Lee and Carol Persons’s Farm Named a 2015 Century Farm

By Jill Veerkamp, St. Charles Press Editor

In 2015, the Lee and Carol Persons farm was named a Century Farm.  Their farm was formally recognized as a Century Farm through a ceremony during the Winona Country Fair.  At the recognition ceremony, the Persons received a Century Farm certificate signed by Governor Dayton and a yard sign declaring their farm’s status.  The Persons also received congratulations from Winona County Commissioners Marcia Ward, Marie Kovecsi, Steve Jacob, Representative Gene Pelowski, and St. Charles Mayor John Schaber.

A Century Farm is a farm that has been owned by a single family for at least one hundred years, is at least fifty acres in size, and is currently used for agricultural production.  Since the program’s inception in 1976, almost 10,000 farms in the state of Minnesota have been recognized as Century Farms.  Winona County alone has 171 Century Farms, as of 2015.  During the Winona Country Fair recognition ceremony, Winona County Recorder Bob Bamenek stated that Minnesota Century Farms are “our history.  They are part of how we got to today.”

The Persons decided to apply for Century Farm status after they saw an article asking for applications in the newspaper.  They commented that application was fairly simple to complete.  After sending in the application, the county recorder then verified their status as a Century Farm.

The Persons’s farm was initially brought into the Persons family in 1913 by Lee Persons’s grandfather, Chancy Persons, with his wife, Selma.  They bought the farm from Thomas Barr and his wife, Rebecca.  Chancy Persons’s parents came to the United States from England.  They were attracted to the area by the good, available farmland.  They settled on a farm to the north of the Lee and Carol Persons farm.  Chancy Persons then bought his own farm of 160 acres at a price of $15,000, or $93.75 per acre.  Over the next one hundred years, the farm has stayed mostly the same size.

Four generations of the family have worked on the Persons farm.  After Chancy Persons owned the farm, it was then passed down to his son Russell Persons, and his wife Donna.  They took over the farm in 1945.  Lee and Carol Persons began to buy the farm from Lee’s father, Russell, in 1978.  Currently, Lee and Carol’s daughter and son-in-law also work on the farm with the dairy cattle.

Early on the farm’s history, it produced oats, wheat, flax, barley, and hay.  These small grains mostly went toward feeding the horses and cattle kept by the family.  The Persons farm is now primarily a dairy farm.

The main house on the farm is the same one that was there when Chancy Persons purchased the farm.  He only added some additions, such as the kitchen and the basement, in the late 1920s.  The barn was built in 1923 and 1924 out of lumber cut from a nearby oak grove.  The barn has lasted over the years, with the Persons adding a new roof and siding in 2007.  The barn has “really stood well considering it is ninety years old,” commented Lee Persons.  In 1956, a Grade A milk house was added to the front of the barn.

An interesting fact about the house, when the family put in a furnace after the structure had some smoke damage from a small fire, they discovered a previously hidden stairway that led from the basement to Carol Persons’s sewing room.  This was apparently the original outside entrance before the addition was added to the house.  Lee Persons commented that his grandmother never knew about the hidden staircase, even though she had lived there for years.

Like many of the farms in the area, the Persons farm was among the first to have electricity.  This was due to the nearby Gainey Gold Mine.  While the mine itself was a scam, it still encouraged the power company to grant it electricity.  Therefore, all of the farms in the area also received electricity at the same time.

Lee and Carol Persons hope to keep the farm in the family into the future.  Lee Persons commented, “These days, you don’t have to have sons to keep it in the family.”  The Persons have three daughters and two granddaughters.  Already, their daughter Shelley and her husband Brad Schrandt have taken over the dairy production of the farm.  Of the long farming tradition of her family, Shelley Schrandt commented, “I enjoy hearing stories of previous generations and the changes they have made.”

The area surrounding the Persons farm has seen a few changes over the years.  In the 1930s and the 1940s, all of the neighboring farms were dairy farms.  As the years passed, the small dairy farms began to disappear, the land dedicated toward other areas of agricultural production.  Lee Persons commented that the smaller dairy farms were squeezed out by the larger operations.  It is also a lot of hard work to maintain a dairy farm, requiring constant effort 365 days a year.  Therefore, the Persons farm is one of the few farms in the nearby area still engaged in dairy production.

Lee and Carol Persons are proud to have a Century Farm.  “It’s nice to see small farms continue,” Lee Persons commented.  They are hopeful that their farm will stay in the family for future generations.