We raised a lot of hogs on the Scheckel farm outside of Seneca in the heart of Crawford County  We had a hog pen section on the west end of the small barn. Then we built a brand-new hog house next to the corn crib that we had constructed the year before. It had eight farrowing pens, four on each side with an aisle down the middle.

I was ten years old (1952) when we built the hog house. Dad and my brothers, Phillip, Bob,  and I cut the logs on our farm, and hauled them to Jake Vedvik’s saw mill in Seneca, where they were made into lumber. Three big logs on a Gehl rubber-tired wagon, pulled by the Massey Harris ’44 tractor hauled the logs to town. Several weeks later, we took the tractor and wagon and picked up the sawed lumber. Some were two-by-fours for uprights and rafters. Some 1-x-12 boards for siding and a few were four-by-six timbers used for sills.

The whole family worked on building the hog house. It was constructed between crop harvests. We dug the footers, smoothed out the ground, and put up the forms to pour the concrete before the first hay crop. The concrete pour was accomplished after the first hay crop, but before cutting and shocking oats. We built the walls and rafters after we finished threshing. We tackled the roofing, shingling, and siding after the second hay crop. Continued……