Small Towns on the Great Plains

It is football season on the Great Plains. It is Friday Night Lights.   Last Friday we drove over to Wheaton where my hometown of Hancock would play.  The high school building signage said Wheaton High School, but we played Border West.  Go figure. How could this be?  It is a story of change, a story of transformation, and it has impacted each of us.  Let’s look at it.

Over a century ago, the railroads fanned out onto the Great Plains, moving westward from St. Paul.  The bison and the Native Americans were swept aside as immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Germany settled near the railroads.  It was called Manifest Destiny.

Small towns, like Hancock, popped up along the Great Northern Railroad.  They were a place where grain could be stored in giant bins.  They were a place for shopping for groceries, purchasing hardware and farm machinery.  Small country schools of the immigrants were scattered across the plains but would merge into small town school systems.  Some of my Hancock classmates started out in country schools.

The land was cheap and was neatly divided into Sections of 640 acres.  One section could support four farms in those days.  The farm families were often large and provided lots of children for the small-town schools.

Then the transformation of the Great Plains continued in earnest.  The farmers that fed their families were called upon to feed the world.  The giant food companies of Minnesota, like Cargil, Pillsbury, and General Mills, would form the mechanism to acquire grain from the small farms and ship it down the Mississippi, or up to Duluth and out the Great Lakes to feed the world.

Large scale operations, like corporate farms, and large-scale farm equipment would transform the Great Plains into a huge factory of grain production.  It would come with a cost.  The smaller farms began to disappear.  For example, Dianne grew up on a farm near Clontarf.  It is now plowed under.  The driveway is gone, the trees are gone, and the buildings gone.  Plowed under.

With fewer farms on the plains, there were fewer school kids to feed the school systems.  When I grew up, my hometown of Hancock had two hardware stores, two grocery stores, a drugstore, a clothing store, two cafes, a veterinary clinic, and a doctor’s office.  All gone now.  Hancock is just a shell of what it once was.  The school system keeps the town alive.  But the 11-man football team is now 9-man.  

Friday, as we drove to Wheaton for the football game, we passed through the small towns like Alberta, Chokio, Graceville, and others which once comprised the Pheasant Conference.  They are also mere shells of what they once were, victims of the great transformation on the Great Plains.  The Chokio schools merged with Alberta, then both merged with Morris.  On and on, the transformation continues.  The small towns on the Great Plains are being slowly swept away, like the Bison and Native Americans before them.   

It is fall on the plains.  Great fields of wheat are being harvested by million dollar combines, sometimes three to a field.  Next comes the harvesting of corn and beans.  For now, it is corn as far as the eye can see.  Everything is large-scale now.  There are nearly 10,000 milk cows at Riverview farm.  A tractor can cost upwards of $800,000 and computers within it control the planting or spraying of the fields.

And so it is that Hancock played Border West, not Wheaton, because Border West is comprised of students from the communities of Wheaton, Herman, Norcross, Clinton, Graceville, and Beardsley. Friday, it took those six towns to field a 9-man football team.  Hancock won by two points.