Farm Buildings and Buyings

The Price family set about improving the farm they had recently bought. By early August 1919, they had hired numerous local contractors to do work for them:

F.B. Price of Ross township has given the contract to Wall & Fleming for the building of a new house and barn, including half a dozen outbuildings on his farm which he recently purchased from W.O. Halsted. The cement contract goes to Vincent Boyd and the electrical wiring to Henry Kegebein. He will install a private electric generating outfit, making his farm one of the most up-to-date in the vicinity.

I'm not sure if any of that glorious work has survived. I've gone out there and tried to spot anything that suggested 1919, but then I have trouble applying those boundaries, so clear in the plat maps, to the real land outside the window of my car.

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A little distance northeast of the Price farm lay some 200 acres that had been known as the Clinton farm for decades — as early as 1874 we find most of that land under Eli Clinton's name, and by 1919 it all belonged to Steve Clinton. Now it passed into the hands of David and Agnes Frank. Those 200 acres touched on the 167 acres that the Franks had farmed since at least 1908 (I can't find any earlier records of them).


(Click on image to enlarge)
From the 1908 Plat Map: outlined in red, the Frank farm in Hobart Township; outlined in green, the Clinton 200 acres in Ross Township.

David Frank intended to continue farming all his land, with the help of his 20-year-old son, John. His other son, Robert, was 17 years old and probably still in school.

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If we look again at that 1908 map, we will notice the Bullock land due north of Ainsworth, 160 acres bordering State Road 51 and divided by the Deep River.



In 1919 this land changed ownership on paper only. Since 1912, Claude and Mary Ann (Chandler) Bullock had lived and farmed there. Now they bought out the shares in that land belonging to Claude's brother, Hubert, and sister, Ruth Mackey.

Claude was then about 39 years old, Mary Ann 34. They had two sons: three-year-old Kenneth, and little Gilbert, just past his first birthday.


Sources:
♦ 1908 Plat Map.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 7 Aug. 1919; 14 Aug. 1919.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 8 Aug. 1919.