West Bend, WI – Fourth of July on the Farm in the 1930’s for over 15 years, Dave Bohn wrote down memories of his childhood, growing up on the family farm just south of West Bend on Hwy P. He hopes his writings will preserve the often-overlooked stories of ordinary farmers and everyday farm life in rural Washington County during the Great Depression through the eyes of a local farm boy.
Summer is a time for celebrations, and it was no different when I was a boy in the 1930’s. The Fourth of July was always a fun holiday on our farm. Of course, we had to milk the cows and feed the chickens, but as a rule, no other work was done on that day.
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There were years when we’d have to do a token amount of work though since the Fourth of July was around hay making time. Now the hay is cut earlier, but back then, the farmers would do the first cut of hay in late June or early July.
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If the hay was just cut, we’d bring the hay from the fields into that barn. But that was only if the work was absolutely necessary.
Some years, when we were out of grade school we did go to parades on Main Street in West Bend, but not very often until I was a little older. Sometimes we went into town to watch the fireworks at City Park, which later became Regner Park.
In the early 1930’s when I was just a boy, was the time City Park was being developed (the park was dedicated on July 4, 1935).
The years we didn’t go into town, we would watch the fireworks that we could see from our house, as our farm was situated at the top of a big hill just south of West Bend. The park was only about 4 miles away, so the fireworks were visible. We would just go out on our driveway and look to the north.
We mostly celebrated the Fourth of July with just our own family and my grandparents that lived upstairs. If the weather was good, Mom would make a little lunch and we’d eat outside. When we were little, Dad would shoot off firecrackers. They would not light up as fireworks do now. They just made a loud bang.
When my brother Tom and I were a little older, maybe 8-10 years old, we started shooting off firecrackers ourselves.
My parents didn’t like it, but as boys would do, we did it anyway. Tom and I would set up the firecracker under a tin can with a short amount of wick exposed outside the can. We would light the wick and the firecracker would explode in about 30 seconds and send the tin can flying up in the air.
I think that the cans would fly up about 50 feet, but I’m not really sure, as I was just a kid. The cans would fly higher if the seal against the ground was tight. So, it would take some time for Tom and I to get the firecracker set just right.
Sometimes Mom and Dad, Grandma, my sister, Mary Ann (Falter), and little brother, Jerry would come out to watch us. Most of the time though, it was just Tom and I because it took so long in between each lighting.
That’s how we celebrated the Fourth of July on our farm in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. It’s a little different than now, I know, with all the big and bright fireworks. But that’s the way it was back then. It was a simple Fourth of July, but we made our own fun.
