Farm Palace - Postal History Sunday

Welcome to the second entry of Postal History Sunday for 2023.  PHS is hosted every week on the Genuine Faux Farm blog and the GFF Postal History blog.  Everyone is welcome here, regardless of the level of knowledge and expertise you might have in postal history.  Take a moment and enjoy where this one goes - because it's probably going to go some odd directions this time around!

This week, I suspect the postal history aspect will be shorter because the items I am showing today follow a theme that comes from the images illustrated on the envelopes.  Advertising covers can add color to something that might have been "just another piece of old mail" and provide us with a window as to how business was done and how people lived their lives.

The large cover shown above was an overweight letter that required a double rate of postage for it to be sent from Kansas City, Missouri to Dike, Iowa. The postage rate for letter mail internal to the United States at the time was 2 cents per ounce of letter weight (Jul 1, 1919 - Jul 5, 1932).  This large envelope probably carried a smaller catalog for the W.S. Dickey Clay Manufacturing Company and the envelope is postmarked on January 28, 1922.  There is no postmark showing when this piece of mail might have arrived in Dike, Iowa for Herman F. Velberding, which I believe is a misspelling for the family name Volberding.

I've always felt that the main barn structure on a typical Upper Midwest farm was the "palace" of the property.  It was a place where animals were provided shelter, resources (such as straw or hay bales) were stored, and a location where various farm tools could be found.  But, if the barn was the palace, the silo often got people to look there first.

The image on the front of the envelope is clearly intended to promote their product for the building of the silo at the left.  But, it is interesting to note all of the period buildings and equipment.  A steam tractor, that looks a lot like this old Case tractor from 1922, is in the foreground, driving a belt to run the harvest up an elevator on the silo. 

At the far right, there are a couple of individuals who are likely tasked with loading in the sileage so that it would be taken to the top in the elevator. 

The reverse of the envelope includes more interesting illustrations, including both a barn AND a silo clearly built with Dickey Tile products.  They dub their silo design as the "fruit jar of the field" and claim that it is the "everlasting silo."  The idea of a silo was to store the harvest for later use.  But, more specifically, it was a way to store "sileage," which is essentially a crop that is stored while the moisture content is still high.  It might be whole corn stalks or alfalfa or some other feed crop.  The harvest is chopped up and placed in the silo, where it essentially ferments without spoiling.  If you would like to learn more, this is an excellent summary that is a pretty easy read.

The whole point of a silo is to provide a storage unit that allows very little oxygen (to prevent spoiling), keeps pests out and allows the farmer to pull out feed as needed during winter months.  Sileage has more nutrients than dried hay or alfalfa and was one way dairy farmers could encourage cows to produce milk year round.

On our own farm, we had an all-purpose barn that included a milking parlor lean-to and a place where pigs could seek shelter or go out into an enclosed yard area.  We also have a granary, which some people might also call a barn, and we had sow farrowing building as well.  Our silo is a big blue Harvestore (built in the 1970s), which would post-date a Dickey silo.   But, the main barn (when it still stood) clearly qualified as the "farm palace" at our place.  In the present day, only the granary and silo remain, along with a long machine shed.  The other buildings are gone or in the process of being removed.

There were some load-bearing tile at the base of the first addition to the old barn at our farm (see above photo).  Sadly, for this story, they were not Dickey Clay Tile - which would really have been quite the coincidence.

Like many barns throughout the Midwest, the barn at our farm had not been maintained for several years prior to the beginning of our stewardship of the place.  As a result, we were not going to be able to rehabilitate the barn without far more funds, time, and energy than we had.  But, we were able to use it long enough to appreciate it.  And, we also learned more about how this particular barn was built - as it came down.

The initial barn structure was built using pegs to connect the beams (rather than nails) and we noticed roman numeral markings to help those building it to keep track of where each piece connected.

That's probably about all everyone wanted to hear about the old barn at the Genuine Faux Farm, so let's get back to our postal history items and the things related to that!

Who was Herman F. Volberding?

It might make sense if Mr. Volberding was a local farmer or, perhaps, was a sales representative for W.S. Dickey Clay Manufacturing.  So, I started with the farmer angle.  I located a plat map from 1930 and looked at Grant Township (and other nearby townships) in Grundy County, Iowa - where Dike is located.  I found both A.F. and F.L. Volberding, each with properties over 100 acres to the south of Dike.  It is possible that Herman was a brother or son who was not a landowner at the time.  But, there is clearly a presence of that family name in the area with some farming connection.

My next clue came from the IAGenWeb project.   It is here that we find a section regarding the volunteer fire department in Dike, written by John Volberding in 1950 (The Grundy Register (Grundy Center, Iowa), 25 May 1950, Dike Golden Jubilee Section of the Grundy Register).

It is here that we first find Herman F. Volberding as one of several firemen to respond to a fire in 1919 at the Dike Livery Stable and again to a fire in 1923 at the Townsend and Merrill Lumberyard.  Since we are talking about a fire department in a smaller, rural community, all members were volunteers and likely had other employment in addition to this duty.

After a cursory search, I could not find anything more about Volberding prior to 1936, when he became the Postmaster for Dike, Iowa.  It is noted in the IAGenWeb page linked above that he became postmaster in 1936 and was still postmaster at the time the May 25, 1950 Golden Jubilee writing.  I was even able to find his appointment to this position in the Congressional Record for May 7, 1936 (page 6828).

So, yes, Herman F. Volberding was in Dike at the time this was mailed.  And, yes, he had relatives who were likely farming at the time.  And it is interesting to have the connection that he became postmaster fourteen years later.  But, I can't really say why he received this mailing at this point in time.

What about the W.S. Dickey Clay Mfg Co?

image from the Frisco Archive, viewed 1/7/23

Company headquarters for the W.S. Dickey Clay Mfg Company were in Kansas City, but by the time we get to the late 1920s, the company had 21 plants across the United States and even one in Mexico City.  Established in 1885, when Dickey purchased an unsuccessful plant that manufactured burnt clay or ceramic pipes, the business initially focused on burnt clay pipes for agricultural land drainage.  Over time, the product line expanded to include pipe for sewers, conduit for Bell Telephone phone lines, and - of course - building materials for barns and the Dickey Silo kits being advertised on this 1922 cover.

image from this Kansas City Public Library site

The company grew quickly, with Dickey acquiring a number of similar businesses to expand the product line and capacity for production.  For example, the Pittsburg (Kansas) Paving Brick Company, established in 1899, was purchased by Dickey around 1910.  The company included 150 acres of land to supply raw materials for production of clay products.  This particular website claims that Dickey Clay had as many as 26 different plants at its peak.  

image copyright Jeremy J Larson

Dickey's personal fortunes took a turn for the worse in 1929, with so many other people, as the markets crashed.  He died of a heart attack in 1931.  However, the company did survive and was producing materials into the 1960s as far as I've been able to ascertain.

A person can find silos that still stand on old farmsteads, though there are fewer each year as landowners knock them down or time and gravity have their way with them.  Just another illustration that claims for an "everlasting" product only seem everlasting in comparison to the span of time that the product was advertised and produced.  The photo above was found on the Smithsonian site and is linked in the caption.

The Dickey Everlasting Silo was often sold as a kit, meaning the parts were shipped to the farm, along with instructions for the building of the product.  Apparently, one such book from 1922 has survived and was offered on ebay.  It is unlikely that the instruction book was included in our envelope as it would be too bulky and would certainly have weighed more than two ounces.

On the other hand, our envelope probably had a promotional piece for a range of products that could be ordered.  I did find an older, closed auction for a promotional brochure from 1915 that might have been similar to the contents that were once in the envelope I have illustrated here.  Maybe, someday, I'll run across something that would go with the envelope.  But, for now, the envelope is plenty to enjoy viewing and enough to get the story going.

A bit of bonus material

Since I was on the topic of the "farm palace" or barn....  

Well, ok, it had more about silos than barns.  This just goes to show you that when I endeavor to write a Postal History Sunday, it doesn't always go where I thought it would.  I DID warn you at the top that I was pretty unsure about where this one was going, didn't I?

In any event, shown above is another farm building related cover.  This time the item was mailed in 1895, when the postage rate was 2 cents per ounce, just as it was with our first cover.  The difference is that this rate period ran from July 1, 1885 to November 1, 1917.  There was a short period in between these two rate periods when the postage rate was increased to 3 cents to help fund World War I efforts.

This envelope from Davenport, Iowa, features two different types of door hangers for farm doors.  This type of door hanger allowed farmers to install larger doors that did not have to swing out on hinges.  Instead, the door would hang on a track and a person could open and close the door by rolling it to the left or right as needed.

We can tell you that this type of hardware certainly works - and has worked for years.  However, there can be issues with this arrangement, just as there can be for any tool.  In our case, we had some trouble with wind.  These doors are between ten and twelve feet tall and are made of wood.  It was no small matter standing these things back up and getting them back on the track so they would work again.

It's just another of those "it's everlasting until it's not" sort of things.  There are heavy bars that serve as guides in the cement at the base.  This typically prevents the wind from pulling them away from the building and causing this failure.  

Well, it worked until things wore down.  Still, any piece of hardware that lasts for sixty to seventy years in decent working order is pretty darned good, don't you think?

Here is a 1905 letter that would be an example of local mail from Merriam Park (St Paul, MN) to, well, St Paul.  The letter was mailed and received on the same day.  It apparently included a bill from the Law Manufacturing Company to the Minnie Harvester Company (which was apparently paid the same day according to the company hand stamps).

This is a great example of how businesses would use the envelopes that contained the mail as "file folders" to help maintain their business records.  Don't remember why you wrote that check to Law Manufacturing?  Go to the filing cabinet... probably the "L" cabinet unless you use some other system ("B" for "Barn?") and find the proper correspondence.  Sometimes I still think that method was as fast as most computing systems have become (and remember I am a Computer Scientist by training).

The illustration on this cover is showing a round bale of dried alfalfa or some other sort of hay to be stored in the haymow, or hayloft, or upper floor of the barn.  Storing hay in the upper floor allows for the lower floor to be fully available for the animals.  After all, you can use pulleys and other equipment to lift the bales up, but the horses aren't likely to take stairs to the upper level if you store your hay on the lower floor.

I was unable to find anything for the Law Manufacturing Company, but the barn illustration shows some dimensions that might indicate they had something to do with barn construction.  I'll save the Minnie Harvester for another day and another blog. But, you can read a bit here if you wish.

Thank you for joining me for this January foray in Postal History Sunday.  Have a fine remainder of your day and an excellent week to come.