Oswalt Family Farm Archives - It's a Fine Life

By Kathy Oswalt-Forsythe

Until recently, the wagon wheel leaned in the hay loft of the old cattle barn, where for the last forty years it had been collecting dust and cobwebs, nearly forgotten. Its spokes were intact, the outer hoop, nicked and scarred but still holding strong, a testimony to the history of our family’s centennial farm operation in Southwest Michigan’s Kalamazoo County.

Here it is nearly 10 years ago. Photo: Leeanne Seaver

Our great-grandparents purchased the original ground in the late 1800s; they built the house, barns, and outbuildings soon after. They began clearing and tiling the rich loamy soil of the low ground, eventually used to grow mint and grains, and created pastures and fields in the higher ground.

Lots of family on the front porch of the farmhouse. Our Great-Grandma Nell, front center holding the baby and Great-Grandpa Lewis in the white shirt and tie, back center.

Our great-grandparents fed a variety of animals, including sheep, hogs, and cattle, and they had a small dairy, as did many farms in our area. They gradually added to the operation and acquired more ground to produce more feed for the animals, as well as grain to market.

Our grandparents eventually took over this farm, where growing grains and purchasing and feeding calves became its focus, and Dad and Uncle John naturally continued the business.

My four brothers, our cousins, and I, the 4th generation, grew up on the farm. My brothers and I lived in the farmhouse. All of us also learned to work hard and to care for and love the farm.

A shot of the farmhouse through “Grandpa’s Garden.” Photo: Leeanne Seaver

Several of my earliest memories are with my dad as he worked–sitting on his lap, his chin resting on my tiny head, as he cultivated corn. I was content, mesmerized by Dad’s humming and the green lines of the young corn plants as we traveled back and forth through the field. I’m sure my brothers have the same memory.

Our daughter Amanda riding the tractor with Dad in 1988.

Or Mom packing up our lunch or supper, taking us to whatever field Dad was working. We sat in the shade along a fencerow, hearing about Dad’s day and sharing events from ours.

Or helping Dad with chores, feeding calves in the barn in the evening, directly across the street from our home, using a cart which at that time was supported by the long-abandoned wheel.

The feed cart fit perfectly in the aisle that led between two concrete feed bunks that spanned the length of the barn. When I was little, Dad fed cattle the same way his father and grandfather had fed them. He loaded sileage from the silo, frequently by hand as our silo-unloading-machine was often broken. He climbed that eighty-foot concrete-block silo rung by rung, carrying an aluminum shovel. He eventually stepped from the ladder to the sileage, then shoveled the feed down the shoot, into the cart, waiting below.

The barn and silo before the renovations.

I stood in the alleyway, listening to the feed hit the cart, shovelful after shovelful.

Then he climbed backdown the shoot and pulled the cart to the far end of the feed alley.

With the strength of Dad’s shoveling, the cart was pushed farther and farther down the alley. When the cart was empty, Dad would start the loading process again. It took probably two or three climbs of the silo for those evening feeds.

Eventually, the operation changed, and the silo stood empty. Dad stacked the sileage outside in a huge open-air concrete bunker, and he loaded chuck wagons using a tractor or front loader. Some animals were fed in an outside feed bunk, and some animals were fed on pasture.

Many of the animals are now fed on the pasture.

The old wooden feed cart was rolled to the corner of the hay loft where it slept silently, like Rip Vanwinkle, for 40 years.

Two of my four brothers eventually joined the farm operation full-time, which enabled the business to expand the existing angus cow calf herd and commercial sheep flock.

In 2014, our parents restored the old cattle barn—a point of pride for Mom and Dad–and about that time, the old wheel was moved to the front of the farm office where it sat until a year ago.

The silo was removed and the barn restored .

Two of my nieces now work part-time on the farm where they encouraged my brothers to open a farm retail store within the existing farm office, and during the last year that space was created.

The wheel now has a new life—providing the structure for a light that shines brightly in the retail store.

It is a symbol of the circle of time, of generations past and their hard work.

It represents the life of a family and its farm ground and animals, carefully tended throughout five generations. And, as in the past, now the sixth generation is learning to love and care for the land and the animals.

My brother Steve and his granddaughter Riley, part of the sixth generation on the farm.

It’s a Fine Life

My dad was a tree guy.

He planted them, admired them, and appreciated them for the firewood he cut to heat our farmhouse. In our yard, we always had shady trees, planted by my great-grandparents in the early 1900’s. To the west of the house stood old, knobby pear trees—overgrown and shaggy—whose fruit bounced to the ground with the late summer winds, attracting all kinds of stinging insects. In the front and back yards, we had big maples which we climbed like monkeys, fearlessly scaling the highest branches. We read books in the branches, pretended to take naps, and gave my mother fits when she emerged from the house, realizing how high we had climbed.

Two old trees stand vigil along the road. When I was a child, there were three, and my brothers and I played and built forts beneath them. (all photos courtesy of Oswalt Family Farms)

“Expand! Expand! Expand!” was the farm lending mantra during the late sixties and early seventies, giving confidence to my parents who purchased an adjoining eighty-acre parcel just to the west of our home place. This acreage was divided neatly by fence-rows into four twenty-acre fields. My dad planned to remove the fence-rows, full of sumac and various determined seedlings, to accommodate the farm implements which were growing vigorously larger and larger with the ag-industry’s push for more production.

Dad bought a small used bulldozer and began his demolition work with enthusiasm. We could hear the bulldozer’s engine and the cracking of the fence-rows’ brush as we rode our bikes back and forth, monitoring his progress. Dreaming of running his corn planter smoothly down long rows the following spring, he uprooted trees, burned huge brush piles, and worked steadily to create a large field.

The Angus are pastured on part of the field my dad cleared. While you see many cottonwood trees here, the year before my dad died, he was working daily to clear the dead and damaged trees from this area.

Once the dust settled, the smoke cleared, and the roaring bulldozer’s engine quieted, one tree stood alone in the middle of the huge, cleared field. I imagine it grew firmly in a fence row when my father and Uncle John were boys. It may have been an anchor for fencing, possibly a mark for a previous neighbor’s gate, or even a visual aid to help set a pattern for corn planting. It most certainly sheltered birds, housed squirrels, and supported the buzzards.

Somehow my dad’s grace allowed this old fellow to co-exist in our farm operation. It stood solidly in the middle of whatever my dad planted: corn, wheat, soybeans, even hay. Why did this one tree survive the bulldozer and chainsaw? I’m guessing my dad just couldn’t bring himself to cut that old gentleman down.

Here is the old tree, still surviving and enduring the winter, as the Angus move around him.

When I was a child, the tree was regal and handsome—his trunk thick and healthy, branches strong and many, and leaves lush and green. He became our favorite “secret spot.” Some breezy summer days, my mom would give us permission to pack our lunch and eat wherever we wanted. The tree wasn’t far—probably a quarter mile up the road on our bikes, then a quick hike through the field to picnic beneath his branches. It was cool in his shade, and around his base my dad had piled many loads of stones we gradually picked from the surrounding field.

I’m now a tree gal—influenced, I’m sure, by my dad’s passion for them: I admire the lone Gingko tree on the empty lot north of the bank, whose history is now forgotten; I am amazed by the massive beech tree on the east side of the Sunset Lake, whose totem pole trunk is carved with bark faces; and I notice the local tulip tree population, whose teacup blossoms grace their cool springtime arms.

And every time I visit my mother, I salute the tree, that tough old veteran, a reminder of my past and my dad’s impractical, sentimental side.

It’s a Fine Life.

Tag: Oswalt Family Farm

Circle of Time

Grace