The farm my mom grew up on - on Peru Street in North Lawrence - is a big part of our family history. We've visited it and taken pictures. In the late 1990s and early 2000s we think it was owned by a couple living in New York City who worked for the United Nations and was using it as a vacation / weekend house. So when we were up north visiting family in the early 2000s, we could stop and take pictures because no one was there at the time. Now it is owned by an Amish family living there and using it as a farm. We have bought syrup from them that comes from the maple trees that my grandfather also used.
But there were a lot of details about the farm I didn't know. My mom was born six years after her siblings and they stopped working the farm when she was in her teens. I've wanted a clearer picture of how the farm worked and when they had to give it up. Thanks to my uncle, I have more details.
Hubert and Helen (Leary) Keenan, my grandparents, took over this farm from Hubert's parents, James (J.J.) Keenan and Mary (Leary) Keenan, who then stayed on at the farm. James and Mary took it over from Mary's parents - Patrick Leary and Honora McCarthy - sometime after James and Mary married in 1894. Hubert's brother Bernard got the "good" Keenan family farm in Helena. More on that in a future post.
The farm was a dairy farm. My uncle said it was 150 acres though it was rocky and about half of it was non-tillable. The farm had about 30 Ayrshire cattle, which are noted for their high level of butter fat. "Back then you could make a living from that," my uncle told me. At that time the milk factory's (to whom they sold the milk) main product was butter and cheese which was made from the butter fat, so cows with higher butter fat were better. (Holsteins, which the family farm did not use, were noted for more volume of milk and lower butter fat content.)
My mom often told the story that when the family would skim some of the butterfat off the top of a milk container, to make whipped cream, her dad would fuss because it meant less butter fat in that container and less money.
They would milk the cows twice a day. The cows were fed baled hay or ensilage (ground corn) twice a day prior to milking them. Right before milking a cow, they would give them a small dish of processed oats as a treat to calm them down.
The amount of milk varied by the seasons but was roughly 80 gallons per day. In the summertime when they were feeding on grass outside they had more nutrition than the winter feed. They put the milk in ten-gallon containers and placed them in their cold-water cooler. Once a day a milk truck would come and pick up the containers and take them to the milk factory to be processed. The farm belonged to the Dairyman's League Co-Operative.
They also had 100 chickens. They had a henhouse and a closed-in chicken yard. The hens were closed in the henhouse in the winter. The family gathered the eggs once a day and would clean and candle them - scan the eggs to make sure they did not have any blood spots. Then they would put them in a egg crate, which held 24 dozen eggs, and would take them to the Rutland Railroad to ship them to New York City.
The farm had a garden about 25 ft. by about 100 ft. that grew potatoes, tomatoes, corn, radishes, lettuce, carrots etc., My uncle said his mom (Helen Keenan) would make the kids weed the garden as punishment when they were bad.
When my uncle was a freshman in high school, Hubert had a heart attack, and after which Hubert was unable to run the farm. My mom has said that back then, the advice after heart attacks was to not do anything strenuous.
So after the heart attack, my uncle and his older brother (my other uncle - Michael - senior in high school at the time) took over on the farm. My uncle said he would go to school late on the little kids' bus. He said he made the football team in his freshman year, but it lasted only 3 games before he had to drop out to work on the farm. He had to be home to milk the cows in the mornings and afternoons.
They sold the cows in the mid fifty's when it was too much for my uncle and grandfather to run the farm without my uncle dropping out of school. Hubert and Helen sold the farm in the summer of 1970 and moved into the village of North Lawrence on Desmond Street.
Let me know in the comments if there are other details about the farm you'd like to know.
