Outbuildings: Chicken Coop

 

Looks like a chicken coop to me. I read that, before pesticides, people would fumigate with a smoldering fire in a bowl, placed in the empty coop.

Vintage Gleaner Combine Harvester

  

The above harvester dates from (I'm guessing), the 1960's. By that time, combine harvesters had been around, in one form or another, for over a hundred years. The one below, I don't know who made it, dates from the turn of the twentieth century, and was probably pulled by mules. Both were impressive works of engineering.

 

 

Harvester in action, c1912 (Wikipedia)



Your squash are overdue: New Mexico's seed library collections

(Library of Congress)

(Santa Fe New Mexican) … Brita Sauer, the woman who managed Albuquerque library’s seed library, is now library services director at the main branch of Santa Fe Public Library, with plans already in the works to replicate the successful Duke City program.
“I think that Santa Fe is a great community for this,” Sauer said. “It’s a great resource and a great way for people to come together around seeds and plants. It’s also a positive thing for libraries to tap into that community spirit that brings people together a little more.” Continued

Quay School

 

Quay School was built in 1929 and closed in 1955. Quay County had a lot of schools, back in the homesteading days. It seems like too many, until you consider the size of the place, 2,882 square miles, a good deal bigger than the state of Delaware. If one was to place a 160 acre homestead on every square inch of Quay County, you'd have 11, 528 of them. A lot of farms and a whole lot of kids.
According to local historian Lynn Moncus, Quay County had 86 school districts in 1908. Over the years, there were little schools in Obar, House, McAlister, Norton, Lesbia, Glenrio, Montoya, and Ima, to name a few. There were larger schools in Tucumcari, Logan, Nara Visa, Quay, San Jon, Forrest, and Wheatland.
Eastern New Mexico, a hundred years ago, was booming: crop prices were through the roof (because of the war), and the rain was plentiful. An Albuquerque Newspaper referred to the Quay Valley as "The garden spot of New Mexico."
There was a saying back then, coined by Charles Dana Wilber, "The rain follows the plough," that many people took as gospel. And why wouldn't they? That part of the west, formerly known as The Great American Desert, was blooming like it never had before. It seemed like the good times would go on forever.

The Homesteads, so far

"New Mexico was one of the last places in the country to acquire significant numbers of homesteaders who were escaping from tenancy and lack of available land in the East, Midwest and South Plains. Homesteaders increased in numbers through the 1890s. Homesteading continued into the 1900s …

These last waves of homesteading were encouraged by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which as we noted above made it possible to file on 320 acres and came closer to meeting southwestern conditions, and again by the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, which made it possible to acquire title to a section of land by paying a filing fee of $34, living on the land for at least seven months a year for three years, building a "habitable" home, making $800 worth of improvements and paying a "proving-up" fee of $34." - Thomas Merlan, Historic Preservation Division, Office of Cultural Affairs, State of New Mexico, 2008.