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Category: Establishments

The Surprising Origin of Cheap Meat

The Surprising Origin of Cheap Meat

Today I will continue our look at Dr. W.E. Taylor’s Soil Culture and Modern Farm Methods (1913) by discussing a section highlighting issues of supply and demand in agriculture in the 1910s. Taylor’s book was also the subject of two prior posts: The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part I and Part II. With the increase of production of corn in the early 1900s due to better technology and understanding of farming techniques, the price of corn dropped by nearly 50%. This…

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The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part II

The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part II

In The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part I, I examined W.E. Taylor’s book, Soil Culture and Modern Farming Methods (1913). In it, Taylor implores American farmers to use manure as a primary source of soil fertility maintenance. So where does the United States find itself today? Farming as it once was is essentially gone, replaced by automated dairies and self-driving, GPS-guided tractors on mega farms rather than family farms. There has also been an increasing separation of stock-raising…

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The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part I

The Best Kept Secret to Successful Farming, Part I

It is an obvious oversimplification to say that the world has changed substantially over the past 100 years. With the dawn of the Internet and the boom of the information and technological age, there are many aspects of our life today that would be unrecognizable to someone living in the 1910s. This idea of advancement of society can make it easy to be dismissive of the past and view it as irrelevant and outdated. It may be a different time,…

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Connect to Plymouth’s Farming Past

Connect to Plymouth’s Farming Past

One of the joys of spending time at the Plymouth Historical Society is the city’s rich farming history. There are many artifacts and documents that help us peer into the past life of Plymouth. Not that long ago, Plymouth was a community that required family farms to survive. Now, Plymouth is a bustling suburb of the culturally rich city of Minneapolis. Those fields are replaced by a much more urban setting with shopping centers, business districts, and a scattering of…

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Object Spotlight: The Yuba Bulletin

Object Spotlight: The Yuba Bulletin

It is hard to even fathom what construction and farming work must have been like over 100 years ago. As I write this, I can hear many construction vehicles reworking Fernbrook Lane right outside of Plymouth’s Old Town Hall, home to the Historical Society. One hundred years ago, similar projects likely would have required the use of horses. The mass use of large machinery was only in its infancy in the 1910s as highlighted by our object spotlight for this…

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Old Town Hall

Old Town Hall

Plymouth’s Old Town Hall is home to the Plymouth History Museum. This building was built in 1885, making it 133 years old. In 1985, Plymouth Historical Society published the following history of Old Town Hall’s construction: In the early 1880s the rapidly growing town of Plymouth came to realize it needed a public building from which to carry on its official business. It was probably in the fall of 1884 that Clem Mengelkoch and Tom Ditter were asked by the…

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Naming Medicine Lake, Part I

Naming Medicine Lake, Part I

According to the chapter on “Plymouth” in Edward D. Neill and J. Fletcher Williams’ History of Hennepin County and the City of Minneapolis (Minneapolis: North Star Publishing, 1881): The lake derives its name from an Indian legend, which says that an Indian in his canoe was capsized by a sudden storm, and the Indians not being able to find his body, gave it the name of Medicine Lake. This story was expanded in Neil O. Nielsen’s “A Brief Look at the Early History of Plymouth,” which explains: Medicine…

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