Tracing my Farming Roots

       The task of tracing my genealogical roots to farming took me to my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Earnest Harker, whom spent the majority of his life farming his pieces of Idaho, despite the historical events that affected his agricultural practices.

(Ben is the one sitting under the window)

Ben was born May 11, 1903 in Taylorsville, UT. In 1905, his family relocated near Jamestown, ID where they cleared the land and built their farm. The farming Ben experience included all types of livestock, fruits, vegetables, and grain. In 1918, the family moved to a larger farm two miles west near Stanton, where they added honey to their production. When Ben was 14, he was taken out of school to help on the farm as he was needed to help in the absence of his brother, who joined the army to fight in World War I. The effects of this had Ben doing “a man’s work” and there were now 18 people at to feed at the dinner table because his brother’s family moved in with them. In 1918, the Spanish Influenza epidemic shook his community and family to then have the typhoid fever hit them in 1919 and 1920. Ben's sister died of the fever which caused her children to come live with the family. The addition to the household definitely affected their farming as now they had to produce more to feed the larger family along with trying to maintain the farm while the people who worked were sick.

(Benjamin Earnest Harker)

Ben worked for his father on the family farm until his younger brothers could take his place in 1922. For a few years before Ben acquired his own land, he worked on other people’s farms for income. One of the farm jobs he obtained because of a local farmers remark that he produced “the prettiest and best tasting potatoes he had ever seen” and his father’s remark that “there isn’t much that he doesn’t know about farming”. This can be credited to him working on the farm at a young age and devoting his whole day to the work starting at age 14. A few years later Ben met and married Anna Elizabeth Pehrson on Dec 18, 1929 and they started a life and family together.

(Anna Elizabeth Pehrson)

During the Depression years, Ben’s family had plenty to eat because they farmed what they needed. However, it was difficult to replace their clothing when it wore out so they resorted to making their shoes, gloves, and underwear. Times were quire rough and Ben fell a year behind on his farm payments, much like most farmers at this time in history. In addition to this, the winter of 1934-5 the children suffered with the whooping cough. Ben stuck things out and in 1935, he made a good sale that paid off all his current debt and expenses and he was able to return to the lifestyle of maintaining a garden to feed his family and animals and sell the excess for income. In 1938, Ben’s wife contracted typhoid fever and died, leaving him with four young children. That year Ben had a lovely crop of sugar beets but harvesting was hard, perhaps because of his new mister mom role, but his neighbors came and helped him just as they did the year before when his wife was sick.

One year later in Logan, UT, on February 8, 1939, Ben married a widow with two children, Ethel Dye Monson. Ethel was not foreign to farming as she grew up working on her family farm in Firth, ID. Ethel herded cows, hailed hay, planted potatoes, and thinned beats. She also helped out on neighboring farms to help purchase her family’s clothing. Ethel was even known to kill a chicken by stepping on its neck and yanking upwards, to then gut and pluck the feathers so she could cook the chicken for dinner. With Ben's family now totaling nine, his 40 acres of land was no longer enough to provide for them so they relocated to the Lava Side area on a larger piece of land where his farming continued.

(Ben and Ethel with their now 7 children. 2 daughter would be added later)

          Farming was put on the back burner for Ben in 1945 when he and Ethel was asked to work in the new Idaho Falls Temple. His neighbors would come help do the work while he was gone and later years he rented his land out because his older children had left home and he no longer had help on the farm. With the aspect of his family growing smaller, Ben and his family relocated to smaller land, where they still maintained a cow for the milk, a calf for the beef, and chickens. Even in these later years when his farming effort declined, he was still able to remark that everything on the dinner table had been produced by them. In Ben's later years be took a position working for the state mental hospital in Blackfoot as a farm supervisor so farming continued to be the way he made a living, just in a new way.

(Ben, on the right, in front of his retirement home)

        In 1969, Ben retired from the hospital and he moved with his wife and their youngest daughter, my mom, to a home, not a farm. Their backyard still allowed them to maintain a nice garden which he worked himself and later, in his 70's, supervised the work from his deck while sitting in his wheel chair. In 1986, Ben was moved to a living center where he still could be seen wearing his hickory stripped bib overalls that were a daily staple from his work as a farmer. Ben died January 25, 1994. Ben was never rich but his family never wanted either. The historical events that occurred during Ben's life time: war, disease, and the Great Depression, were hurdles that Ben was able to work through successfully. I think my grandpa's success as a farmer was because of what being a farmer creates a person: farmers are disciplined, hard working, they appreciate the simple things, and they value what they have because they helped create it.

(Ben and Ethel Harker) 

Resource: Johnson, Mary Susan. Personal interview 18 Jan 2015.

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