers on a relative’s farm. They begin by collecting the tractor their dad drove.”Then they want the tractor an uncle had. Then they say, ‘My neighbor had one of those so we should maybe have one of them.’ Before you know it, you want them all!”

Ken believes toy tractor enthusiasts are different from risk-takers who invest in cryptocurrencies, and even a breed apart from collectors who focus on comic books, sports memorabilia and rare coins.

The Wakonda auctioneers also organize several gun sales every year. Mike Girard (above) says the government is much more interested in firearms than farm toys.

Many of the Girards’ customers, both online and those who show up in person, come from states east of South Dakota.”Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania — that’s probably where the biggest portion come from,” Ken says.”But we’ve shipped tractors to Hawaii and Alaska.” Interest in farm toys seems to lessen in ranching country, which begins west of Wakonda, but Ken surmises that it’s only because there are fewer people living there.

Just as farmers enjoy the long-standing”color wars” of tractor companies, toy collectors also play favorites. John Deere has the most fans, partly because the company makes more tractors — real and toy — than their competitors. Deere’s famous red rival Farmall (which morphed into IH and today’s Case IH) also has many fans and there are buyers for every make and color, including lesser-known companies like Cockshutt, Oliver, Massey-Harris and Allis-Chalmers.

The Girards enjoy the nostalgia-fueled camaraderie and good-natured rivalry of toy collectors.”They’ll drive here together, sit together and then bid against each other,” Ken says. Some are such regular attendees that they have a favorite chair in the Legion Hall.”It’s just like church,” he laughs.”They always show up and sit in the same place, and if they miss a day then their friends want to know if they’re okay.”

Seeing an empty chair is the hardest part of the profession, Ken says.”We’ve come to develop quite a relationship with many of these guys. Some I see a lot more than I see my own relatives. But let’s face it, some are on the senior side of life and suddenly they are gone — gone to a nursing home or they leave this Earth. Then maybe you have to sell the toys you sold them over the last 15 years. While we’re proud to do it, it’s hard sometimes.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Windmill Man

By Michael Zimny

Mike Moeller has a unique skill set. Those iconic Aermotor windmills that populate the Plains, often in dilapidated, unworking condition? He can fix them. He can disassemble them, repair broken parts or fabricate new ones, and make them spin again.

For centuries, wind has been used for power. In Europe, wind was historically harnessed by grain mills. That tradition continued in America, though the need for water is what drove the proliferation of windmills across the American prairie.

According to T. Lindsay Baker’s A Field Guide to American Windmills, the first commercially successful American windmill was invented by Daniel Halladay of Marlboro, Vermont in 1854.

In 1863, the Halladay Wind Mill Company was bought out and manufacturing operations were moved to Batavia, Illinois. The market was in the Midwest, where fewer farms had access to water. Railroads, which used wind power to pump water for their steam locomotives, were another major customer.

The early commercial windmills were made with wooden blades, at first featuring larger, paddle-shaped blades, but designs quickly trended toward more numerous, thinner, rim-fixed blades. (Some farmers constructed their own windmills by hand, often utilizing designs much different than those commercially available.)

The manufacture of all-metal mills began in the 1870s and accelerated in tandem with the American steel industry. At the turn of the century, there were dozens of major windmill manufacturers in operation, mostly in the Midwest, making machines that many ordinary farmers could afford. Companies invested in beautifully drawn advertisements and traveling salesmen. Others sold their wares through mail order catalogues.

The Aermotor, introduced in 1888, was designed by Thomas Perry, who had experimented extensively with different models while working for the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, the same concern that bought out Daniel Halladay. Aermotor billed its wind machines as more efficient and buyers apparently agreed. The company dominated the industry by the 1890s, and its logo is still recognizable on wind vanes of old mills, working or not, around South Dakota and beyond.

When Mike Moeller started working for Dakota Windmill, based in Hurley, most farm communities had electricity and no longer needed wind power to pump water.

But there are areas in Texas and the Nebraska Sandhills where ranchers are still drilling new wells and installing wind-powered pumps. Dakota Windmill sells components and services to the well drillers who do this work.

Moeller says that in South Dakota, in the 1990s, “People were selling their windmills left and right … cheap too. They couldn’t give them away sometimes. At that time, we’d go and take these down and sell them in Nebraska or Texas.”

When they couldn’t find working parts they needed, they’d rebuild broken parts or machine new ones.

In recent years, some people began to rediscover the aesthetic appeal of a working (spinning) windmill, even if it doesn’t power anything. Now Moeller spends some of his summers outside the shop, repairing or installing Aermotor windmills in the same areas where he used to buy them for scrap.

Moeller recently installed an Aermotor windmill with a 1927 gearbox at a farm near Parker. “These farms couldn’t have survived on the prairie, without windmills,” Moeller says. They supplied precious water where there otherwise would have been none. No longer needed for their original purpose, they have become totemic, decaying symbols of the rural past.

Here and there, though, the reverse happens. An Aermotor — with a shiny coat of red paint on the gear box, and that simple but ubiquitous logo on the tail — appears on the prairie, spinning like it was 1927. When that happens Mike Moeller might have been in town.

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The Calving App

By John Andrews

Keeping track of cattle is now as easy as a few taps on a smartphone screen, thanks to the dogged determination of a Faulkton High School senior.

Ellen Schlechter lives on a farm between Miller and Faulkton. She says her family had been searching for a phone app because between two pastures and several people handling the herd, their traditional calving book was always missing. They thought they found a winner, but discovered the app was unable to track many of the things they wanted and could not cross platforms between iPhones and Androids.”So my family literally told me to make it happen,” she says.

She experimented with writing code, but had little time to learn it after farm and schoolwork. Then she found a program that simply allowed her to enter the features she wanted, and soon The Calving Book was created.

Farmers can track calving, breeding, pregnancy and weaning on the app. Since its release in October 2014, over 6,200 accounts have been created. Schlechter continues to tweak the app based on feedback from users.

The Calving Book is available for iPhone in the App Store and for Android in the Google Play Store.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Surviving Wind Chill

By Linda M. Hasselstrom

Chores need doing, even at 40 below.

“Wind chill is 70 to 90 below zero.” I shrugged as I snapped off the radio. I moved cattle on horseback one day when the wind chill was 60 below. Once it’s that cold, what difference can a few degrees make?

I found out. Exposed flesh freezes in well under a minute. In the time I took to open a gate, the naked skin behind my glasses began to sting. I think my nose is shorter — frozen off when my scarf slipped down as I hacked at six inches of ice on the cattle tank. When I stepped out of the pickup my often-frostbitten hands began to ache at once, and didn’t stop until hours later. My eyes burned for several days. My face felt sandpapered. My lungs ached, in spite of the scarf.

I followed all the well-known rules for living through cold weather. I kept a little water running, flushed the toilet frequently, checked the sewer vent pipe for frost, hauled in an armload of wood every time I went outside, plugged in the truck heaters. I called a neighbor before I went out to do chores, and called her when I got back safely.

But I survived. And that amazed me. I went outside often, though the radio was advising people not to, because I had work to do. I carried 50-pound sacks of cake to the cows, chopped ice, ducked behind a windbreak when I could, put my free hand inside my shirt when it hurt too much, and drove back to the house more often to warm up. I walked slowly, so I wouldn’t gasp for deep, dangerous breaths.

Once I went out when I had nothing to do, really — just to look at everything with new eyes: to see how the animals were staying alive. Grouse clucked at me from bushy branches of a cedar, an owl dropped silently out of a broken barn window. The cows had gone over a hill to a gully on a south slope and didn’t reappear until two days later. Their eyelashes were frosty, but their month-old calves were fine. I resisted hunting for them in the deadliest weather, remembering my father’s rule:”A cow can stand more cold than you can.”

That’s what amazes me: that humans survive at all. We are so dependent on our machinery and our miracle fabrics, so overconfident about our often-wrong interpretations of nature, that I don’t understand how we’ve lasted this long. A freight train barrels into a town, out of control and speeding because the air brakes didn’t work. Anyone who has heard her own footsteps on a 30-below morning knows cold air is thinner. Misguided folks feed starving deer and chase them away from hunters, thinking to help. They fail to see that starving deer mean too many deer for available grass. They should thank hunters for killing them mercifully instead of letting them be smashed on the highway. Our lives are so nearly automated that a problem requiring thought can kill us — because we are not used to thinking.

And if you’re not thinking when the wind chill is 90 below zero, you can be dead. I reached above my head to pull a bale of hay into the pickup. Two dropped, knocking me backward. I was quick enough to roll over the side of the pickup. But heavier bales might have knocked the wind out of me, broken a bone, made me fall on my head. Later I could think of a half-dozen ways I might have been badly hurt. Ten minutes of lying in the snow would have killed me. Next time I didn’t stand below the bales. Another of my father’s rules flashed through my head:”When you’re handling cows, it helps to be smarter than the cow.” Or a bale of hay.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2005 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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An Irrigated Valley

Our September/October issue includes a feature on the Belle Fourche River valley. Butte County is a West River oasis, thanks to the Belle Fourche Irrigation District, a century-old project that can be traced back to 1885. Bernie Hunhoff took several photos in the area last summer while working on the story. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine.

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A Farmer’s Story

By Bernie Hunhoff

Johnny Cloud, a colorful Sisseton farmer, has many descendants in Roberts County. They include his daughter, Marlene (left) and a grandson, James Cloud.

When South Dakota Magazine began publication in 1985, we hurried to interview some of South Dakota’s elder statesmen because we wanted to collect their stories firsthand. Ben Reifel and Sigurd Anderson were two such leaders. Reifel was born in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation in 1906 and became the first (and only) Native American to win statewide office in South Dakota.

Anderson was born in Norway in 1904, and served as governor in the early 1950s. Although Anderson and Reifel were Republican office-holders of the same age and era, they told very different stories. There was one exception: both mentioned an Indian boy from Roberts County who wanted to be a farmer.

They each spoke of him when we asked about race relations in South Dakota. Neither seemed to know any details about the boy, and the story was almost too cute to be true — like the feel-good anecdotes that politicians like to tell. We figured that one of the old pols had heard it from the other, so we gave it just a few paragraphs in Reifel’s feature article in 1989. However, I did repeat it on occasion when I was asked to speak at various events.

Anderson and Reifel told the story like this: the boy grew up on the reservation speaking only the Dakota language and a little German. His teachers told him he must learn English if he wanted to be a farmer.”After all,” said one teacher,”you don’t know how to farm, so you’re going to have to ask.”

That made sense to Johnny. He worked hard at English and other subjects. Years later, he was able to rent a patch of land in Roberts County. He decided his next step would be to meet the neighbors, who gathered for coffee every morning at the local grain elevator.

In farming country, a grain elevator is like the country club to an advertising executive or insurance agent. That’s where a farmer goes to”network” with his associates. The young Indian boy didn’t know the meaning of networking, but he intuitively understood the concept. So he bravely walked into the grain elevator and sat down at the table, ready to learn.

Imagine his surprise when he found that — after years of learning to speak English — the farmers were not speaking English, but some other language. He wasn’t sure what tongue it was, but it wasn’t German or English or Dakota. He wondered if his new neighbors were intentionally snubbing him. He didn’t know what to do. So he went home.

A few days later, Johnny mustered up the courage to confide in his nearest neighbor. He went to the man’s farm and blurted out his confusing experience at the grain elevator.”I spent years learning to speak English so I could be a farmer, and when I went to meet the other farmers they were talking something else,” he said.

The neighbor explained that nearly everyone in the community spoke Norwegian. He said the farmers at the elevator certainly didn’t mean to slight him.”They just weren’t thinking,” he assured the young man.

The two came up with a plan. The young Indian already knew three languages. Surely he could learn a fourth. A few weeks later, Johnny and his new friend returned to the grain elevator. They sat down at the table and Johnny, the Dakota Indian, introduced himself in Norwegian. Imagine the looks of surprise on his new neighbors.

Speaking in Norwegian, Johnny clumsily explained that he always had wanted to be a farmer. That his teachers told him to learn English so he could talk to his neighbors. That he still wanted to be a farmer, and he knew he needed their help and advice. And that he would help them whenever he could.

Before he could speak any further, because his Norwegian was so torturous to hear, they all welcomed him with handshakes and offers to help — offers spoken in plain English. And Ben Reifel said that was the last time anyone spoke Norwegian at the grain elevator, because they realized they had been excluding their non-Norwegian neighbors. Anderson and Reifel said the Indian boy became a skilled farmer and community leader, and all lived happily ever after.

That was their story. Whenever I told it in public, I admitted that I didn’t know the Indian boy’s name or the community where it happened. And, of course, I wasn’t even sure it was completely true.

A year ago I was asked to speak at the Center for Western Studies’ annual Dakota Conference in Sioux Falls. Wanting a feel-good conclusion to my talk, I told the story of the Indian boy from Roberts County. As I spoke, I could see that Wayne Knutson was paying close attention. He is the retired Dean of Fine Arts at the University of South Dakota and a patriarch of the arts across South Dakota.

As soon as I finished speaking, Knutson hurried to the front of the room and said to me,”That’s Johnny Cloud! I knew him. He was a big, tall Indian farmer from Sisseton who always greeted us with a god dag!” Wayne, it turns out, was born and raised in Roberts County. He said Johnny Cloud was one of the most memorable characters from his childhood in the 1940s.”Most of the Native Americans seemed more reserved, at least when they were downtown, but Johnny was a gregarious man with a hearty laugh that drew me to him,” Knutson said.”And he loved to show off that he could speak Norwegian. We’d heard that he had learned the language so he could do business with the Norwegian families,” he said.

Knutson remembered Johnny Cloud delivering”little Norwegian speeches” to the clerks in Stavig’s Department Store on Main Street.”Then he would laugh his big laugh, because it tickled him so much. I can still hear his laughter ringing out.”

I could hardly believe my ears, as Knutson brought Johnny Cloud back to life. My estimations of Anderson and Reifel — though already immense — grew still higher. Why had I doubted that the story was true?

As soon as I returned to the magazine office in Yankton, I looked in the Sisseton phone book for the Cloud name. I found James Cloud and dialed his number; James promptly answered. I asked if he knew Johnny Cloud, and he said both his father and grandfather were named John.

When I told him my story, he said his grandfather was the tall, successful farmer who spoke Norwegian.”I’m looking out my window at the land he farmed,” James said. He invited me to stop by on my next trip to Roberts County.

Sisseton, a tidy little city of 2,600 people, sits on flatlands just below the Coteau Hills. Sometimes in the winter, the sun is shining in Sisseton while a fierce blizzard rages in the hills west of town. Atop the Coteau, three markers have been erected to memorialize three separate incidents involving travelers lost in such storms.

The Sisseton area has a lot of variety for its size. The Lundstrum family’s religious ministry is headquartered there, as is the Schiltz family’s goose farm and factory, which processes 100,000 geese a year.

A glacier slid across this land a mere 20,000 years ago, creating dozens of pretty little lakes that are now ringed by cabins and resorts. The Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Sioux Tribe runs a bingo hall and a community college just south of Sisseton. The tribe has a rich history. Its people, starving and denied supplies in Minnesota, battled the Minnesota militia in 1862. When the hostilities ended, 38 Indian warriors were hung on Christmas Day. It is called the largest mass execution in America’s history. Chief Gabriel Renville led the tribe into the 20th century, and many of his descendants live in Roberts County today.

Johnny Cloud and Bessie Derby were married at Sisseton in 1912.

Northwest of town is the West’s smallest and prettiest forest, a 900-acre state park known as Sica Hollow. Hikers, horse enthusiasts, photographers and bird-watchers frequent the place, and sightseers come in the autumn to marvel at the hardwood trees’ golden foliage. Who could blame Johnny Cloud or any young man for wanting to make a living here on the land?

Driving into Sisseton on a weekday morning, I wondered if anyone other than James would remember Johnny Cloud. It was too early to call on James, so I stopped at the Cottage Restaurant on Highway 10 for coffee and eggs. Ken Erdahl, a longtime Sisseton banker, was seated in the next booth. We struck up a conversation, so I asked him if he knew Johnny Cloud.

ìHe was a big, tall guy,” answered the banker.”He was kind of husky. He was a good customer of ours, and a good farmer. When he wasn’t farming, he liked to hunt on Buffalo Lake. He liked to be called Goose Hunter.”

Erdahl recalled that Johnny spoke Norwegian, but he hadn’t heard the story of why he learned the language. He wasn’t surprised that Anderson and Reifel might have known the Indian farmer.”Johnny was well respected around here and very sociable,” said the banker.”He hung around Mel’s Diner for coffee. He was a very nice fellow.”

Erdahl was working at the Roberts County National Bank when Johnny borrowed $1,400 to buy his first new tractor, a shiny red”M” Farmall.”He sold it 20 years later for $1,500 and he was very proud of that,” said the banker.

Everywhere we went in Sisseton, old-timers remembered Johnny Cloud. They didn’t know of his encounter with the neighbors at the grain elevator, but their memories of his good nature, his intelligence and his passion for farming all supported the Anderson/Reifel story.

At the Roberts County National Bank, the Torness family paged through their local history books and found some specific information on John Melvin Cloud. He was born on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana in 1891 and came to the Sisseton area as a teenager to live with relatives. His ancestry, like many Indians in Roberts County, traces to Chief Renville. Johnny married Bessie Derby in 1912 and they began a small farm on land just north of Sisseton.

Late in the morning, I drove north of town to the old Cloud farm. James, a short and slender man with jet-black hair, said he was young when his grandfather died in 1968.”I do remember helping him to feed the chickens, and if you didn’t do it right he would get after you,” he laughed.

ìCome in the house,” he said.”My mother knew him.” There in the living room, lying in a hospital bed, was James’ mother, Goldie. She was injured in a car accident in 1974, and has been confined to bed ever since. She was already the mother of 10 young children when the accident happened. Today, nine of the 10 still live in the Sisseton area and James says they all help care for mom, but he is there constantly, attending to her needs.

Goldie, despite her paralysis, is a happy and content woman. Her living room is filled with pictures of grandchildren, and she looks out a big picture window at the fields that her father-in-law once farmed. She remembers him as a big, friendly fellow who loved his neighbors and his family.

She married his only son, John Jr., in 1947. Goldie’s nearest neighbor is Marlene Campbell, her sister-in-law and Johnny’s daughter. Marlene lives less than a quarter-mile down a gravel road. We knocked on her door, and she was happy to answer our questions as well; but she noted that her husband had died two years earlier, and the shock affected her memory. Still, she had good recollections of her father.”A lot of the farmers would come to him because he could speak German and Dakota,” she said.”He probably learned it in Montana before he moved back here. He was always happy to translate for people.

ìHe helped people out, and he loaned machinery to the neighbors,” Marlene said.”He also would go to the jail and take the prisoners for a day or two. They were always so glad to get outside and work in the fresh air.”

None of the Cloud family remembered a specific story of Johnny learning Norwegian to speak at the grain elevator. But they agreed that it sounded a lot like him, and they confirmed his passion for farming. Marlene says her father built a barn even before he built a house.”He loved his farm and he was very successful,” she says. The big red barn was recently torn down, but a grove of trees and his old granary still stand on the Cloud farm.

ìHe encouraged all of his children to go to school,” said Marlene,”but I was the only one who went to the university.” She earned a master’s degree in education, and taught at Sisseton High School and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Tribal College.

Cloud family members have worked in education, health care, religious ministries and other professions. Because a boy wanted to farm — and possibly because a neighbor helped him learn a little Norwegian — his family took root in Roberts County. The benefits to the area continue to multiply, as does the Cloud family; as we visited with Marlene, her granddaughter came by the house with the family’s newest member, a three-month old baby called Azriel who has the bloodlines of a great chief and a fun-loving farmer.

While driving away from the Cloud farm, we thought that Azriel deserves the opportunity to know about her Norwegian-speaking great-grandfather. He overcame the gulfs of not just two, but three cultures — and he did it with laughter and good cheer. So, with apologies and appreciation to Ben Reifel and Sig Anderson, we’ll continue to tell the story of the Indian boy who wanted to farm.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Record Harvest

Fall is in full swing in South Dakota and farmers across the state are hard at work in the fields. Warmer than average temps and dry weather are aiding this year’s harvest. The USDA predicts South Dakota farmers will harvest their second largest corn crop as well as a record soybean crop. Sorghum production in South Dakota is also up 73 percent. Here some photos from farms around our state.