Humans have always sought the idyllic way of life. One searcher, Wendell Berry, a contemporary American farmer, writer, and poet, has reiterated Jefferson's ideal of family farms as "Farms formed by families who live on them, within them, and from them; that farming encompasses a mutuality of influence between farm and household. Farmers own and work the land they live on." Dairy farming, in existence since cattle were first domesticated in Europe and Asia some 6,000 years B.C., supports that ideal in providing the animals necessary for functioning as independent, self-sufficient family units.

Raised and bred in sufficient number, dairy cattle could provide subsistence for a farm family, and the family was the heart of the dairy industry from its beginnings. Early cave and temple drawings and frescoes depict women milking cows. In medieval times, milkmaids-young peasant women-were hired to milk cows and take care of the dairy. The paintings portray children with the women. Men and boys used oxen to perform the heavy laborplanting, cultivating, and harvesting crops.

In colonial America the ideal of family farming and ownership of land began when individual families moved inland away from communities and common property. The cattle they had brought to North America on ships from Europe moved with them on steamboats, railcars, or on foot following wagons as they pursued independent ownership and the Jefferson ideal. The settlers who arrived in Stearns County during the period of heaviest settlement (1853 to the 1890s) were part of this early purist tradition.

Cows and Families on the Frontier

Mainly of German Catholic heritage, the settler families tended to be large, conservative, and hard working. Retired farmer Herman Kohorst explained, "In Germany if you were born poor, you stayed poor all of your life." In America hard work, land, and cattle could make farmers rich, so people like Phillip Thull, Wakefield Township, "built a long cabin 19 by 26 feet, and started farming with an ox team, a cow and a calf. Sometimes the cow was fastened with an ox and used for draft work."