Category:Harms

Harms House built 1875 in Carver County, MN

Short Biography

According to Merrill Jarchow, “The Minnesota commissioner of statistics, J. W. McClung, in 1860 estimated that it cost $795 [roughly $25,000 in 2019 dollars] to open a farm, including the price of implements, provisions, oxen, cows, a team and wagon, breaking about twenty acres, and building a house and fence.”

One of the first tasks confronting the settler was to build a cabin, and during its construction, the family often lived with a kind neighbor. Another was to break a little land for a crop. Many settlers did not know how to break land and many had the wrong kind of plow. Others had no horses nor oxen, and they had to hire the job done. . . . Potatoes, corn or rutabagas were the usual crops sown on newly broken land, corn often being inserted in an opening made with an ax in the sod. By the following spring the land would be ready for a wheat crop. After building a cabin, breaking some land, and planting a few crops, the pioneer frequently had to turn his attention to the problem of fencing, since until the late 1870s livestock was allowed to run at large