The rest of Adie's story by Adie S. Petzoldt

On January 6, 1912, my sister Frieda was born when I was just over two and one half years old. There were now six children and our two parents living in a two-room log cabin with an attic without outer wall or ceiling. All of us thought life was great.
The winter my sister was born we had the largest snow I can remember. It drifted up to the windows of the house, and my father and brothers shoveled paths from the house through the yard, the barn lot to the barn, to the feeding troughs and food bins for the farm animals.
One winter my father had hogs which had to be driven to market. It was at least a mile to the county road and then two more miles. I can see them digging a path for the hogs and driving them up the field from the house, one behind the other.
Such a feat would have been more difficult without the good stock dogs, “Old Judge,” and “Jack.” The hogs and all our stock had great respect for their presence and their barking. As I grew older, I learned to direct these and other dogs who were raised and trained to get the cattle and other stock from the pasture fields.
The milk cows were milked each day by hand at certain times. The dogs as well as the cows knew those times as well as if they could read a clock. If they did not appear on time, the dogs knew, and sometimes without being told, they went out and quietly rounded up the cows. All of us learned to milk, but since the men folks tended the land and the fields, the milking fell to Mother, my two sisters, and me. Summer was nice, but in winter our fingers got painfully cold.
During those years, farmers could not sell whole milk in the market and there was no means of distribution. The milk had to be separated, with the cream spun off the milk in the separator. We took the cream to market, where it was graded for butter-fat content, which determined the price. The milk was fed to hogs, chickens, cats, and dogs. A certain amount was kept in the earth cellar or hung in the cistern for family use ---drinking, cooking, and cheese.
In my early childhood my father developed the finest Holstein dairy herd, hoping that gradually farmers would be able to sell whole milk at the market. Unfortunately, Dad was too far ahead of his time, and he found the herd to be unprofitable. One by one he sold the Holsteins and bought Jerseys, a higher cream-producing breed. Several years later, the market for whole milk opened, which put him in the wrong enterprise, since these sales were now more profitable than those of cream. He gave up on milk cattle, altogether.