<Begin Segment 63>

JA: What had to be done on the farm before the first crop could be harvested?

MH: Oh, that was a traumatic job. First thing we had to buy a horse, that we knew. We had to buy a horse because we couldn't afford a tractor, not right now, so we bought a horse. And then we had to buy equipment to go with it so we can dig the ground a little bit and cut the great big tall grass that was there and everything else. So Suguros and (we) shared a horse and we bought the horse together, and it worked out real well that way because you don't use a horse every day of the week so we used it that way. But you had to cut all the grass down to start with in the whole field, miles and miles of it.

And then we had to kind of work the soil up, but it's a dead soil that nothing would grow on if you even wanted it to grow at that time. But I think it took about two years because around and around we went, over and over, trying to stir up the ground, trying to rebuild it again, rebuild it again. Then the Midlake group got together, and we ordered tons and tons of, car loads and car loads of cow manure from someplace. And then, we hauled all that cow manure and threw it in all the farms through there and tried to rebuild the soil as much as you can. But it has never come back to original, as it was in the, before we left it. So it was hard to raise anything, but we did the best we can by putting a lot of fertilizer in and things like that, but it took two years to get it to workable, but still it wasn't the right soil, it never was. And so we worked on that field, all of us, everybody did, but we never got the product we used to get, no way.

And even though after, we did raise the vegetables and things, it did not sell at the market like it used to either. It just was a different, different scale out there and people didn't want to pay for that type of... they rather eat the California stuff, which is cheaper and things like that, so they wouldn't want to pay us the price for it. So things got worse and worse for us farmers. And so, more and more of us went out to work part-time, run the farm the other part-time is what we were trying to do to keep it going until a great buyer came along, which was -- is it okay to tell that? -- Great Northern Railroad came along and offered us a pact that he was going to buy the whole seven ranches all at one time. And we thought, and so we all got a meeting together and we decided, "Don't you think we ought to all leave the farm now? It's just getting to be too much for us, we can't make any money, it's been hard work for us so let's all sell it together." So we all got together and sold it to the Great Northern Railroad Company, which give us a fair price on the property, and then the Great Northern Railroad built Coca Cola Company and Safeway Developmental Center there, up there after we sold it to them.

JA: And what year was this sale?

MH: 1953.

JA: 1953, okay.

<End Segment 63> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.