Posted on 01/22/2010 8:37:54 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
I wonder what the inheritance tax would have been on those 51 cows. The farmer may have wanted to spare his family from completely loosing the farm.
Prayers for the family.
RIP Mr Pierson.
“The last thing that went through his mind was the bullet.”
Reminds me of a joke British comedian Kenny Everett (sp) told:
Q: What is the last thing that goes through the mind of a bug that hits your windscreen (windshield) ?
A: His bum.
Sounds like he didn’t want the milk cows to suffer from having no-one to milk them.
That could be. The article that I found said he had a widow. Maybe she couldn’t care for his stock. Neighbors dug a trench to bury the cows.
“Trying to run a farm in NY state must be horrible.”
Milk prices are tanking and the farmers in NY have been getting killed financially since the ‘80s. So bad in the ‘90s I sent a copy of the “Lancaster Farming Journal” to a guy I met in the FL panhandle who was investing in real estate “back home” for him. Auctions galore, land for much less than 1K/acre with outbuildings.
Hog farmers don’t have it any better, take notice of the sales in supermarkets lately. Even beef is cheaper than it was over 20 years ago.
ping
The testimony of Sam Brown...What my wife told me. She would fain have her children buryed in the barne. I tolde her ye children were well and so why do ye talk so poor. Why she replyed there are dreadful times a coming. Conceiving (sic) that her fear and amazement was an effect of her Dystraction I told her she knew not what she said and put her out of that discourse and I am told by my Daughter Sara that my son Samuel hearing of such like discourse asked his mother if she could kill Him she replyed yes if I thought it would not hurt you...
He also testified that she had not slept for three nights prior to the act, and that after she had killed her son she said "she hoped he was Abram's (sic) seed" (Abraham is the symbolic father of all Christians) "and that she could never get her husband to do the deed."
Again one of the Tuttle brood stood in court. The judge intoned:
Mercy Brown, ye hath committed a most unnateral act...at the instagation of the divill...for which thou oughtest to die.
Yet many in the town spoke in favor of Mercy's being exonerated, albeit by virtue of insanity. A neighbor, John Beach, testified that Mercy Brown had come for fire on the morning of the murder and that she went down the hill toward the swamp, "partly in one path and then turned about to the brow of the hill and stared about as if distracted." One Joseph Dolittle, son-in-law of the Browns, testified that Mercy was often distraught and once threatened to throw scalding water on him. Daniel Clark, the jailer, testified that Mercy Brown had appeared distracted while in prison and had "cried out against persons without cause." Her own brother Simon, the ninth child, born in 1647, with wife Abigail testified as follows:
"this we believe and do atest, and that our sister Mercy Brown has bine a distracted woman. I myself being at brother Browns house but a litel befor she committed this woful act and I observed that she was verye much out in her understanding then: also we do believe in our conciences that she was a distracted woman when she committed this horid act: I was also at the home that morning after the act was committed and I could judg her no other then a distracted woman both in her words and actions: I and my wife were thar several times after but we found her very litell rational."
Events of the time may have influenced Mercy. The infamous Salem witch trials were about to begin, and in 1688 Cotton Mather had published a sensational account of four Boston witches. If Mercy was having auditory hallucinations-"hearing voices"-she may have thought that she herself was a witch. Did she fear that Armageddon was at hand and believe that her son had to be killed, as he would die horribly at the day of judgement anyway? And how was it that she apparently had periods of lucidity, during which she functioned normally? There is no way to know. What is known is that the court did not sentence her to death for the murder. She may have lived out her life in prison or in one of the log pens that were then erected for the containment of the insane.
Of course, not all of the Tuttle children committed antisocial acts. Elder sister Hannah bore and raised the child through whom I have descended. Simon, the barrel maker, who died in 1719; Nathaniel, the twelfth (last) child, who was born in 1652, married Sarah How, and died in 1721; and even murdered Sarah had children whose children prospered and helped found a new country.
Elizabeth Tuttle is the ancestor of a family that was to have an amazing impact on American history. Her son Timothy married a Stoddard, and he became the father of Jonathan Edwards, the brilliant, neurotic minister who has been called the last of the great Puritans. Jonathan Edwards married a Pierrepont. His descendants went on to be influential ministers, college presidents, financiers, surgeons, and judges. Perhaps the most famous descendant was Aaron Burr.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
One of my 3rd cousins, who had lived on the same block before moving to the country when we were kids, also lost his dairy farm in that era. He's an Ag extension agent for the state of Nebraska now. Although his parents were not farmers, they lived on a farmstead. His grandfather, my great uncle, was dairy farmer, who also worked for one the larger dairies in the area. He also had a few hogs, who got lots of overage milk, sometimes chocolate. :) Uncle Joe's farm is now a housing development, which at least carries the family name.
The farm of our great Uncle Sam is a light commercial area, mostly freight company transfer facilities. That was part of the farm that was settled on by our mutual Great Grandparents when they immigrated to Nebraska from England. Breaks my heart every time I drive by it, and it's on the route from my Moms to my brother's houses. Fortunately for my brother, he's younger and has few memories of Uncle Sam's place.
I wasn't judging his desperation, I was saying that it was about more than cows. See my later posts.
Do you know how tough it's been on farmers lately - especially dairy farms?
I know that grain, and hay, prices are up, my mother-in-law's farm is doing fine, selling corn, soybeans and alfalfa. But I also know, from her share-cropper, that things are not so great for those feeding animals, be they beef cattle, dairy cattle, or hogs. He feeds beef cattle and hogs, and told us that he had to sell a bunch of cows just before Christmas somewhat earlier than optimum, and for poor prices.
As always, it's better to be diversified, and as self contained as possible. He'll be OK, because he raises feed crops as well as feeds animals, either on his land or as a sharecropper. OTOH, when crop prices are down, my mother in law will be lucky to be able to pay the taxes.
Very very true.
I wouldn't have expected someone who had already given up to do those things that someone still trying to hang on would logically do.
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