Harry Caldwell

In what ways has your town changed?

My dad built this place in 1934. And we had a whole town full of businesses. We had two barbershops, three restaurants, and about five gas stations at one time. Now we’re down to one restaurant, no barbershops, and no gasoline stations.

Well, we do have one that’s a self-serve thing out here. But basically, the businesses are just about going down to not much, to the point we’re at right now. It was better back when we knew everybody in town. And now people change, go in and out, and we have workers in town that we don’t know. They come and go.

And it’s just all together different than what it was 60 years ago.

If I just go down the street as I remember it, we had an [elevator] here in town, it handled the market commodities, and grain. And we had a drugstore in town. We had a dry goods store. We had three grocery stores. We had two taverns, and of course, we had the bank and post office. They’re still here.

And we had two garage services that serviced the tractors, and cars, and everything for the farmers, and three churches. We still have a couple of those, yet.

What’s accounted for the change in farming?

I suppose, I’m really not qualified to say what accounted for it, but you have to get bigger to stay in business, especially on a farm. And with people that could not afford to expand, they eventually drifted away, and the ones that could afford it have just eaten it up. And there’s many, many empty farms or places that I remember that actually the house is not even there anymore, there’s no buildings, or they farm right over everything.

Is this a change for the better?

Well, as I say, everything’s changed. The face of the whole town has changed. But, I think for the most part, probably the people that live here are better off today than they were in the ‘30s, because times have changed. Even if we have changed – and of course, we’re a more mobile society now – and by that virtue, everything must be better or we wouldn’t be able to move around the way we do.

I’d love to see it back a few years, maybe not clear back in the ‘30s, but in the ‘40s and ‘50s it was quite a viable town. I think it was very nice. Everybody knew everybody. All friends.

What’s your take on the changes with ethanol?

Well, I think with the advent of ethanol there’s a tremendous demand for corn in this state. And by the virtue of that, I think you’re going to see a lot more nitrogen used, in an effort to get more bushels per acre, which I think will probably contribute to more water contamination. I don’t think there’s any question that’s going to happen.

Tell us about the grain stores and feed stores.

Okay, yeah, we had feed stores for the farmers. And they bought cream, they bought eggs, every Saturday night and Wednesday night, people would come to town and market their eggs and take groceries home with them. And they sold feed for the chickens maybe a 50-pound bag at a time, whereas now they buy it by the tons, for the livestock.

Do you miss the days when you were enjoying local milk and eggs?

Well, I don’t know if that has had a lot of effect on us, because we probably don’t eat the same as we did back in those days, for one thing. But it brings a lot of people together; on a given night everybody would come to town. And it would just be a lot of interaction between the farmer over here and the farmer over here that they hadn’t seen all week, and they would see in town on Saturday night, probably.

Do you think that more of added social life would have a tendency to have the young people wanting to stick around more?

In this day and age, it’s too convenient to go somewhere. And it wasn’t in those days. But today, I don’t know how much difference it would make. It may not.

There are definitely fewer younger people in this area. And as they grow up, they tend to migrate because they don’t have the activities here that they need, so to speak, or want. And so, they migrate to the larger towns, and maybe clear out of state. Who knows?

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