A granary memory

I thought you might enjoy a historical perspective about the old granary that used to be on this farm before the current granary (now on its way to a house) was built in the 1950s. This is a story written by my aunt Helen, my father's sister, who grew up on this farm. She now lives in Oregon and wrote this story in a writing class she is taking.

By the way, if any of you relatives reading this would happen to have any photos of the original granary, I'd love to see them!


THE OLD GRANARY

I am a product of a farm from the state of South Dakota. The farm where I was born and where I grew up is located about seven miles from the village of Frederick.

When I was growing up on my father’s farm one of the buildings on the farm served as my playhouse. This building was the granary used for storing grain after harvest. The granary was painted red as were all the farm buildings. The century old farmhouse was painted a pristine white.

The granary was built in two stories. A stairway was on the outside in front of the building. I can recall how I used to climb those stairs and just sit there at the top and look out at the surrounding countryside. Inside on the 2nd floor there were sacks of shelled corn. My sister Verna and I re-arranged the sacks of grain to make rooms for our playhouse. The air in this room smelled musty from the stored corn and from the grain stored in the lower story. In the center of this large room with a slanted ceiling was a machine with a handle on one side. Ears of corn could be placed in the top portion of the machine. When you grasped the handle and made it turn, the ears of corn would fall into the machine and some sharp teeth inside the machine removed the kernels from the cob. The shelled corn kernels would stream out of one side of the machine and the bare corn cob would fly out of the other side. This machine held a great fascination for me.

My brother who lives on the old homestead has retired and has rented out the farm land. His renter does not need to use the granary for grain storage as he has his own buildings on his own farm. A few months ago my niece Heidi, her husband David and little daughter Sofia left city life behind and have moved in with her parents to live on my birthplace farm.

Recently my niece informed me that they were going to build a house next to the old farmhouse where I was born. They were going to use the granary as the shell of their new home. In my mind’s eye that was difficult for me to picture although I have made many visits to the farm and had accepted the fact that the old granary was gone and a new one had been built in its place. The farm buildings are no longer red and are painted white. With my niece’s remark my mind still pictured the old granary where I used to play. I was still picturing the red building with the stairs out in front. That granary had been replaced with a new one way back in the 1950’s.

My niece is a journalist and has a blog on the internet describing the daily and weekly building progress of their new home. It is strange that my memory bank still has neglected to store the changes that have occurred to my birthplace. I am glad that her blog also has pictures to describe the progress taking place.

Helen A. Kolehmainen
July 9, 2008