The Sunday Herald, Boston, May 4, 1924; transcribed by Pamela Hodgkins 2025.
Solve Labor Problem by Using Entire Family in the Fields – Mother and the Boys and Girls Get Out with Father in the Connecticut Valley and Help to Convert Holdings Into Highly Productive Properties – Case of Two Brothers Who Have Wives and 19 Children to Aid in Raising Crops on Their Joint Estates – Short on English Talk Are These Farmers, but Long on Energy, Thrift and Cash.
By ALBERT D. BARKER
“That land over there was sold recently – for $9100. A Polish farmer bought it.
“Why? He had the cash, for one thing. Another – it isn’t worth that to a Yankee farmer. He’d never get his money back. The chap who bought it, however, will get his money, and make money, in a very few years.”
So spoke our guide as we rolled and bumped over narrow, wind-swept roads in the fertile and flat Connecticut valley. The only breaks in the landscape, close at hand, were farmhouses and great, stark tobacco sheds; at a distance, the wavering skyline of the Berkshire, Holyoke and Pelham ranges.
The foreground showed conspicuously two absences. There were no rocks, and almost no “natives.” Poland and Czecho-Slavia had moved in. A two-room white schoolhouse, however, gave the unmistakable American touch, and evidences on every hand of certain modern luxuries showed that here lived no down-trodden and unaspiring peasantry.
We were in the midst of the tobacco and onion-raising belt of western Massachusetts – ages ago a giant lake-bed, in the days of the settlers a primeval forest, and now the profitable homestead land of newer pioneers from across the ocean. And they are reaping the pioneering rewards by filling in the chinks left in the industrial structure where the younger Yankees packed up and headed for the city.
Tackle Farming Problem from “Man-Power Angle”
Almost within the shadow of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which is teaching Bay state boys (and girls) how to farm from the brainpower angle, lie across upon acres of rich, light, stoneless solid upon which the Stepans and Mikes are approaching the farming problem from the man-power angle. There is evidence that both are winning out, but the contrast is striking as you come down from the college slopes at Amherst on to the broad floor of the valley and whirl through the Hadleys, Sunderland, and the Hatfields.
On every hand are families whose names fall grotesquely on Yankee ears, but whose farming properties, once the holdings of Yankee families, show themselves well kept and productive. As you move through this region, seeing men, women and children – the women invariably with shawls over their heads—out in the fields, weeding, cultivating or seeding, you hear strange stories of men who can hardly speak English, but can put their mark to checks in four or five figures and can and do pay hard cash for high-priced cars and the best of whatever their fancy turns to.
The industrial – and social – overturn in a number of farming communities in the valley has not been a rapid process. It has been going on for a generation. But realization of the extent to which alien farmers have literally “dug in” and become an important part of the communities where older inhabitants had decided “farming doesn’t pay” has become almost over night.
Scarcely noticed, the Polish farmer took up land in the valley. There was no reason why he should have been considered seriously—or more than “outlandish”—in those first few years. He had little or no money; he lived in a shack; he settles ofttimes on land that the Yankee farmer despised. His ways were not American ways. What if he did get a living and raise a large family? He was just patiently grubbing along, harming nobody, a sort of curiosity.
Then more came—and stuck. Individually or in groups, they began to buy up farms, paying prices the Yankee farmer neight could meet, if a prospective buyer, nor turn down. If a seller, “Plumb-crazy,” was the verdict on the first few such transactions.
But shortly it was noticed that the buyer generally made a go of it – regardless of initial expenditure—and the old-timers began to wonder. Some got out and left the field to the placid invader; others took a leaf from his book and combined forces in certain districts to “keep this place American.” If a farm was forced into the market, they joined hands and bought it before Mike could come in with his bankroll. This counter-play – less narrow prejudice than a love for the traditions of historic towns and a desire to retain long-standing social surroundings—is still going on. Its outcome is in doubt, for an apparently irresistible economic force is at work.
The nature of this force is not hard to understand. The Yankee families have gone beyond the pioneering days into a way of working and living which ao often marks the top of the grade for any social group in any land where a certain culture may be won. A measure of success with the soild and an assured steading have come to them. Their psychology is no longer that of the beginning; their members who have the psychology of a fresh start in new field have largely gone to conquer the city, or to excel in intellectual pursuits.
But with “invader” it is different. He comes in with little money, no expensive habits or traditions, asking only for land that will grow crops, and a chance to work that land. He begins where the Yankee’s early foregathers began, and he works – the entire family works – as they did. He is a modern pioneering Yankee, speaking consonants instead of
Saxon vowels, and laboring in a smiling, open country instead of the wilderness. On every hand the Yankee is tacitly admitting he can’t compete.
And that is not strange, either. The native farmer’s wife rarely does a man’s work in the field. Much less does she work in the field while bearing and raising a family of eight children. Just as rarely are the small children of the native farmer seen soberly, unquestionably taking their places side by side with their elders between the onion row from dawn til dark, day in and day out.
In farming these days, the difference b success and failure may very easily lie in the difference between hiring help , rarely competent or amenable to discipline; and getting better help free. The Polish farmer in the Connecticut valley has turned the leaf back to the days when the big family was an asset, and not a liability – economically that is.
Yet in the advance to financial competence that has been made by many an alien family in the valley there is more than a little of the heroic.
CASE OF THE JEKANOSKIS
Take the case of Peter and James Jekanoski, who came some 30 years ago from Poland. For several years they worked as “hired men,” for others. Then, 14 years ago, they resolved to go on to their own land. The track they selected in Hadley, near the Amherst line, was land which a native declare “nobody will live on or make money out of for 50 years.” It was cutover bottom. From it had been taken great logs which provided timber for of the M.A. C. buildings. All that remained of the timber, said to have been primeval, was massive stumps – “big round as me,” explains Peter Jekanoski – which twisted into and gripped the earth. It was not considered worth a 10th part of the herculean task of breaking.
To this came the Jekanoski brothers—they bought for a song – with their young families. They agreed to work the land on equal shares. While they cleared it, they erected a house (for both families) and a stable.
Peter, aided by his boys with their American schoolhouse English, told something of the financial arrangements. Today the two families own two of the best cars made in America (and still work long and hard), but then they were nearly 100 per cent mortgaged, and their real estate had next to no cash value, either. Once settled, they had hardly enough money to provide the ordinary necessities. And the land was not ready to yield much in the way of food.
“We had to have money,” said Peter, a great, solid, round-faced man with a slow smile. “So my brother work, and I get out the stump. Then I work and my brother get out the stump. We work up at the college.”
GETTING OUT THE STUMPS
Probably getting out the stumps was the hardest assignment of the two. At last, though, a space was cleared – as it probably would not have been it if had remained in native American hands. Then the Jekanoskis didn’t look quite so misguided.
“I planted one row of potato, from that tobacco barn over there in that little hollow” – it was not such a long distance either – “ and I got more than enough potatoes for the family. The first acre I planted I got 400 bushels –but they were only worth 15 cents a bushel. The land was good, and it is better now. When I came, I paid, with my brother, $5 a year in taxes – today I pay $400.”
It is hard to conjure up the picture of the forlorn stump land, with the meagre house and small barn, the one crowded with Jekanoskis and the other but poorly supplied with livestock. Peter Jekanoski today has about 85 acres in three parcels, and a woodlot. His brother has about the same.” They live separately in houses with well-kept lawns and most of the city conveniences. Behind each house are four tobacco barns, garages, sheds, poultry houses and whatnot – all marked with the fruits of shred and careful husbandry. Through an open door is seen a bright, near pile of stove wood; it becomes somehow symbolical. It was just the kind of woodpile that the Yankee farm boy used to get together so painstakingly and now could be hired to go near.
Of the stumps there is no more trace than of the shade of primeval trees once cast. Every last vestige has been rooted out of the soil, which rolls away, acre after acre, unfenced and yellow, cultivated till it is powder fine. On 30 acres will grow this summer endless rows of tobacco, and on three acres of heavier soil onions will send up their green spikes in other endless rows. The Jekanoskis have made their bit of wilderness wonderfully productive – and are raising nearly a score of children.
NO CHARITY CASES
Not all the Polish and Czech families have made an unqualified success, like the hard-working, never tiring Jekanoskis, but they own to no charity cases. There are, however, quite a number who have reached a position of affluence, and are accredited with supplying, on a strict interest basis, the hard cash which starts countless newcomers on land once turned by Yankee ploughshares. One – a born trader in addition to being a farmer—cheerfully admitted losing in the season past something like $20,000 in onions (which took a fearful drop). He is still in business, and so far from bankruptcy that he’s improving his property. He is sound enough financially not to be seriously worried, and, besides, he has enough tobacco warehouses to pretty much wipe out the deficit.
An interesting pioneer is Peter Sfokvzecky of North Hadley, known all over the countryside as Peter Moore and rated as a big man in the community. Peter came from Vilana. As a youth he traded in produce. Twenty years ago he bought the homestead, about 100 years old, formerly owned by Levi Stockbridge, founder of M. A. C. Today he owns 63 acres, a part of which he sets to onions and tobacco and buys and sells the produce of the countryside wherever he can see a profit. His yearly gross business easily cracks $100,000.
Peter Moore has built up a tobacco business of no mean proportions. It has long ago advanced beyond the first family stages. In season, when the tobacco he has raised and purchased has to be sweated and sorted and cased according to grade samples, he hires between 30 and 40 people. They work to a sorting building erected close to the homestead.
The proprietor is a wiry, dark eyed, quick, smiling chap, with none of the look of the “furriner” about him. He is credited in good years with having made a bank president’s profit. He showed, in the course of conversation, two prides – one in his real property – “we improve something every year”—and the other his family – he has a boy studying accounting and business methods in Boston.
MANY SUCH INSTANCES
The instances could be endlessly multiplied. There is Sunderland, for instance, where, on old
Sunderland street, nearly a quarter of the old homes have Polish occupants, and the old Mt. Tabor House has become a Polish booming establishment. Here Alec Bribco has made such an outstanding success that he is a marked man in the Polish community and not unmarked by Yankee business men.
But it’s not only the man. Christine Osley, 18, or West Hatfield, and still in high school, took hold of a 20-acre farm when her father was taken ill. Unloading a car of fertilizer proved no great obstacle for her – nor did making $1000 clear on an acre of tobacco.
Christine is of Czech stock. So also is another Hatfield farmer who has been on his last 10 years now. He started with nothing, but raises nine acres of tobacco yearly and generally sees a handsome profit, owns his own house, supports 10 children and goes without no necessity nor reasonable luxury. When an older boy became interested in pure bred livestock, the father bought him a heifer at a handsome price, and insisted on paying cash rather than taking terms, as offered.
Another farmer, a Pole, it is related bought an old farm at $10,000 for cash—where he got it is a puzzle to his Yankee neighbors. It was considered not a desirable farm—conceded worth about $3000, in fact. Yet within a short time he was showing a tobacco check for a bit over $5,000—one season’s gross profits.
And so it goes with the modern pioneers in an alien land. “Language seems to be no barrier,” comments one observer. “Often they can hardly understand what you are driving at. They know no business. They can’t even figure. It often happens. But they get there just the same. I believe some have a sixth sense. Offer them a deal that’s bit off, and they shy away from it. When you given them a square deal, they seem to know instinctively that it’s all right and do not hesitate.”
Says another: “Look at those horses. As soos as they begin to prosper, they will have nothing but the best around the place—good stock, modern machinery and the whole works.”
GRUB AND SAVE FOR YEARS
“They work and grub and save for years, then all at once they have come through. The, when they can afford it, they speck money on good cars, talking machines, pianos and whatnot. We at the agricultural college during a field meeting I notice that among the farmers who came in from all over the country it was the Poles and the Czechs who were driving the best cars.
“Law-abiding? Yes. They are too busy to get into mischief and it goes they don’t hanker to, anyway. They go to church, too, and you won’t see them doing a stroke of work in the fields Sunday.”
The field men of the agricultural college and of the farm bureaus, have shown much interest in the new-trend of agriculture in the western counties. It means an employment of the potentialities of Massachusetts agriculture such as they have hoped for, though in the malo through other agencies.
What its outcome will be they are reluctant to say. It is comparatively a new development, and has not yet gone through its cycle.
“Dr. Kenyon L. Butterfield, president of M. A. C. who has noted the phenomenon with deep interest, commented briefly to The Sunder Herald ma: “Is it, in your mind, encouraging or disquieting?” he was asked.
“It is both,” was the answer. It can hardly be anything but encouraging from the production point of view. The people are thrifty: they add to agricultural resources, take care of the land and improvit it. They add to the community prosperity.
“But it is disquieting because they are not being assimilated in some cases as fast as they might be. The thought inevitably comes that if one the unassimilated are going to work our farms profitable a serious social problem may be created.”
There in a nutshell is stated the dual nature of the phenomenon. It explains the mingled admiration and uneasiness with which the growing Polish communities are regarded by their Yankee neighbors. Though it is being demonstrated that a Polish family with lower living standards, can make money where Yankee family barely scrapes by, it is in all fairness, admitted that this is not because of any tendency to cut prices or undersell. To quote one farmer, “they want top prices for everything they raise.”
But there are signs that in many instances the assimilation process is going ahead fast. The automobiles, the talking machines, the green lawns, and electric light have been mentioned.
PRIDE IN ACHIEVEMENT
These come inevitable with prosperity, pride in accomplishment, and the eventual capture of a sense of security. It is noticeable that the older generation as a rule takes a vicarious rather than a direct pleasure in those luxuries. With the younger generation it’s different.
And that’s where the cycle goes into the second phase. The younger generation speaks perfect English, for the most part looks Yankee and is pretty like to thing Yankee thoughts—for the better or for worse. There are ____that it is not as a class going to be satisfied to grub early and late, even after measurably high rewards, or with the minimum requirements in clothing, food and recreation. In many a family of the sort one can easitly imagine a bit of tragedy, a bit of pathos, as a the younger generation frown away from the older, the pioneer generation – insists, when married, on modern houses, modest “frills” and white collars, and satisfied with three children in 10 rather than eight in the same space.
Just as the Yankee family did, it is the Polish family going through the cycle from pioneering to “gentility.” And it’s a question if it won’t make the circuit in much shorter time.
If it does, the social problem will look small. But the economic, agricultural problem, out there in the valley, will very likely still be begging for solution.
Thus once more we find ourselves facing the same old stonewall.
The problem concerns not so much those who farm, as American farming itself. It does not disappear til agriculture as a business becomes honored, and reasonably lucrative, without undue sacrifice of social pleasure, creature comforts and certain cultural influences.
PHOTOS AND CAPTIONS:
Plow and Tractor
Peter Kekanoski a Typical Farmer and his Son
Sorting Tobacco
The Levi Stockbridge Homestead now Owned and Occupied by Peter Monrzurchy
