In the early 1950s we considered buying a 160 acre farm that was known to the neighbors as the Chris Baumgartner place.

In the four years since the place was used, heavy rains had washed gullies in the pastures and brush grew where corn had grown. Old fence posts were rotted and the wire was rusted. Two trees -- a thorn and a mulberry -- and an outdoor “john” stood near the one-room frame dwelling. The only modern convenience available was service from Boone County’s Rural Electrification Association.

We had no intention of ever living there.

The water supply was from a well that sometimes had “living water,” but was dry in late summer. It was formerly a cistern, collecting water from the roof of an adjacent log cabin. The walls of the cabin were intact but the roof had collapsed. The former residents had carried water about a hundred yards from this well to the house, a steep climb for a woman carrying two heavy buckets.

On the county road, as we approached the farm, overhanging trees touched each other overhead. It was a dead end road with creek gravel in some of the mud holes. The mailbox was two miles from the house because, in wet times, the mailman couldn’t get through. The postmaster asked Lloyd Bennett and others to move their boxes up to Rangeline Road until after the spring thaw; promising to restore delivery when the road dried out. But the new postmaster knew nothing of that promise.

The Columbia telephone line was several miles away. The only neighbors in sight were Frankie and Nannie May Sappington and their phone service was from a mutual phone company at Millersburg. “Central,” a woman, worked at an exchange in the little town. Sappington’s phone wire was draped along on trees and fence posts and made a deep loop where it crossed Cedar Creek into Callaway County. The cost for phone service was low but Nannie May warned, “Central works only from 8 till 5 and lives across the road from the exchange. If you ring frantically at night, she might hear you and go across the road to plug you in.”

The farm needed massive doses of TLC. When Dad and Chub walked over the entire place, Dad took his shotgun along, saying. “If we don’t scare up some rabbits, the land isn’t worth having.” They found some rabbits and Dad said, “The west half will produce enough to pay interest and taxes on the other 80. I’ll help you clean it up and get it into production.”

The purchase price was 160 acres for only $4,500! We bought it.

The men ripped out old fences, blasted hedge stumps and plowed in lots of ditches. “If you plant it in corn and tend it a year or two, it’ll begin to look like a farm,” Dad said, not knowing that a serious drought was in the future. He directed the building of terraces and waterways and loaned us $1,000 to have a bulldozer straighten out a small creek that meandered through the most fertile part of the farm.

Chub and Dad worked from dawn till dark, cutting sprouts and closing the ditches. The youngsters and I brought lunch every day and, while the kids napped, I cleaned the house, painted the walls and planted some flowers out by the front door. I had fallen in love with the place, even without a telephone!

The next summer we would furnish the one-room house and “camp out” on our own farm while the men put in the second crop.

More next Tuesday.