Family’s Farm Cultivates Stability for 128 Years

Wilma Buhr sits at her antique kitchen table, handling her scrapbooks and old photographs like jewels lifted from a treasure chest.

They are her history, and that of her father and his father and his father, a record of 128 years of life, back to the day a young German immigrant named Eibe Hinrichs decided to rear his family on a tract of land here in eastern Illinois.

Every family has a history, and many even have a record of it. But how many families today really live with their history? How many sleep each night in the same house their great-grandfather built, scrape the same dirt from their shoes, make their living in much the same way?

Wilma Buhr and her family live with their history, on land transformed from swamp to farm, in the modest, two-story white frame house that Hinrichs built.

The story of America is often one of change; up to now, though, the story of the Hinrichs family is one of continuity. Hinrichs and his descendants farmed the same land through two world wars, the Great Depression, the agricultural prosperity of the 1970s and the agricultural crisis of the late 1990s.

But change is happening, even here. Wilma Buhr is 60; her husband, Vernon, is 65. They have four daughters, but none is involved in farming. So Wilma Buhr could be the last of her family to live on and work this land.

“They say the family farm is going to fade away, but I hate to see it,” she says softly. “So many people are selling the farms away from the home, but I would like to keep it all together if we could possibly do that.”

Eibe Hinrichs was 29 and his fiancee, Gretje Albers, 25 when they left their homes in northern Germany in the spring of 1866 to settle in the United States and marry.

Arriving in New Orleans, they traveled up the Mississippi and arrived in Golden in western Illinois. Eibe worked as a section hand on the railroad; Gretje was a housemaid. They had two children by the spring of 1870, when they joined other German settlers on their way east to the St. Joseph area--about 15 miles east of Urbana.

The area had no school or church, and the land was dismal and swampy. But no matter; they had drained land in Germany with dikes and canals. So they dug ditches and drained swamps here, creating some of the most fertile farmland in Illinois.

On March 22, 1872, Eibe and Gretje Hinrichs purchased 60 acres of land for $15 an acre southeast of a town called Flatville. Two months later, their second son, Arnd, was among the first babies baptized in the community, in a school doubling as a Lutheran church.

The Hinrichses prospered. Flatville, meanwhile, became a bit of Germany transplanted. So they attended a Lutheran church, socialized with German immigrant neighbors and sent children to German-language schools. When the children married, they chose spouses from German families and moved to nearby farms.

In 1898, Arnd married Eke Saathoff and moved into the original farmhouse. And his parents moved into a small house next door.

Gretje died at age 78. Eibe lived to be 94.

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By 1903 Arnd and Eke had expanded the original farmhouse to a two-story white frame home with shuttered windows and covered porch. They named their eldest son after his grandfather, Eibe, and gave the other nine children traditional German names like Klaas, Tena, Janna, Martin and Mentka.

The farm kept everyone busy. The children helped butcher cattle and hogs. They all helped their mother with washing and baby-sitting and cooking. Oats were cut and bundled, then threshed by a machine pulled by a steam engine so big it required two dozen men to run it.

Years later, Wilma Buhr asked her father how the family managed. “He said, ‘We all helped eachother. That’s the family way. You can do that,’ ” Buhr remembers.

Religion was a vital part of farm life. In 1914 the Hinrichses helped build a massive Lutheran church with brown stone walls, arched Gothic windows, murals and a soaring gold-and-white ceiling. It was nicknamed “The Cathedral in the Cornfield,” and the steeple is visible from the Hinrichs’ farm.

Strong anti-German sentiment arose with World War I, and the Lutheran pastor told his congregation to think of Germany as the mother country and the United States as a wife. “When we take unto ourselves a wife, we swear to be loyal to her until death,” he said.

Family tragedies followed medical problems that would be easily handled nowadays. A son died in 1929 from complications of tonsillitis; another died in 1940 of tuberculosis, leaving a 20-year-old widow.

But Arnd and Eke Hinrichs had a long marriage, celebrating their 55th wedding anniversary before she died at 81 and he at 88. The farm passed to a third generation when their oldest son, Eibe, bought the original farmhouse and land from two surviving brothers.

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Born just before the start of the 20th century, this eldest son grew up in a way familiar to the German immigrant grandfather for whom he was named. He attended German school in the summer and six months of public school in the winter.

He hunted rabbits, quail and prairie chickens to sell for extra money. He and his siblings rode horses around the farm and into town.

When he married, in 1923, it was to a girl of German immigrant stock, Fanny Marie Kopmann. They had three children--Ernest, Helen and Wilma--over the next 16 years.

Before his grandfather--the original Eibe--died in 1930, someone had the foresight to record four generations of Hinrichses on film.

Eibe, with a short tuft of a white beard, sits with his cane hooked around the arm of his rocking chair. His son Arnd stands behind his father with his son Eibe at his side. The younger Eibe’s son, Ernest, sits on his great-grandfather’s lap, a chubby baby in a white christening outfit.

All in the farmhouse yard, a freeze-frame of a disappearing way of life.

On the farms of Eibe’s youth, the men grew a variety of crops and the women tended huge gardens. Horses pulled plows and wagons, and cattle, pigs, chickens and dairy cows provided meat, milk and butter.

By the time he died, in 1972, some crops such as oats had already disappeared, and soybeans were almost as important as corn. Those who kept livestock did so for a living, not to feed family. And horses were replaced by costly tractors and combines.

“He saw the changes coming,” Buhr says. ‘He said, ‘A lot of this is for the good.’ But I think he’d be amazed at the prices we’re still dealing with--and our expenses are a lot greater.”

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Born in 1939, Wilma Hinrichs grew up a tomboy, more interested in helping her dad in the fields than her mom in the kitchen. Eibe Hinrichs taught Wilma to drive at 9, when she was so short she had to peer through the steering wheel spokes.

“I felt so proud my dad trusted me to do that,” she remembers.

She milked cows by hand, made butter and drove a tractor in front of a hay baler. After graduating from high school, Wilma Hinrichs worked in Urbana, and she dated some boys. But she knew the right one would have to be a farmer.

In 1963 she married Vernon Buhr, a farm boy from nearby Royal, also with German roots. When her father retired a few years later, he asked the couple to take over the farm. “I thought it was a privilege,” she says.

But it was also hard work. Buhr remembers baling hay and slaughtering cattle. She would pile her young daughters into a car to take lunches to men too busy to come in from the fields.

In 1972, Buhr asked the Illinois Department of Agriculture to certify the Hinrichs homestead as a centennial farm--one that had stayed in the same family’s hands for at least 100 years. The metal sign noting the designation stands near a bend in the road.

Today, Buhr’s kitchen counter is crowded with time-saving appliances, such as a coffee maker and food processor, that would amaze her ancestors. She drives a minivan and uses a car phone. An old outhouse now stores her grandchildren’s toys.

The Buhrs farm an additional 240 acres beyond Eibe Hinrich’s original 60. Where Hinrichs once raised oats, cattle, pigs and dairy cows, now corn and soybeans are the mainstays. Wilma Buhr buys her beef at the grocery store rather than slaughtering cattle, as she and her husband did when they were newly married. She is a devoted grandmother to three children with thoroughly contemporary names: Dalton, Katelyn, Lauren.

She is the curator of the family history, compiling scrapbooks, updating address lists for the hundreds of descendants of Eibe Hinrichs. Before one recent harvest, Vernon Buhr touched up paint on the old barn, put together mostly with pegs, holes and notches, hardly any nails.

“I feel very privileged to be able to live here,” Wilma Buhr said. “We try to keep it fixed up. We’ve redone the barn and redone the house. I’ve had members of the family tell me they appreciate that. We try to keep things the way it used to be.

“That’s important to me; it’s very important to me.”

Buhr’s daughter Linda and her husband, Matt Smith, help at critical times like harvest. But low prices for corn and soybeans make Buhr wonder if any one of her children’s generation will want to sacrifice the stability and benefits of jobs in town for the risky life on the farm.

Buhr would love to see Matt and Linda’s 4-year-old son, Dalton, be the sixth generation to take over. She encourages the little boy’s interest, keeping a pillow in the truck for him to sit on during trips to the grain elevator.

“We hope we can keep him interested.”