Eagle Tail Farm

The farm that I grew up on was just about a mile or two northeast of Paradise off of Highway K-18.  It was a wonderful place and I don't think I would have rather grown up anywhere else.  Our house was in a valley near Eagle Tail Creek (a tributary of Eagle Creek) and although I don't know much about the history of the farm itself, I know that the house we lived in was built in the 50's by the Fowler brothers, and that there was at least one house there previously which supposedly my grandma Strecker lived in at some point.  I also was always under the impression that part of the basement had retained the original foundation from this house, as parts of the north and eastern walls appeared older than the rest of the walls, but my mom recently told me that was not the case (she thought).

Part of the fun of growing up on a farm was exploring the many different areas and buildings.  Although it was not what you would call a large farm, it did have several outbuildings, including a two car garage which had formerly been a sheep shearing barn from another farm; a machine shop; a granary, a chicken coop, an oil house, at least four corrugated tin sheds, and a disused outhouse.  

I recall a favorite game of mine, which we used to play when Joann Whitman would babysit.  It involved us making use of all the outbuilding, the four-wheeler (ATV, but we never called it that), and lots of dress-up clothes and wigs.  I'm not sure what the point of the game was, other than that one or more of us would hide and dress in "disguise" and try to avoid being seen by the other group, which would be on the four-wheeler.  

Back then, my imagination was very wild and I could pretend that our farm was a small town and each building had different purposes.  I'm not sure really how we thought dressing up in disguise would really accomplish anything (other than fun), since, upon being spotted, it wasn't like you could have been mistaken for anyone else!  I guess it was just more of an excuse to wear wigs and run around.

I think my favorite building was the granary.  Had we stayed on the farm, my dad always had plans to tear down the granary, build a new basement for our house on that location, and move the house there.  It was just up the driveway and west of our house, on the side of a hill, so that if it had been a house the front door could have faced north at the top of the hill, and on the south side the hill would decline to have a walk-out basement.

But the granary itself was an old wooden building, which had been painted red at some point but the paint was always weathered and chipped by the time I ever was old enough to notice.  In the front (the south side) it had two large garage door openings for vehicles to enter into the lower level.  Inside, there was some sort of really old farm implement or machine that I don't know what it was used for, other than a favorite place for our many momma cats to give birth to litters of kittens over the years.  Whenever one of them had delivered and we weren't sure where the babies were, this was usually the first place we would look.  On the west side of the building there was a door to access the upper level.  There used to be some steps leading up to this door, but at some point they broke or otherwise disappeared and we would just either climb up there or use something else.  Inside there was a narrow hallway with a room to the left and a sealed door to the right, which we eventually excavated and discovered there was another small room in there.  The hallway opened into a large room that was divided in half, and at the far end was another sealed door which opened into another room.  For me, this was definitely the most cool building because I could pretend like it was many different things.  At one point, due to some graffiti on the wall (no idea how it got there), I was convinced it used to be a dance hall.  (Yeah, on our farm!)

I spent a lot of time in this building, cleaning it up, dragging stuff in there to furnish it as my club house.  We never actually used it as a granary, but because that's what it had been, it had many neat features such as "secret passageways" which were actually trapdoors that would allow grain to be emptied into trucks in the ground floor level.  Also, there was a nasty beehive in the western wall, which generally prevented us from ever going into the far room unless it was wintertime.

I remember at one point, I made some sort of little loft area up above the middle (largest) room and took a small black and white TV up there and some clippings from Rolling Stone to decorate with.  I often pretended that this was my house.

Of course some of the other buildings served as my clubhouses at various points.  The garage was usually not used for anything other than rollerskating when the cars were not parked inside.  There were often wasps in there so I usually tried to avoid it, sometimes even running out of the car when we would arrive home because I had such a fear of wasps, bees, and hornets.

The oil house was really too small for anything and it was also off-limits after me and a visitor once pumped oil all over the floor because it was "fun" - but my dad was not amused.

The chicken coop was another popular clubhouse.  We never had chickens so it was another building that was really not used for anything, so us kids could do with it as we pleased.  It was small, but it had a neat barn-type roof and windows that looked out to our house.  Unfortunately we burned it down at some point, probably long after we had outgrown it as a clubhouse.  

The last substantial building, the shop, was used too frequently by my dad for us kids to really use much.  Plus, again, there were wasps in there sometimes which scared me to death, and then at one point we got a van that we parked in there since it wouldn't fit in the garage.  This building was the best built, since it was made of cinder blocks and had a very high ceiling, electricity, a wood-burning stove, and even a water faucet although I don't ever remember that working.  

So there you have it, my run-down of our farm.  We sold it several years after we had moved to Hays.  Maybe someday I will be lucky enough to go back and buy my childhood home and maybe even research more history about it, but until then, I always have my memories.