Subsistence Farming, Ocean Park, WA – Early 1900s — Dobby Wiegardt Collection

I’m not sure if we were thinking clearly when we planned tomorrow’s History Forum.  We’ll be taking a look at the beginnings of agriculture and farming in Pacific County — a great topic and surprisingly complex and interesting, but… on the 3rd day of January???  When we’re still feeling completely overstuffed and waddly after the bounties of our 21st century holiday?  I’m not sure if, replete as we are, we can be properly impressed by the hardships our ancestors faced just to raise a patch of potatoes in this wilderness area of the 1850s.

Or maybe, it will work the other way for me.  Perhaps learning about their ingenuity and tenacity will inspire me to think about renewing a small patch of Nyel’s old “kitchen garden.”  Maybe such a 2024 project will seem less daunting when I learn more about the challenges faced by my forebears.  I do remember my grandfather back in the 1940s and ’50s working in his vegetable garden in the very same area of the yard.  He was an old man by then, his dairy farm but a memory, but still he was drawn to the tasks involved in providing food for his family.

Papa in His Garden 1948

And, thinking of Papa and his garden reminds me  that when his last horse, Countess, died in 1944, my uncle Willard began his ‘Family Man’ column (in Good Housekeeping Magazine) by quoting Papa’s letter: “It was a relief for her to be gone,” he says (Countess was past thirty), but she wanted to live and so I wanted her to. She was the last animate tie to the old ranch, when you boys were on it with me.” Her death reminds him, he says, that he is lonesome and old.

Willard went on to say that the letter made him see a herd of four-legged ghosts – the horses Empress, Fanny and Prince, Blaze and Lassy and many of the cows as well.  He remembered that when Papa got sick and had to give up the ranch, he had kept the animals that would not sell and they had died one by one.  Countess was the last and only the summer before had become so feeble that she could not pull the harrow across the garden plot so Papa had unhitched her and pulled it himself.

The enormity of that image — with all its implications — is what draws me again and again to learn of the lives of our forebears.  Stocking my pantry from a shopping trip to CostCo or Jack’s pales by comparison.