Serendipitous search

One of the benefits of Google is the way a search for one item can point the searcher to an unrelated item that proves to be of equal interest. For example, because I was unaware that grapes were often grown in the Henderson area, I searched for the terms grape, cultivation, and York County before writing the post. One of the results returned was the biographical sketch about Jacob Friesen. Another result deserves its own post, which is what follows.

By chance, the October 1950 Mennonite Life has one article on grape cultivation in the San Joaquin River Valley in California (think Dinuba, Reedley, Parlier, and Sanger), followed by an article on a certain Mennonite town in York County, Nebraska (Friesen 1950). More specifically, the article is about the way irrigation revolutionized the farm economy in the Henderson area.

Of course, one cannot write an article about Henderson irrigation in 1950 without mentioning John and Gus Thieszen, two leading pioneers in the development. Nor can I write this post without at least noting that Gus Thieszen’s company (whose drilling rig is pictured above; I may be mistaken, but the person next to the compressor appears to be Gus) was eventually purchased by one of Grandpa Chris’s sons, Carl, who later sold it to his son Steve (for another drilling-related post, see here).

As evidence of the increased yields possible on irrigated land, the article provides a photo of corn cribs and the explanation that those who “had more wells constructed on their farms … simultaneously replaced their single-ring cribs of corn with two-, three-, four-, and even five-ring cribs of corn” (Friesen 1950, 12).

But no need to take my word for it; you can read the article for yourself. Thanks to the good graces of Bethel College, all the back issues of Mennonite Life are freely available to anyone who cares to read them (see here). The October 1950 issue is available here (scroll down to page 10 in the magazine, which is page 12 in the PDF file).

Source

Friesen, J. J. 1950. Remaking a Community—Henderson, Nebraska. Mennonite Life 5.4:10–13. Available online here.