No. 136 April, 2010
Harold Ratzburg was born at the start of the Great Depression and raised on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin. He served four years in the US Air Force in the 50's and was stationed in Germany, where he met his wife Anneliese, who helped get him through College to become a Civil Engineer. After a time as a Highway Engineer and College Instructor, he wound up as a City Engineer of a small town in New Jersey. Twenty four years later he retired to become an old geezer telling old stories on his new fangled computer.
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Pickin' Up Stones
By Harold Ratzburg
Once upon a time, about ten or fifteen thousand years ago, give or take a coupla of thousand years, a good part of the USA was covered by a sheet of ice, up to a mile thick in places. It was the last of the glaciers, one of four or five that made up the Ice Age, if I remember my Geology lessons correctly.
The glaciers really did a job on rearranging the landscape as they moved down from the north. With their weight and force they moved soil and rock ahead and under them, kinda like a big snow plow at the front. Under the glaciers the stuff that they dragged along, like pieces of granite bed rock from further up north was ground up into smaller stones and even down to sand sized particles.
The ice sheet was kinda erratic in its movement. I always figured that it moved from the north to the south but in some cases it moved east or west. This is indicated by a land feature that I played on when I was a Kid, called then the Ratzburg Hill, cause our family lived there on the farm. (Now it is probably known as the Nolan Hill, cause Tim Nolan now owns the old homestead.) The hill is known in geologic terms as a "drumlin" (A long narrow, or oval, smoothly rounded hill of unstratified glacial drift) and it runs from east to west which indicates the direction of travel of the ice sheet. Its kinda hard to imagine that the ice sheet could make a turn, but something as big as that ice sheet was, could do anything it darn well pleased.
Along came the last period of "global warming" when the world warmed up and the ice sheet melted back toward the north pole. (This of course was long before Al Gore tried to convince the world that all our cars and factories were causing present day glaciers to melt and make all those poor polar bears homeless.)
As the ice sheet melted, it left all the hills, valleys, rivers, and other landscape features that you see around Marion. It also left all those granite rocks and boulders scattered all over the place. You will notice that every rock that you see around Marion is rounded or oval and almost none of them have sharp edges unless they are freshly broken. That is because, as I said above, those rocks were dragged along in and under the ice sheet and any sharp edges were ground off by the other rocks under the tremendous pressure and movement of the ice sheet above.
The glacier was very indiscriminate about where it left the rocks as it melted. It left them scattered in sand pits, on top of hills, in the swamps, and anywhere else it pleased.
One good example of a serious deposit of granite rocks is when you drive south out of Marion on 110. Just after the intersection where a road comes in from the left, look to the left and you will see a field that is darned near covered with granite rocks of different sizes sticking up from under the surface. Notice too, that all the rocks are rounded off, to one extent or another. Thank you Mr Ice Sheet.
Anyway, that kinda brings me to the point of my story---i.e.---Picking up stones.
Living on a farm meant that those rocks scattered all over the place got in the way of plowing a field. If there were too many of them on a steep hill side, you would kinda just ignore them and use the land for pasture. But if they were laying on or in a relatively level piece of field on the lower forty, they had to go.
I dreaded the days when Dad would announce "Today we are gonna pick up stones" That was the most boring, back breaking job on the farm. Almost as boring as hand snapping forty acre long rows of corn at harvest time.
The tools we used were a good ole crowbar and a manure fork for the smaller rocks which we piled on a horse drawn lumber wagon. For bigger rocks, up to fifty pounds or so, a strong back had to do the job.
After about ten seconds that job got pretty boring but you still had a long long way to go. Fill the wagon, and then take it to a stone pile along the fence row and unload it---and repeat---and repeat---and repeat. You could work up a pretty sweat at it too, which bothered me the most, being a kinda of a guy that I am, I just HATE to work up a sweat. Every time I see a stone pile anywhere, I can imagine the amount of physical labor and sweat that went into building it. And you see stone piles everywhere. Them old pioneers were hardy folks weren't they?
One of the annoying aspects of the job was that there were certain areas in the lower forty where there seemed to be a cluster of smaller rocks, manure fork sized, that had to be cleaned up. And---every year there seemed to be a new crop of stones in exactly the same area!! Thank you Mr Glacier.
Come to find out after further education, frost action from those Wisconsin winters would bring more rocks to the surface every winter, until finally, the stones in the frost affected zone were all laying there on the stone piles, out of the ground and out of the way.
For the bigger rocks that stuck up out of the ground, well, Dad kinda ignored them and plowed around them until maybe one day there would be a little slack time on the farm between crops and he would decide to go after those annoying obstacles,
Then the equipment changed. The horses were hooked up to the "Stone Boat" (if you can imagine a stone boat.) It was made of heavy oak planks about two inches thick and the planks were especially sawed at the sawmill so that they turned up at the front end so a team could be hooked up to it and pull without the end of the planks digging into the ground. They were bolted together front and back to make a wooden platform about ten feet long and four feet wide.
That gave you a low wooden platform that you could pull up beside a big rock and using brute force and ignorance, roll that sucker onto the stone boat and haul it away to the stone pile and roll it off, ---and repeat---and repeat----and repeat.
When it came to the really big boulders that couldn't be moved, no matter how strong a back you had, a different approach was needed. Nowadays, you would hire a backhoe or bull dozer to dig a hole next to the boulder and then nudge the big rock down into the hole and cover it up. But when I was a kid, the only backhoe around was a personal shovel with a wooden handle that really wouldn't do the job of moving a big boulder into a hole.
Dad would go into town to Moericke's Hardware store (next to the movie theatre in Marion) and buy a coupla sticks of dynamite, some fuse, and dynamite caps. (Imagine doing that today in this terrorist dominated world we live in.)
We had a rock drill at home, so the next step was to drill a hole down into the boulder. This took a while with the drill and a big hammer but it could be done.
Then Dad would put a cap with a fuse into a stick of dynamite and put it down into the hole and pack it with mud. After lighting the fuse, we would high tail it back to the house and sit there and watch for the explosion. (Dad had a safety precaution that he observed without fail. If that stick did not go off as expected, nobody was allowed to go close to check it out until the next day!!!!!!!!!! In my memory, every explosion went off as planned, but Dad made his speech every time he lit one up.)
Of course, the dynamite did make a big boulder into little rocks. (It was never clear to me where the cutoff size was between boulders, rocks, and stones, but you get the idea.) If they still needed a reduction in size, the process with the drill and dynamite would have to be repeated, ----again,----and again----and again.
Looking at it today, that lower forty is clear of rocks that have to be plowed around, but the stone piles are still there in the fence rows.
Dad did instill a healthy respect for dynamite in us kids. He did not keep the stuff in the house, usually out in the shed somewhere. When I left the farm to go work in the big city of Milwaukee, I remember about four sticks of dynamite still laying up in one corner of the machine shed. I understand that dynamite just laying around will start to ooze drops of nitroglycerine after a time and I remember that those old sticks had all kinds of little brown drops of something on the surface. As a kid, we always gave that dynamite a wide birth and never touched or even got too close to it.
I wonder sometimes, just how and when some subsequent owner of the farm got rid of that touchy pile of explosives. The shed was still there years later so it must have worked out OK.
So, there you are folks, is this old geezer's little story of life on the farm back in the 1930's.
And I hope, you have paid attention and enjoyed the little lesson in Geology that was included. You will have a test on it later.
copyright 2010, Harold Ratzburg
By Harold Ratzburg
Once upon a time, about ten or fifteen thousand years ago, give or take a coupla of thousand years, a good part of the USA was covered by a sheet of ice, up to a mile thick in places. It was the last of the glaciers, one of four or five that made up the Ice Age, if I remember my Geology lessons correctly.
The glaciers really did a job on rearranging the landscape as they moved down from the north. With their weight and force they moved soil and rock ahead and under them, kinda like a big snow plow at the front. Under the glaciers the stuff that they dragged along, like pieces of granite bed rock from further up north was ground up into smaller stones and even down to sand sized particles.
The ice sheet was kinda erratic in its movement. I always figured that it moved from the north to the south but in some cases it moved east or west. This is indicated by a land feature that I played on when I was a Kid, called then the Ratzburg Hill, cause our family lived there on the farm. (Now it is probably known as the Nolan Hill, cause Tim Nolan now owns the old homestead.) The hill is known in geologic terms as a "drumlin" (A long narrow, or oval, smoothly rounded hill of unstratified glacial drift) and it runs from east to west which indicates the direction of travel of the ice sheet. Its kinda hard to imagine that the ice sheet could make a turn, but something as big as that ice sheet was, could do anything it darn well pleased.
Along came the last period of "global warming" when the world warmed up and the ice sheet melted back toward the north pole. (This of course was long before Al Gore tried to convince the world that all our cars and factories were causing present day glaciers to melt and make all those poor polar bears homeless.)
As the ice sheet melted, it left all the hills, valleys, rivers, and other landscape features that you see around Marion. It also left all those granite rocks and boulders scattered all over the place. You will notice that every rock that you see around Marion is rounded or oval and almost none of them have sharp edges unless they are freshly broken. That is because, as I said above, those rocks were dragged along in and under the ice sheet and any sharp edges were ground off by the other rocks under the tremendous pressure and movement of the ice sheet above.
The glacier was very indiscriminate about where it left the rocks as it melted. It left them scattered in sand pits, on top of hills, in the swamps, and anywhere else it pleased.
One good example of a serious deposit of granite rocks is when you drive south out of Marion on 110. Just after the intersection where a road comes in from the left, look to the left and you will see a field that is darned near covered with granite rocks of different sizes sticking up from under the surface. Notice too, that all the rocks are rounded off, to one extent or another. Thank you Mr Ice Sheet.
Anyway, that kinda brings me to the point of my story---i.e.---Picking up stones.
Living on a farm meant that those rocks scattered all over the place got in the way of plowing a field. If there were too many of them on a steep hill side, you would kinda just ignore them and use the land for pasture. But if they were laying on or in a relatively level piece of field on the lower forty, they had to go.
I dreaded the days when Dad would announce "Today we are gonna pick up stones" That was the most boring, back breaking job on the farm. Almost as boring as hand snapping forty acre long rows of corn at harvest time.
The tools we used were a good ole crowbar and a manure fork for the smaller rocks which we piled on a horse drawn lumber wagon. For bigger rocks, up to fifty pounds or so, a strong back had to do the job.
After about ten seconds that job got pretty boring but you still had a long long way to go. Fill the wagon, and then take it to a stone pile along the fence row and unload it---and repeat---and repeat---and repeat. You could work up a pretty sweat at it too, which bothered me the most, being a kinda of a guy that I am, I just HATE to work up a sweat. Every time I see a stone pile anywhere, I can imagine the amount of physical labor and sweat that went into building it. And you see stone piles everywhere. Them old pioneers were hardy folks weren't they?
One of the annoying aspects of the job was that there were certain areas in the lower forty where there seemed to be a cluster of smaller rocks, manure fork sized, that had to be cleaned up. And---every year there seemed to be a new crop of stones in exactly the same area!! Thank you Mr Glacier.
Come to find out after further education, frost action from those Wisconsin winters would bring more rocks to the surface every winter, until finally, the stones in the frost affected zone were all laying there on the stone piles, out of the ground and out of the way.
For the bigger rocks that stuck up out of the ground, well, Dad kinda ignored them and plowed around them until maybe one day there would be a little slack time on the farm between crops and he would decide to go after those annoying obstacles,
Then the equipment changed. The horses were hooked up to the "Stone Boat" (if you can imagine a stone boat.) It was made of heavy oak planks about two inches thick and the planks were especially sawed at the sawmill so that they turned up at the front end so a team could be hooked up to it and pull without the end of the planks digging into the ground. They were bolted together front and back to make a wooden platform about ten feet long and four feet wide.
That gave you a low wooden platform that you could pull up beside a big rock and using brute force and ignorance, roll that sucker onto the stone boat and haul it away to the stone pile and roll it off, ---and repeat---and repeat----and repeat.
When it came to the really big boulders that couldn't be moved, no matter how strong a back you had, a different approach was needed. Nowadays, you would hire a backhoe or bull dozer to dig a hole next to the boulder and then nudge the big rock down into the hole and cover it up. But when I was a kid, the only backhoe around was a personal shovel with a wooden handle that really wouldn't do the job of moving a big boulder into a hole.
Dad would go into town to Moericke's Hardware store (next to the movie theatre in Marion) and buy a coupla sticks of dynamite, some fuse, and dynamite caps. (Imagine doing that today in this terrorist dominated world we live in.)
We had a rock drill at home, so the next step was to drill a hole down into the boulder. This took a while with the drill and a big hammer but it could be done.
Then Dad would put a cap with a fuse into a stick of dynamite and put it down into the hole and pack it with mud. After lighting the fuse, we would high tail it back to the house and sit there and watch for the explosion. (Dad had a safety precaution that he observed without fail. If that stick did not go off as expected, nobody was allowed to go close to check it out until the next day!!!!!!!!!! In my memory, every explosion went off as planned, but Dad made his speech every time he lit one up.)
Of course, the dynamite did make a big boulder into little rocks. (It was never clear to me where the cutoff size was between boulders, rocks, and stones, but you get the idea.) If they still needed a reduction in size, the process with the drill and dynamite would have to be repeated, ----again,----and again----and again.
Looking at it today, that lower forty is clear of rocks that have to be plowed around, but the stone piles are still there in the fence rows.
Dad did instill a healthy respect for dynamite in us kids. He did not keep the stuff in the house, usually out in the shed somewhere. When I left the farm to go work in the big city of Milwaukee, I remember about four sticks of dynamite still laying up in one corner of the machine shed. I understand that dynamite just laying around will start to ooze drops of nitroglycerine after a time and I remember that those old sticks had all kinds of little brown drops of something on the surface. As a kid, we always gave that dynamite a wide birth and never touched or even got too close to it.
I wonder sometimes, just how and when some subsequent owner of the farm got rid of that touchy pile of explosives. The shed was still there years later so it must have worked out OK.
So, there you are folks, is this old geezer's little story of life on the farm back in the 1930's.
And I hope, you have paid attention and enjoyed the little lesson in Geology that was included. You will have a test on it later.
copyright 2010, Harold Ratzburg