Many changes have taken place in farming during the last 154 years! The farming methods were very primitive in the beginning when the Klanderman family began farming in 1868. Over the years the farming methods have changed dramatically as farming became more mechanized and the farms became larger, so that the family farm as we have known it in the past has disappeared. To describe the changes over the years, I decided to first describe some of the changes that happened during the Klanderman era and then some of the changes that happened after the Essenburgs purchased the farm in 1937.
The Klanderman years 1868-1937
The Jacobus Klanderman family arrived in the Borculo area in 1868. They had just immigrated from a small city in the Netherlands called Borculo, which was already 500 years old when the Klandermans left. It had many nice brick homes and even some brick streets. This was quite a contrast with the tree-covered wilderness they found when they first arrived in Borculo, Michigan! There were no permanent homes in the area; in fact, there was an encampment of American Indians living just east of the present Borculo cemetery, living on the hill in wigwams. These Indians were the Klandermans’ first neighbors.
The first roads were just muddy trails through low, poorly drained land. When my father quit farming in 1960, the land that was poorly drained bordering Bingham Street was left idle so that today this part of the farm has reverted back to the wooded natural state as it was when Jacobus Klanderman purchased it in 1868.
Jacobus Klanderman‘s first task when he arrived from the Netherlands was to buy some land and build a log cabin for his family to live in. He soon bought 40 acres of land located ½ mile south of Borculo at 6091 96th Avenue and established his farm there. This 40-acre parcel lay on the south slope of the Borculo hill, so the north fields were 20 feet higher than the land bordering Bingham Street to the south.
Oxen were the poor man’s horse and there were still many oxen used on farms during this period of time. The oxen were as strong as horses and were used to transport good logs that were cut on the farm and taken to a sawmill to be sawed into lumber or sold.
The grain cradle was an improvement over the regular scythe because in one sweeping motion the cradle allowed the operator to cut and catch the grain, depositing the grain on the ground with all of the heads of the grain facing the same direction. It could then be tied into bundles.
The wheat and oats were sown by hand also between tree stumps. The wheat and oats were cut when it was ripe with a grain cradle scythe and then tied into bundles and set in shocks to dry. After the bundles were dry, they were brought into the barn’s grainery to be threshed. The farmer used a stick or flail to separate the wheat kernels from the stems.
The hay was cut by hand using a scythe, and later raked into small piles to dry. When it was dry, the hay was pitched onto a high wooden wagon and stored in a mow in the barn.
At first the Klandermans kept one cow for the family’s milk supply but soon they added a few more. The cream from the excess milk was churned into butter and sold to the local grocer. Some farmers owned a hand cranked mechanical cream separator and a barrel churn to do this, as shown in the pictures below.
Some farmers needed someone to bring the cans of milk to the creamery. This is when the milk hauling business began. The first milk haulers used a wagon pulled by a team of horses. A wagon would normally carry 20 cans of milk. The milk haulers would pick up each day except on Sunday (see an earlier story here about milk hauling in Borcul0: https://borculo.weebly.com/blog/milk-hauling-in-borculo-michigan-by-bob-essenburg)
Many early farmers only kept about 5 cows which would produce 2 milk cans each day. Later by 1950 the average farmer’s herd was producing about 4 cans of milk from a herd of 10 cows. In about the year 1915 the milk was hauled by a milk truck. Later the milk trucks had an insulated body to keep the milk cool. In 1948 farmers started using bulk tanks and in 1950 the average cow produced about 30 pounds of milk per day. Today it has increased to about 90 pounds.
After the first difficult years the Klandermans began to prosper. They eventually bought a team of horses and more modern farm equipment like a sickle bar mowing machine and a grain binder. They enlarged the barn and later built a new Veneklassen brick home in 1891. The brick on the home was carefully laid by a skilled brick mason using a fancy style called patterned brick. They shared in the prosperity during the roaring 20’s, but later also suffered the hardships of the great depression.
The area did not have a local church to attend when the first settlers arrived. Many folks would walk with their families to Zeeland to attend worship services there. When the weather was bad or the roads too muddy, they at first worshipped at the Klanderman home. When the new Borculo Public school was built in 1876, some families also worshiped there. On July 5, 1883, a church was organized in the community. It took the name of the Holland Christian Reformed Church of Borculo.
In 1937 James Klanderman, the third generation to farm the old homestead, retired, and having no children to pass on the farm, he sold it to Martin Essenburg.
The Essenburg Years 1937 - 2022
On November 29, 1937 my parents, Martin and Delia Essenburg, purchased the 40-acre Klanderman homestead from James Klanderman, a third generation member of the Klanderman family. James and his wife Tillie had no children, so they put the farm up for sale when they reached retirement age.
The purchase price was $3,500 which included the land, the livestock, and the farm machinery. The land was valued at $2,500 and the livestock and machinery at $1,000.
When my father, mother, and myself (I was born in 1936) moved to the farm on November 29, 1937, we did not have to travel across the ocean to get there. Our move was from my grandfather’s farm ½ mile away on VanBuren Street. When my father arrived on the farm, he did not have to first clear the land or build a house or barn. On the day he arrived he could walk to the barn and milk the 5 cows that were already there. He could do his daily chores which included feeding the cattle and chickens and gathering the eggs.
The farm did not have electricity hooked up to the buildings yet and so one of my fathers’ first task was to get an electrician to wire the house in 1938. We did not get an electric pump yet, so we pumped our water for both the house and barn for a few more years. I still remember pumping water for the horses when I was 5 years old.
Our farm machinery was old horse-drawn equipment that had seen better days. The three most important tools were the plow, the grain binder and the sickle bar mowing machine and they were valued at $20, $20, and $15 respectively. The total value of all of the machinery was $140.
Farming with horse-drawn equipment was a slow process and took a lot of time to get things done. A team of horses could usually only plow 2 ½ acres a day. In 1946 we purchased 50 more acres of land located ½ mile south of our farm on 96th Avenue and Van Buren Street. The price of land was really cheap at this time and my dad only paid $750 for the fifty acres, or $15/acre.
After purchasing additional land, my father expanded his faming operation. He built a new chicken coop in order to lodge 500 hens. He also built a new silo and a milkhouse with a cooler for Grade A milk. We expanded the herd of milk cows to 10. We replaced all the horse-drawn equipment and the horses. In a few years’ time, we purchased two tractors, a new manure spreader, and a loader. Then a new mowing machine and a side rake, a new disc and grain drill, a corn planter, a hay baler, and a small threshing machine.
After my father retired from active farming and rented out his land, we noticed many changes in the technology used in raising corn. In 1960, my father rented his land to the Nienhuis Dairy farm, located north of Borculo on Tyler Street. This is one of the few family farms still operating in the Borculo area. They remained in business by expanding their acreage and using larger and more modern machinery, and by enlarging their dairy herd. We especially noticed the corn harvesting equipment go from one row at a time to 6 or even 12 rows at a time. Pictured below is some of the farm equipment used to harvest corn in 2022.