BUENA VISTA

Peters

Century Farm

Established: 1921

Township: Hayes Township

Acres: 70

Century Farm Award: 2021

Generation: 5th-generation their son Larry.

Born in 1940, Larry Foell attended grade school through first grade in Nemaha and graduated from Hayes School in 1958 with seven other students.

As a boy, he participated in 4-H and enjoyed cattle projects.

“Farming was a passion for my dad,”

Hay Rack Decks

said Peters, an instructional assistant with the Storm Lake Community School District. “He farmed several years with his dad and Grandpa Foell before running the farm himself. Until late in his life, he lived on the same farm since 1966.”

Larry, who farmed with International Harvester (IH) equipment, raised corn, soybeans and popcorn, which he sold to the JOLLY TIME popcorn company in Sioux City. He also trucked for Dekalb Seed for 54 years, traveling to Illinois, South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota.

In addition, he loved tractor rides and spending time with his family, which took him to Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Illinois.

While the farm wasn’t overly important to Peters when she was growing up, things changed after her father broke his femur in 2019.

“My husband, Matt, and daughter, Kaylee, took time off from work to help do all the planting that spring,” said Peters, who lives on a Century Farm where her great-great-grandfather lived, five miles

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By DARCY DOUGHERTY MAULSBY Farm News writer

LOHRVILLE — While the world was at war in 1918, Joe Beschorner was seeding oats that spring on his Calhoun County farm. The German immigrant had purchased a 120-acre Reading Township farm on March 19 that year. About a week later, he and his wife, Anna, welcomed a daughter, Pauline, who was born on March 27.

“I was born on the Century Farm, which is southeast of Lohrville and north of Churdan,” said Pauline (Beschorner) Boner, 105, of Lake City.

While the Great War ended in November 1918 and the Roaring 20s followed, times were tough on the farm, especially for a young family like the Beschorners (who also had a son, Frederick). “My parents sometimes had to borrow money from Grandpa and Grandma,” Pauline Boner said.

When the Beschorners wanted to send a family photo to Joe’s parents in Germany, there was no extra money to buy new clothes. “My mom disassembled her wedding dress and made a pretty dress for me, which I wore in the picture,” she recalled.

When Pauline was growing up, her family raised crops, beef cattle, dairy cows that they milked by hand, and lots of chickens. “We also had apple trees and sold apples to people in the area,” said Pauline, who enjoyed farm life.

Sometimes tramps would stop at the Beschorner farm for a bite to eat. When Pauline was about 5 or 6, she recalled one of these men eating a meal in the family’s kitchen. “My mother asked him to keep an eye on me while she went to the barn to milk the cows,” said Pauline, who added that everything worked out fine.

For eight years, Pauline attended Reading No. 8 country school, which was half a mile west of the family’s farm. When she started school, she didn’t speak English. “I’d speak German during recess with a neighbor girl,” said Pauline, who grew up

Boner Century Farm

Established: 1918

Township: Reading

Acres: 120

Century Farm Award: 2018

Generation: 3rd generation speaking German.

In her grade level, there were only two students, including Pauline and another girl.

“For a time, our teacher boarded with us in the winter in an upstairs bedroom at our house,” added Pauline, who graduated from Lohrville High School in 1935.

Spring graduation seemed like a distant memory by the brutal winter of 1936. “We had a long lane,” she recalled. “Dad would shovel it, but the wind would blow the snow right back. We never left the farm for six weeks that winter.”

Pauline was working at a grocery store in Churdan when she started dating Lawrence (“Larry”) Boner, a former Lohrville High classmate.

The couple married in 1946 and started their married life in a one-bedroom home with no running water north of Lohrville.

“My dad, Joe, continued to live on what’s now the Century Farm until he died in 1968,” said Pauline, whose mother passed away in 1957.

As Larry and Pauline’s family grew, they moved in 1954 to a farm a mile and a half east of Lohrville along Iowa Highway 175.

The Boners had seven children, including Ann, Robert (“Bob”), Kathleen (“Kathy”), twins Eileen and Elaine, Mary and Ron. The kids had plenty of jobs on the farm.

Whether they were baling hay, shelling corn or walking beans, everyone could count on Pauline to make a big lunch, complete with her famous pies, from apple to lemon to banana cream.

Larry and his brothers all retired from farming at the same time in 1979, when Larry was 61. Larry and Pauline moved to Lake City in 1981.

Pauline learned how to golf at age 62 and enjoyed going to the Lake City Country Club with Larry.

By DARCY DOUGHERTY MAULSBY

Farm News writer

HALBUR — When Leon Williams’ ancestors emigrated from Germany to America, their long journey took them from Wisconsin to Winneshiek County in northeast Iowa by 1870, but they looked further west to put down roots. Within a few years, they settled in Washington Township in Carroll County.

“Adam Williams bought 240 acres of land here in 1873 for $1,440,” said Williams, 66, whose farm is located four miles southwest of Halbur.

In 1882, Adam sold 120 acres of land to his brother Peter, who raised his family in Carroll County, including his son Anton, who would become Leon Williams’ grandfather.

“Anton met my Grandma Ida when she moved from Nebraska to work for her uncles, who were bachelor brothers,” said Williams, who noted the brothers lived on the section east of the Williams farm.

On one occasion as Anton and Ida were getting acquainted, Ida left one of her gloves in his old Model T. “Anton had to bring the glove back to her,” said Williams’ mother, Velma.

After Anton and Ida married, they bought the 120 acres of Washington Township land from Anton’s parents, Peter and Katherine, in 1915. A new house also graced the farm around this time.

“The old farmhouse became the granary,” said Williams, who lives in the home that was built circa 1910. “We kept oats in that granary and used it as a feed shed when I was growing up.”

Anton and Ida Williams’ youngest son Raymond (who was one of 10 children) became the next generation of the family to own the farm. After Raymond married his wife, Velma, in 1954, the couple raised their four sons and four daughters on the farm.

“We loved raising our kids here,” said Velma Williams, who had grown up on a farm near Roselle.

In 1971, Ray and Velma Williams purchased the farm from Ray’s parents, Anton and Ida. The Williams family raised corn and managed a farrow-to-finish swine operation and bought cattle to finish.

“After we got hailed out in June 1969, the corn was stripped, so Ray used the corn for silage that year,” Velma Williams said. “It worked out well, so we kept making silage.”

Those were the days when a 100-bushelper-acre corn crop was impressive, added Leon Williams, who enjoyed working with his father. “I watched and learned how Dad did things,” he said.

CARROLL Williams Heritage Farm

Established: 1873

Township: Washington

Acres: 240

Often the two would work together taking care of the pigs in the barn, which had been built in the mid-1920s. While the barn was designed to house horses and dairy cows, the Williams family modified it so they could farrow a dozen sows at a time in wooden farrowing crates. They also modernized their swine operation in the 1970s, when they built two new 20-head farrowing barns.

The Williams family continued to find ways to blend pieces of the past with their grain and livestock operation.

“In the early 1960s, when steel grain bins started becoming more common, some of the neighbors went together and each bought a 4,000-bushel steel bin with a dryer,” said Leon Williams, who raises corn and soybeans and custom feeds hogs.

After graduating from Kuemper High School in Carroll in 1974, he farmed with his father and worked for MJM Enterprises in Manning, which made grain augers and grain gates. Williams stayed with MJM for 13 years before farming full-time in 1985.

His wife, Cathy, also graduated from Kuemper and worked in Carroll for several years. “We married in 1978 and lived in Halbur for a few years, but we were glad to have the chance to move to the farm to raise our two daughters,” said Cathy Williams, who grew up on a farm near Roselle.

From Halbur, the young family moved to a neighboring farm.

“Then we moved to the home place in 1996,” Leon Williams said. “In June 2006, we bought the farm from my parents, Ray and Velma, and we continue to live and farm here.”

By CLAYTON RYE crye@wctatel.net

NORA SPRINGS — Samuel and Margaret Spotts drove a team of oxen from Plainfield, Ill., to the 185 acres of land they purchased in Cerro Gordo County in 1871. The same yoke used by that team of oxen hangs on a wall in the home of Marcus and Cathy Spotts.

Cerro Gordo

Marcus & Cathy Spotts Heritage Farm

Established: 1871

Year awarded: 2021

Heritage Farm Award

Generation: 5th

Township: Portland

Acres: 185

In 1895, their son Abraham and his wife Emma Spotts became the second owners. The ownership passed to their son Paul Spotts and his wife Alma in 1944. They passed the farm to their son Lester Spotts and his wife Lorraine in 1973. The farm has been operated by their son Marcus Spotts and his wife Cathy since 2016, raising corn and soybeans.

Marcus and Cathy Spotts are parents of Blake, age 28, who works with his father on the farm, son Mac who farms in Fayette and Buchanan counties, and a daughter Reggi, age 16, a junior in high school.

To celebrate their Heritage Farm Award after receiving it at the 2021 Iowa State Fair, the Spotts family held a celebration Labor Day weekend. Marcus Spotts estimated there were 250 people in attendance.

“We ran out of food,” he said. Airplane rides were part of the celebration, with 18 takeoffs and landings that day, each trip carrying three people and the pilot, who was Marcus Spotts.

The Spotts Heritage Farm looks like a typical Iowa farm from the road with bins, barn, and the usual

-Submitted photos assorted outbuildings. However, if a passerby is observant, it is possible to see a broad grassy strip with a wind sock in the distance. Yes, it is a landing strip for the plane owned by the Spotts family and kept on the farm in its own hangar.

ABOVE: This undated photo (note the wooden wagon wheels) shows Lester Spotts sitting on a large boar while his father Paul stands by the boar's head and a man named Chris looks on.

“We’ve always done a lot of flying,” said Marcus Spotts.

He has been flying since 1983 when he received his pilot’s license at age 17. His son Blake is the fourth-generation pilot.

It was grandfather Paul Spotts, a soldier in World War I, who decided he wanted to fly and took lessons.

In 1946 he built a hangar on the farm to keep his plane handy.

Over the next few years, the Spotts’ farm became a gathering place for the Flying Farmers organization.

During a gathering of the Flying Farmers, the Spotts farm had planes parked there much like cars in a parking lot at any gathering.

Marcus and Cathy Spotts use their plane in the same way anyone would a car. It is just the distances are farther. Besides flying to see people in Florida, Texas, or anywhere they decide to go, their plane is used to look for stray cattle and check field conditions. They even flew over the Field of Dreams baseball field during the Major League Baseball game that was held near Dyersville in recent years.

LEFT: In an updated version of the American Gothic, this photo has Marcus Spotts holding a tool from farming's past and wife Cathy holding a tool from farming's present. Behind them are the plaques they received at the Iowa State Fair and the actual yoke used by the oxen that pulled Samuel Spotts' covered wagon from Illinois to Iowa in 1871.

Marcus’ grandfather Paul and his father Lester hunted fox from a plane and have the home movie showing them climbing out of the plane with two foxes from that day’s hunt.

In the span of 150 years, Sam Spotts drove a team of oxen from Illinois to his new farm in northern Iowa where his great-greatgrandson Marcus keeps a plane that allows him to travel to any part of the country easily, quickly, and comfortably.

Peters

Continued from Page 11C south of the Century Farm that received that honor in 2021. After her father died of cancer in 2020, well-meaning friends asked if Peters planned to sell the farm. She knew she didn’t want to sell the land that had been in her family for generations and where she had spread her father’s cremains.

Finding the right tenant was important to Peters and her family. “I’m not interested in renting to someone just because they’re the biggest farmer, or because they’ll pay the most cash rent,” Peters said. “I want someone who cares about the land.”

Peters appreciates her family’s current tenant. It’s a plus that he uses IH equipment, just like her dad did.

“I’m proud of this farm,” she said. “I’m grateful my great-great-grandparents bought the land all those years ago, and I think of the tremendous effort it took generations of my family to keep the farm going. I want to maintain this tradition.”

By DOUG CLOUGH

Farm News writer

MARCUS — Ron Schmillen couldn’t attend the Iowa State Fair’s Century Farm Award celebration for his Cherokee County farm in 2022. A neck injury kept him in the nursing home while his grateful family did the accepting. The clan brought a cut-out version of his likeness to the event attended by Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig.

“It was the next best thing to him being there,” said Darlene Schmillen, his wife of 65 years.

“We’re a strong family, one with 14 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.” Ron’s spirit and likeness included a photo of him in an iconic Chicago Cubs sweatshirt, a team he was able to see win the pennant in 2016.

“Ron’s last four years were spent at the nursing home after he fell and broke his neck in three places,” said Darlene Schmillen. Ron recently passed on April 11 after 86 years of good farm living.

Arley and Ethel Schmillen were Ron’s adoptive parents and second-generation owners of the farm; at 70, Ron gratefully came to know his biological mother Alma Hendrickson and his siblings, enjoying the rest of his years with them involved in his life.

His grandparents were firstgeneration owners William and Alvina Schmillen, who purchased the farm June 2, 1909. For the first 64 years, the 160-acre farm was operated like most traditional barn-centric farms, with corn and soybean rotation and livestock that included dairy cows, cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and Ron’s favorite — sheep.

Ron and Darlene married in