As children growing up, we tend towards the idea that things will remain constant virtually forever. One of the first lessons we learn, or should learn, as young adults is that the only thing that remains constant in life is change.
When I was a youngster, I remember wanting to grow up to be a farmer like my dad. In those days seven decades ago, farming meant growing crops and raising livestock. Crops were rotated on a regular basis, and included corn, soybeans, alfalfa (often varied with clover and timothy), and oats, for the most part, with maybe a little wheat, rye, or barley for the adventuresome. The grain crops were regularly rotated with the hay crops in order to enrich the soil.
Fertilizer consisted mainly of manure collected each year when the cattle yard, hog houses, and chicken house were cleaned out. Manure was shoveled by hand into our orange New Idea manure spreader and hauled out into the field where it was spread on the cropland.
There was specific equipment for all of the tasks my father and mother needed to do on the farm, each built by a company that made its money producing products filling those niches. It all seemed so solid and unchanging.
But fairly quickly, that whole way of farm life ended. Diversified farms quickly gave way to specialized grain or livestock operations, more farm wives began working off the farm full-time for wages instead of growing big gardens and fruit orchards; canning vegetables, meat, and fruit; and selling eggs and chickens.
But looking back through diaries kept by country folk indicates lots of change—often major—happened before I was even a gleam in my parents’ eye; in fact before my parents were gleams in THEIR parents’ eyes.
Good examples are the diaries of the Bushnell family who lived in DeKalb County just across the Kendall County line. They dealt a lot with Kendall County folk, and spent their time in and around Plano, Little Rock, Sandwich, and Hinckley.
The normal view of farming in the early 1900s is that it was grueling, lonely work, with hardly a minute for self-enjoyment. But the first thing that strikes the reader when he picks up 25-year-old Frank Bushnell’s diary for 1900 is the amount of recreation farm folks enjoyed along with the hard work. Barely a day went by without one of the family members heading off for one of the nearby towns, a neighbor’s house, church, or some other place.
A constant stream of visitors came to the Bushnell farm, and family members reciprocated. Often visitors stayed overnight. Most of the time they came for a meal. They made trips to town many times each week all year around, even during frigid winter months.
Most of the year, the mode of travel was by buggy or road cart, but in the winter, the Bushnell’s got the cutter (a one-horse sleigh) out and used that to visit and run errands.
When harvest time comes around, modern farmers hit the fields for very long days, often working well after dark by the headlights of their combines and tractors. But just like their descendants a century and a quarter later, in 1900, in the middle of the threshing season, the Bushnells and their neighbors took four or five days off when the Sandwich Fair began, only to resume the harvest after the fair closed.
Time was also taken off to attend the Big Rock Plowing Match, and a number of socials sponsored by schools and churches.
Then, while they didn’t realize it, something happened at the Bushnell farm in 1900 that would change their lives forever. Their first telephone was installed.
No longer did they have to physically travel to a neighbor’s house to ask a question or visit; they could literally ‘let their fingers do the walking.’ Frank Bushnell noted in his diary that the family had a good time talking over the phone wires.
But from this vantage point nearly 125 years later, it was sort of sad to realize that the bustling parade of visitors that brought the Bushnells into face-to-face contact with their neighbors was on its way out, to be replaced by electronic, rather than physical, visits to friends and relatives.
Today, we sit in our homes, relatively self-contained. We don’t need, as did the Bushnells, to visit for entertainment. We simply click on our televisions, phones, laptops, or tablets and the world comes directly to us. If we need to talk to a friend or neighbor, we can pick up the phone—whether they live half the world away or next door—and chat face-to-face, or send a text or email.
With modern smart phones in our pockets, we’re never far away from instant contact of any kind with anyone.
But strangely enough, we seem to have turned into a less of a society because we no longer have to interact with real people. Instead, we interact with their electronic images or their electronic voices or their typed words. We don’t have to speak with groups of people, so most of us don’t.
And because we don’t have to run ideas past our neighbors in private settings, we huddle in our small circles of acquaintances, virtually all of whom believe as we do, and avoid hearing alternatives to our own views.
The world of 1900, as viewed through Frank Bushnell’s diary, was certainly more primitive than our own. Frank’s father died in 1908 from infection after an angry hog sliced into his leg with its tusks. Today, a few stitches and an antibiotic would have made Judd Bushnell’s leg good as new.
But while the world of the Bushnell family was less safe in many ways, it was a friendlier place where people enjoyed more human companionship than we seem to do in our modern isolated lives.
Change has piled atop change and while we are better off in many ways, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look back once in a while and remember a time when neighborliness was the way life was lived.
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