Back Home by Chris Hardie
I carried the metal box into a small room at the bank and removed documents – some of which had been stored for more than 50 years.
The box was rented by my parents, who checked on its contents about a month before Dad died in 2020, according to the registration card. I kept paying the annual rental fee after taking over Mom’s finances.
So what was inside Box No. 52? Some documents that detailed some of the history of the farm and some of the unlucky financial investments made by my father.
The oldest document was a notice of a meeting of the Franklin town board, dated Nov. 4, 1937, to decide upon an application to lay out a highway. The meeting was to be held Nov. 18 in the home of Ray Hardie – my great grandfather.
My late great Aunt Sara Clair – Ray’s daughter – told me that getting a mile back to the farm from County Highway C used to be a laborious task as it involved stopping at the various property boundaries to open and close gates.
This notice stated that the highway – what became a town road – was to run southeasterly from the former schoolhouse along Highway C to Ray’s house. It was to run between his machine shed and ice house and then across the creek to a lone white oak tree. The description – which included the descriptions of the quarter sections the road crossed – said the road was to run to the southwest bank of the creek.
Without digging into town meeting records, it’s pretty clear the town never took action on this description. The town road certainly does not cross the creek but it did end up between his house – where I live today. I remember the old machine shed but the location of the lone white oak tree is a mystery.
From 1939 is a copy of a land warranty deed in which my great grandparents Ray and Hilda bought 160 acres of land from their neighbors John and Esther Tollefson for $700 – which is about $4.38 per acre. That $700 is the equivalent of $16,220 in today’s dollars.
One of the documents detailed the financial transactions when Aunt Sara and Uncle Leland Clair purchased the farm from Ray and Hilda. On July 1, 1957, they purchased 21 Herefords, eight Holstein cows, 3.5 (not sure where the ½ comes in) Holstein heifers and three Holstein calves for $3,650. They also paid $1,260 for the tractor, equipment and a team of horses and $50 a month in rent.
The signed agreement – which was updated annually – also specified that my great aunt and uncle would pay half of the fuel oil bill and one-third of the “light bill” with the other amount credited off their note – they shared a house with Ray and Hilda.
Oh to have such energy bills today – in 1958 one-half of the fuel oil bill was $95 and one-third of the light bill was $83. Yes, that was for the year.
Also among the documents were fancy stock certificates from mining and exploration companies dating to 1969 and 1970. These were penny stocks my father purchased back in the days when he worked as a mining engineer for what was then Nordberg Manufacturing Co., a Milwaukee company that was once the largest manufacturer of mining hoists in the world.
Dad left his job with Nordberg in 1970 when we moved to the family farm, but he continued to do consulting with the company for a few years. While Dad was an excellent farmer and I assume an excellent engineer, he wasn’t as good at buying stock in mining or gas and oil companies.
He had 500 shares in Silver Bowl Inc., from Utah that he bought on May 13, 1969 for 30 cents a share; 50 shares of King Resources of Maine and 100 shares of Sunshine Consolidated. Although vestiges of Silver Bowl and Sunshine still exist, the original companies are bankrupt or long gone. While the stocks are worthless, the paper they are printed on could be worth a few bucks as there are some collectors of these certificates.
Speaking of my father, he also had a copy of his baptismal certificate from Jan. 23, 1938, signed by his sponsors – three aunts and two uncles. The ceremony was held at North Beaver Creek Lutheran Church, where he is buried.
Another document is a copy of a 1993-94 Wisconsin Assembly Resolution that pays tribute to my grandfather Keith Hardie’s career in the Assembly in the 1950s. Grandpa died on April 7, 1994.
There are other documents – like a copy of Dad’s life insurance policy – that were once important but are now a part of history that will soon be forgotten, just like the farm.
I’ll keep most of them, because I won’t forget.
Although there was no buried treasure in the bank, I struck gold anyway.
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
