was you know that was a one of the biggest decisions i ever made my life is decide to sell the farm because it had been in my family since eighty ninety one you know what i've gone through my family and my father died your my mother  forty three when i lived here there were many of these farms have been in the family for two three generations and also farmers worked off of the land and it worked off the assets that they created and they didn't have retirement funds they weren't planning on it so what was going on is they're using the development pressure as a retirement fund for the family so in this case here the family lived there for generations sold off the farm that family members were able to to retire and what was a farm is basically forgotten because when i was when i was a you know growing up like i say the rats fire was across the street from us reiko pharmacy east of us for well look right at that tower there of them the main power tower there just lol that would have been the home stead of the high tech family on the radiator farm that's long gone  maplewood where we've identified them and we actually have a walking tour if you want to contact the commission we can get you the information in the for the walking tour of the hundred year old homes and businesses in maplewood and it's a self guided tour it's kind of interesting to find out some of the older development of some of the older lifestyles and how we're transforming now into a modern suburb of the greater metro as opposed to just a small little village of gladstone some hundred years ago so there's a lot of history but there's also a lot of challenges in bringing that history preserving it and preserving history so we know what was i often tell people it's like you know you remember what you did yesterday think was working in the city clerk's office the city council decided that maple would needed a historical society and they appointed a commission seven member commission to whose primary purpose at the time was to create an historical society for the city and i was asked to be the city's representative at their meetings to help them along and do whatever needed to be done in relation to the city so since then i have been involved not only with that historical commission but also with the historical society and in the society i originally served for several years as the secretary and more recently as the treasure both of which have kept me busy and i am also still working with the commission i was excited when the society decided to try to save the farm because i grew up on a farm and road trip farm reminded me very much of the one where i grew up in even though the farm i grew up on is still in existence as a farm there was nothing other than city around a success for the brown trout farm and i thought it was an excellent idea to preserve it for all the future generations to be aware of what it was like to live on a farm even though they didn't have to work as hard as we used to going about nineteen ninety five we started the maplewood area historical society and i was involved with that and i think by the nine people showed up at the first meeting and then there was the number ninety five were we first got going to be taken over by developers and i can remember driving by that farm so many times and say oh i hope they don't take that out of there don't tear it down so the historical society we've been going about three years and our dues are only five dollars a year so we would like to give you this opportunity to sign up for membership and to get their memories of what was here before it was made public and he's still in the process of doing that so i'd like to introduce people  and you're going to see a video tonight that all really sheds more light on why we should save this farm well like to do right now is show the video and i'm going to give a little background tour  some here and know many years ago in one thousand nine hundred sixty i got involved in a historical society in a town about the size of north st paul and i'm still at it about twelve years ago i vowed i would not fight another battle saving buildings saving farms or whatever join historical society and here i am again fighting another battle i was partnership architectural firm in cities was there as a consultant and he wrote a letter fourth of november to  anderson director of parks and rec and i'm not going to read this whole five pages just excerpt thing very it says stu says is an unexpected jam of the historic site no one paid him to rate these things condition integrity in general the farmstead buildings appear to be a reasonably good physical condition survived with a few to changes to their original construction and historical appearance significant in our judgment the farmstead is located is locally significant as a rare remarkably intact early twentieth century dairy farms did and probably would be eligible for listing on the national register of my story places we are not aware of a similar collection of agricultural buildings either in maplewood or ramsey co y i can say he's very accurate and that any ends and says it has the potential to be a great historic asset to the city of maplewood i was involved in the restoration of the oliver h kelley farm in elk river minnesota and if anybody's ever if you travel down highway ten swing in there it's eighteen fifties sixties living historical farm when we did that project at the historical society minnesota circle society there was a barn and a house here we have a barn a house a grain marry a mill chicken coop ice house when mel and everything else all there so to find a firearm within a city limits with some property around it is amazing most historic sites as one building or another gets torn down it does not if it is not saved it will be asphalt and concrete it will be some sort of another strip mall development i've got nothing against development i've got a hell of a lot more for a little open space a little green and a little bit more of wh it's everybody's heard just comment if we don't know where we've been how are we going to know where we're going somebody said well we need development we need tax base except for except for exc if as i say this farm goes we're not going to be able to build another one where are the kids going to go they're going to go the mall and hang out much rather see my grandchildren sent me a copy for our historical society and i would just like to read a brief portion of that letter because i feel it is so good i am writing to encourage the city to do whatever possible to preserve the printer farm has a historic site as land in the twin cities area has been really the elop we have given up many of the historical treasures from earlier this century  deserves preservation just as gibbs farm is a valuable historic site from an earlier part of our twin cities history unfortunately recent historical sites often get destroyed before people realize their historical value the risk is that we view the burn truck farm is just a typical fire and not a historical site i urge the city of maplewood to join the maplewood historical society in doing whatever possible to preserve the printer farm thank you for your consideration of this matter we are here talking tonight about that could be done there to educate our children as to what takes place on a farm and reminds us of the culture of our past heritage sometimes we think in ways that are penny wise but pound foolish city  could not come up with the funds so the historical society started thinking about trying to raise funds so we sent out pledges to individuals  about twenty thousand dollars or something which wasn't nearly what we needed as a lot of people through the years had said you know this should be preserved the city should buy it now so we gave the city the first crack at it and they looked at it very seriously actually they took a study of it  to see the feasibility of doing a referendum vote on appropriating funds for the problem being there was three other referendums that year i mean it was i think the parks and rec and fire and there was another one i don't recall what it was  the timbers of the barn and what to do with the house but the barn would have probably been torn down and salvaged for the beams i was looking to get something to do that the other buildings but it just been bulldozed that's when the historical society got involved and i got a call   forty acres with a wedding present to my grandfather and grandmother from her folks and as how the farm got started and then through the years it was built up two hundred seventy five acres which was someone she had a kind of a german that licked and remembers used to get mad at my sister and i say you don't cough but she was a great lady and did a lot of things with her i remember of typical of women that you know she go out to the garden and she always wore an apron and she'd come back and hold in her apron you know and she had for whatever will produce or was in the garden and of course she grew and grew everything and we had a vegetable cellar down on the north end of the house and it was used for  data storage as well as canned goods we had shelves all the way around it i remember and you know he would have everything from sauerkraut to you know apples and we of course we had little orchard with apples and plums and they'd canned them and then when the peaches and pears helping maybe and i fell asleep in a foamy half buried under the course itself so that was another experience the other things i remember of course is we had a dairy farm and so we always had calves you know and  especially in the spring time and i'm sorry to fall and some sometimes i hated to see the cattle truck to come because that meant the calves are getting shipped to market his lease a reason to tell her about three months old and then we'd sell veal or so that was always a sad time because he used to play around with a cab let him run in between where they were tied up in a colonnade used to just run you know as fast as they could the other things that i guess i remember really is  crashing time when i came around is probably one of my fondest memories of the firmest ration days even as a youngster before i could help it was all the activity used to have at least a thrash about eight or nine different farms and we go from place to place and every place we go they would try to put out a bigger spread for lunch and dinner and then the last place while home cooking of course and and it was also the work it was a lot of work and it was also the first time i really made any money as compared to nothing with a lot of money so i never left about the week or ten days sometimes longer depending on the weather everybody worked hard but everybody enjoyed it it made all the neighbors and just have a have a good time together and then i got a little older and i get to run a bundle wagon with a team of horses my first year which was great because horses you just tell them you know giddy up and well when they walk to the next shack and then after that we started using tractors which didn't prove to be too great because you had to get o and move the tractor which is a lot of work when you're pitching bundles and then we started getting the young gals my sister and some of the neighbor gals was drive the tractors for it which worked out well and then you took pride in who could make the biggest little who could make the neatest lowden and  things like that so it was it was even it was kind of a kind of competitive thing but you know good natured competitiveness it was it was just a great time and i was sad to see that thrashing days disappear i've spent my entire youth working on the farm here and that effect i never played in sports in high school that because my dad said i need you on the farm here but it was it was a good life i mean i we were thoroughly enjoyed it one thing we used to do is that we belong would have skating parties on the pond and that was even upon in those days it got cold earlier it seemed like a lot time thanksgiving we skate on the pond with cousins always came over and it was we'd always go and sometimes it was pretty thin but it was just a shallow ponselle even if you fell through you're in two feet of water or something but but we spent a lot of thanksgivings this skating and plenty o crack the weapons and with the foreach with a lot of times have a fire on the ice on  but every game bad for the second well that's another thing we talk about having horses and we had horses up until i believe but the late fifty's we had still had horses here and one of the things was my dad of course was born in one thousand nine hundred so he grew up with horses and he thought there was a lot of things that horses just did better than a tractor and one of them was planting corn and the other one was dragging the green field after you planted because he thought the tractor pack it down too much for the horses would just you know what prints and so we kept them i'd say until late fifty's and one of the neighbors bottom elbert ricco so they in a matter of fact he kept them until the died i think that's yes and what the seventy's maybe are some you know it and i you know going back to my youth i also remember writing a horse prince was one horse's name is kind of a pet and i used to be able to wri off and on but never got one killed and they disappear for a day or two and then they come back licking their wounds you know and the next thing you know there are a to go again it was it was i just a lot of a lot of fun memories of the sirens you know it's just and then you know the way paraben of course used to be just that when i grew up with two lanes it was concrete but it was only two lanes wide and it was it was just even then it was a busy road but of course nothing nothing like you see you know and my father started selling some of the property i believe the earliest was late fifty's maybe early sixty and that was just a little chunk up along with that being it was  across the road i believe in late sixty's early say mid sixty's maybe and there again a star they were talking the development of wiper avenue and more assessments and i will say that the village it was a village maple at that time worked with him quite well and and deferred a lot of the cessna's but then they got to a point where you can you know if you defer that means it goes on a just general tax burden so they got to a point where they couldn't keep deferring things and because it was too hard on the other taxpayers so at that point he decided to sell now it was probably an emitter early sixty's because i remember my dad was in his sixty's and he was looking to retire and of course typical of that age they didn't have you know they just got in on the of social security they actually bought into it didn't get a lot of benefit and as typical even farmers today there are a lot of more land rich and cash poor so so he actually used it for his retirement your dad really enjoyed watching the prime element a lot of people would say ah don't you hate to see and actually my dad enjoyed it you kind of gave him think he was interested in things like that he told me there and check out the driver on the watch to see what they were doing any you know he always knew what was going on and saw a lot of people say well you made all that money and also on that land but what people don't realize when he sold it number one wiper avenue was an upgraded number to six ninety four was not in there so it didn't have the access that people wanted for needed for a shopping center so actually the shopping center really didn't develop until the dead did get better access which was six ninety four it opened it up and you know that it was a lot i think at least eight or nine years after my dad sold it before maplewood mall went in and it was yeah so we did see a lot lot of development you know st paul or the suburbs were already starting to creep out but it was and you know the thing that was still open fields for farms and and even way paraben along towards white bear was pretty open yet so all of the biggest decisions i ever made my life as it was decided to sell a farm because it had been my family since eighty ninety one you know i had gone through my family and in my father died here my mother and my sister ended up dying early at one thousand nine hundred four and after that we we were kind of stomping at the duraid on i tried moving back here and it was just it had changed so much and what forty years or whatever it's thirty five i guess but they had built the shopping center they had built them all under the north side they were empty dumpsters in the middle of the night they're plowing snow and they do you hear the sirens going to the hospital it was just just i couldn't adapt to it i don't think i had had fun memories of it but things had changed so much an area that just so then two of our children weren't married at the time we talked to them and they moved  here for almost five years and son and daughter and then our son wanted to buy a house and move on so then we moved back with our daughter marianne and and live here and that's when we kind of made the decision that we had to do something and and we decided to sell at that point but like i say that's probably the toughest decision i ever made my only girl and peter's husband glen painted a big sign to save the farm put it out the end of the driveway yeah we get i think very positive many letters from people and then what can you do to help i think memories vironment fun memories of youth lot of people if they didn't we're going to live on a farm a lot of them work summer help type thing or they had grandparents that lived on a farm that they would visit or i think it was just a passing year that that you know everybody likes to hang on the memories and the way things were not always possible and i think this was an opportunity to  some of that in be able to hold on to those memories joining me on the program today our current peterson and shar was like a lady's certainly known you both for a long time and been very interested and involved myself in the farm but shar want to tell the people a little bit about the history to date about the farmer and all we've been through so far ok well i think many residents and maplewood have driven by the farm in its original location and wondered about what was going to happen to that and hoping that it might become a part of the city at historical society maple that area historical society so we brought it to meetings and we wondered what could we do about it so we went before the city and  they did send out a call for interested people that would like to save the farm and we had a very good reception but it wasn't quite good enough at that time  to for them to consider putting it on a referendum to get the one point eight million plus you know that we needed to buy let's say the farm on the original site and the on the original site so then that was denied because partly because the city was involved in other funding at the time i think it was part of a new gladstone fire station and things like that were coming up so  then our group we had a bigger group by that time and carolyn and some of the other other people got involved out side of the historical society quite a few people and so we did form a committee of the historical society to just be involved in saving the farm and carolyn peterson here and i are co chairs of that dollars and this was to move the farm and at that point i don't think we were quite sure where it was going to be moved but it was they were thinking somewhere in that area of county road well as it turned out the city did allow us two and a half acres of land in the open space city open space and the legislature and we had quite a few ups and downs you know and whether we were going to get any money or one time it was fifty thousand maybe and then it turned out that  that they were had the bill of one hundred thousand dollars well this wasn't enough really to do the farm but it was something to start with so we were a citizen lobby and we were quite  little thorn in the side i think of some of the legislators down there we were there all the time including george specter and ray day all in bill brown tarp or there and glen in carolyn peterson and my character who was the system to the city manager so anyway the final result was one hundred thousand dollars and then along with the contributions large contributions from  interrupts and sixteen thousand dollars that was pledged by citizens and we talked about before so many of the labor unions and businesses have contributed to this funding i was excited when the society decided to try to save the farm because i grew up on a farm and road trip farm reminded me very much of the one where i grew up and even though the fire i grew up on is still in existence as a farm there was nothing other than city around this except for the brown farm and i thought it was an excellent idea to preserve it for all the future generations to be aware of what it was like to live on a farm even though they didn't have to work as hard as we used to well i had the joy of learning an awful lot growing up in a small lemon acre farm we had a team of horses and we had a cow we had chickens and we had pigs and so all of us children there were six of us daughters in our family and we learned from the ground up how to care for them how to feed the chickens how do gather the eggs and one incident i have to tell you that every friday our grocery man came and can have the three exhibit but we had a lot of experience where we were taught how to milk the cow how to feed them so children miss all of that they miss all of that enjoyment we had kit of course we saw the little kittens we always had a big ship shepherd dog and so it was something that we learned from the beginning and all the kids all they do is look at it on t love history and i do family history and so i saw what was up and the issues that they were bringing lots of just beautiful place i lived on a farm myself off and on in my youth and the best time of my life was on the farm and i see the children that come out here and that's all you just see the children for one day they just it just so joyful and you know that once this is gone it's gone and so if they can preserve this for the rest of the history of this house and the land it will be a wonderful thing these kids will love it and their generation and on hopefully this will take place that time so then the idea of moving the farm community members came forward and says enough is enough we're losing our farm for losing our landscape we don't have anything to reflect back upon in history so in order to do that an effort was put forward to say the broom to farm it wasn't just to say broacha farm it was to save a way of life what they had to do was move the buildings onto a piece of property because the foundations we had to move them quickly because of the the developers were coming and so they moved them on to a piece of property while they built the foundations for the house and for the barn move really well well i was here when they moved the farm and i watch with great anticipation i was very interested in the moving of it and of course moving here and then all the platforms of cement were here so the buildings were put in its proper place oh i'd say yes i watched over when the barn was coming down the street and i thought oh me i hope it doesn't tip over so i watched some of the procedure but they did a good had quite a time moving and it was it was great fun to watch them the society is recreating the farmstead as closely as we can to the original site and i might also mention that this open space that it's been moved to originally was a dairy farm so it's appropriate that the branch of buildings be there and this home will be  a home to the maplewood area historical society where we will hold our meetings but we also plan to have reception's maybe catering could be our chose craft shows there will be demonstrations i think the main objective is to educate children short children and not only children adults to how farm life was in this area you know there was a lot of farms dairy farms truck farms all kinds of different firms but it was a way of life and and just to see how people lived how they made a living what they did every daily basis and you know some of these children just don't have that personal feeling and maybe  demonstrations i think we'll probably have a demonstration well when i see the children come for open houses or for different family get togethers here at brown so far they're excited they're they're jumping from one sink to the another or i have to go see the animals no i want to go over here and there there's always something for them to see and it's an education for them especially when we have johnny appleseed and some of these things that are really well planned by the we believe it's important to not only educate the younger people of the area about farming and farm life but also to give them a sense of the history of what people had to go through in order to make the city of maplewood what it is and all the things that led up to it actually being a city when it was off farms and people were basically creating their farms out of wilderness it in the earliest stages of the area and it's i think children nowadays don't get the same kind of historical education in school that maybe many of us did when we were children and i think this is good for them to see and understand what there passed really is we're taking pictures of one hundred year old homes that's so that was my first job was to finish the list of the hundred year old houses and i went around in that kind of started me with the for tiger fee and after the fire moved i have an album from each year starting in two one a full album of everything that the historical society has done for the whole year so right now it's not history but fifty years from now it will be history we did get a plaque we have a plaque over here that was from the preservation textbooks but actually artifacts being able to walk to a farm site like the broad stroke farm and just walk and feel what it was like a hundred years ago kids i think like you say a lot of them have never been on a farm  and of course you if they have seen pictures everything is modern know the great big equipment and they probably don't realize too you know what a small family farm was like back in may you know  leaving you look back and i'm sure everybody our age remembers you know baking homemade bread you know i'm a can remember grandma used to make apple google and with the apples from the apple trees and and you say i can remember just go out and grab and plums off of the off the trees and but just to see you know your mother father had to work you know basically i remember my dad always got up about six in the morning you know the cows only come in for breakfast and then do your chores you know and he had a clean the barn had to feed the cattle they usually fed the cattle when you're milking but then you had a clean the barn after and there was always george grain feed in the wintertime snow removal just making sure things