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Silo Filling Drama

We filled the silo in the spring with grass and in the fall with corn. My grandpa, (Gus Waschke) was big on corn silage. He and my grandmother were photographed by Northwest Farm News in 1946 standing in front of a stand of Minnesota 13 field corn. Judging from the photo, the corn was over twelve feet tall. Dad (Ted Waschke) less inclined toward corn. Dad did not like to spray with pesticides and herbicides and raising a good crop of corn in those days without spraying meant many passes with a cultivator and some hand hoeing that took time away from tending the pasture, haying and the grain crops. Not long after Grandpa died, Dad quit growing corn silage and increased his small grain acreage.

I was enthralled with silo filling and remember much more about spring grass silage. Probably because the fall corn silage filling was after school had started and I didn’t participate as much.

Silo filling was a community event, but it was a different community than most of the other events on Waschke Road. Unlike hog butchering or chicken catching, silo filling was more business and equipment rather than a gathering of friends and neighbors. And had an element of danger.

In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field cutter and a blower. The machines were expensive and only used for a short time each year. Each farmer supplied their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is usually hauled on trucks and self-unloading wagons, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to the back of the wagon where the silage was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyer attached to the blower. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the silage already in the silo.

The blower was powered by a big tractor with a thirty-foot drive belt. The tractor was run with the throttle wide open. Log chains held the tractor to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor could be heard a mile away. The ground thumped and shook with raw energy when a wad of silage weighing fifty or more pounds hit the blower blades and was thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.

In the silo, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter of the silo, leveling and packing the chopped fodder to prevent air pockets that caused spoilage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as hard as pulling silage off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required some heavy fork work, especially when the silage was wet. Filling never stopped for the soaking rain storms that come in off the Pacific in June in Whatcom County, because the silos had to be filled quickly while the fodder was at its prime.

As the silo filled, the work in the silo got harder and more dramatic. As the level of silage rose, sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section was removed, the silage became more difficult to direct and more silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.

About twelve feet from the top, the pace of the men on the forks became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the tractor quickly, the energy of the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with tons of silage. If the crew was quick and lucky and the silage was dry, the pipe could sometimes be cleared by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage packed tight and the blower pipe would have to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to clear it.

Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a mud bowl by the wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.

One year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and the pipe was damaged. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to take him in a car to the emergency room at the county hospital at the corner of Northwest and Smith where they sewed his wound up so he could return to work. One of the other owners rushed off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide Meridian for a replacement section of blower pipe while my Dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the packed silage.

The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.

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Catching Chickens

We raised chickens for eggs until the early 1970s on the Waschke Homestead. About this time of year—around Halloween—family and neighbors on Waschke Road would gather one night with flashlights to sneak up on sleeping chickens. For the kids, it was exciting, for the adults, necessary work.

The process started in the spring with the arrival of a batch of newly hatched baby chicks. I can’t remember where Grandpa (Gus) got them. There were several chicken hatcheries in the county and I assume they came from one of them. The hatchlings came in corrugated cardboard boxes and went immediately into the brooder house, which hasn’t been used for at least fifty years now and has fallen into decay.

The first few weeks of life, the chicks stayed under the brooder hood, a sheet metal canopy about six feet long and three feet wide, suspended by a block and tackle from the rafters so it could be raised and lowered easily. The hood was heated with electric light bulbs. As chicks get older, they need less heat. By raising the hood a little bit each day, the chicks were kept at the right temperature. Before the chicks arrived, Grandpa would go over the brooder house, patching with tin any holes a rat could through. Predatory rats could eat several chicks in a single night if they could get into the brooder house. As spring turned to summer, the chicks were allowed first to roam around the brooder house, then let into a roofed area enclosed in chicken wire, later they went into a fenced yard surrounding the brooder house. By fall, the chicks, now pullets, were allowed to roam freely and seldom entered the brooder house. Most roosted in the orchard at night.

The chickens roamed all around the farmyard during the summer. Those free roaming young birds got me in big trouble once. One day, I caught one. For some unknowable reason, I thought it would fit perfectly in the glove compartment of our navy blue 1952 Dodge pickup. I tested my theory and found it correct. Later, Dad heard a chicken cackle when he started the pickup. He found the chicken and several days droppings in the glove compartment. I don’t remember my punishment, but I have never put a chicken in a glove compartment again.

As the days grew cooler and the nights longer, we began to keep an eye open for newly laid eggs in the yard. These eggs were often small, misshapen, or double-yoked as the pullets got the hang of laying. When we had found enough eggs, the young birds were ready to go into the regular chicken house and start producing eggs for sale.

The fun began with a long-distance call to Wallace Poultry on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, where The Bagelry is now. Wallace bought the old hens and butchered them. By the time the old flock was ready to be replaced, the hens were looking bedraggled and, I imagine, were quite tough.

Throughout the year, Mom or Grandma would occasionally butcher and pluck a nice-looking hen for dinner but we didn’t eat much poultry on the farm. Neither my mom or grandma liked butchering and plucking chickens. According to them, chicken dinners were not worth all the trouble.

When it was time to replace the flock, the tough old hens were not candidates for the kitchen. Although the baby chicks were supposed to be all female, a few roosters always made it past the chick sexers, and they supplied all the poultry Mom and Grandma wanted to deal with through the summer and fall.

I always hoped the Wallace Poultry truck would arrive after I came home from school. The truck driver had a folding wire fence that he set up inside the chicken house and we would chase chickens into a corner and corral them with the wire fence. The driver grabbed the corralled chickens by the legs and loaded them into crates on his truck. When all the chickens were crated, he drove off, the chickens never to be seen again. Wallace Poultry was still in existence after we quit raising chickens, but Mom would never buy poultry from them because she remembered those scrawny old birds that they used to get from us.

During the year, one of my jobs was to clean the chicken house and spread fresh straw litter on Saturday mornings, a job I hated, and, I suspect, I didn’t do very well. After the Wallace Poultry truck left and the chicken house was empty, Dad would take a couple days to give it a thorough cleaning, removing every bit of litter, taking apart the laying nests, hosing everything down, spraying with carbolineum to eradicate mites and other parasites, then brightening the place up with hastily applied slaked lime white wash.

Crating the old chickens was more fun than cleaning the chicken house but the real fun came after the chicken house was cleaned and it was time to introduce the new hens to the chicken house. The new chickens were wild by fall; even with bribes of wheat or oats, you couldn’t get closer than a few feet. Catching a few with a leg hook was possible, but with two hundred birds to catch, hooking them would take too long.

Instead, we would wait for night when the chickens were sleeping in the orchard.

The men would use flashlights to spot the roosting birds and reach up and grab them by the legs. The chickens roosted close together and it was easy to grab two or three at a time. The caught birds would cackle and screech, but the others ignored them and obligingly waited to be caught. When I was big enough, my job was to carry the chickens from the catchers to the chicken house feed room, where I deposited them into a wooden barrel with a lid to keep them captured.

My grandpa would reach into the barrel, grab a chicken, give it a worming pill and let it loose in the chicken house proper. Getting those pills down the outraged birds was harder than it looked. Grandpa did it in one smooth motion before the chicken knew what was happening. When I tried, the wriggling bird drew blood with its beak and claws and got loose before I could shove the pill down its throat. After one failure, I left it to Grandpa.

When Grandpa died, Dad quit raising chicks and bought birds that were dewormed and ready to start laying.

There were almost always a few stragglers that eluded capture for a few days. I remember one year, a hen stayed loose until Christmas when Dad asked a neighbor to come over and shot it with a shotgun in return for the meat. My mother was very clear that she was not interested in plucking and dressing a chicken brought down by a shotgun blast.

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More on Waschke Road

Last week, I wrote about Waschke Road and speculated that the full two mile stretch of the right-of-way petitioned for in 1886 was used as a trail, but when my grandfather, Gus, opened up a lane from his house and barn to the Smith Road, the right-of-way was an unimproved trail.

A new source

This week, I spent some time studying the historic maps in James W. Scott and Daniel E. Turberville III’s Whatcom County in Maps 1832-1937. (Bellingham: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, 1983.)

The 1902 map

The first map that shows Section 26 of Ferndale Township, where the Waschke Homestead is located, is a county map dated 1902. This map shows the Northwest Diagonal as a plank road and indicates it was the main road from the town of Whatcom (now Bellingham) to Ferndale and Blaine, following the route of Axton road past Barrett Lake (then called Gamble Lake) to Ferndale. The plank road continues to Blaine as a plank road roughly following the route of what is now called Vista Drive.

Axton Road from the Northwest east is shown as “opened” but not planked or graveled. Now, Axton goes straight east to the Guide Meridian and beyond, but on the 1902 map, it jogs northeast at about where it would intersect Waschke Road, if Waschke Road were there.

The Smith Road appears as “opened” like Axton Road, and runs its full present length from Tennant Lake to where it intersects the Northeast Diagonal, which became the Mount Baker Highway. There is no sign of either the Waschke Road or the Aldrich Road on the 1902 map.

North Bellingham School

There is a school marked at the corner of the Smith and the Northwest Diagonal. This was the location of North Bellingham Elementary School, which was my first school. My grandfather’s younger brother, Bill, would have been three years old at the time the map was drawn and must have attended the school marked on the map when he was old enough. Some of his older sisters probably went there also. When my father, Ted, started school at North Bellingham in about 1920, the school was a two-story wood building. My memory is a bit hazy, but I believe Dad said the school had two rooms on each floor. That may have been the building marked on the 1902 map or a later replacement. Dad said the principal was responsible for cutting firewood to keep the school heated.

Topographic map from 1907

The next important map is the 1907 Blaine Quadrangle topographic map, drawn two years before my grandparents were married. This map shows the Aldrich Road running from the Smith Road north to Tenmile Creek and the Axton Road going straight east from the Northwest to the Aldrich Road. The section of Waschke Road from the Northwest to the Larson Road shows as unimproved. Larson Road does not go through to the Northwest as it does now. However, the Lange Road, unlike today, goes through to the Northwest and on to the Brennan station on the railroad south of Tennant Lake. My dad remembered taking produce to the Brennan Station to load onto railroad cars. In his memory, it was just an unattended open shed.

Buildings in 1907

Standard Geological Survey topographic maps show buildings. The shingle mill mentioned in the newspaper clipping I referred to in the previous post is probably the mark on this map where Silver Creek crosses Waschke Road.

The houses of my great-grandparents Matzke and Waschke are also marked on this map, located across the Aldrich Road from each other. Both my great-grandparents built his houses near the top of the ridge that marks the boundary between the Silver and Deer Creek watershed. Both houses are still occupied. Later Gottlieb Waschke sold the north half of his property and built another house close to the Smith Road, which was eventually occupied by my grandfather’s brother Bill and later his son Buford.

1924

The last map of interest is from 1924. It looks as if the cartographer started from the 1902 map and added to it. This map shows the townships of Whatcom County. According to Scott and Turberville, Whatcom County and Spokane County were the only counties in Washington State to set up townships when they were authorized by the state legislature in 1896. The townships were responsible for the county roads within their jurisdiction. This map shows the right-of-way all the way from the Northwest Diagonal to Axton Road, and shows the Axton terminating at Aldrich Road. Unfortunately, the reproduction of the map in the Scott and Turberville book is smudged and I can’t determine the status of these routes. The map shows Lange Road still extending all the way to Brennan Station.

Skid road

None of the maps have any indication of the skid road along the southern boundary of the Waschke Homestead. The 1902 map mentions 92 shingle mills and 24 saw mills in the county with 5000 employees and capacity for 110 car loads of product per day. These mills must have kept the oxen busy pulling logs on the skid roads.

I will try to research this more at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University. I now suspect the original petition for Waschke Road is archived there and I also might be able to find something there about the skid road.