This is the dairy farm of my grandparents, Mike and Matilda Patrykus, located northeast of Bancroft, Wisconsin. They moved to the place in 1914, just 100 years ago. Some of my earliest memories are of Sunday's at the farm where grandma would fix a big dinner, often of their farm raised chickens and canned goods from the cellar or fresh vegetables from the garden and always with pie for desert. There would be a lot of cousins, aunts and uncles there and by the end of the day we'd be all tired out on the ride back to our home in Wisconsin Rapids. If it was early enough, sometimes we'd stop in Ray Petrusky's Bar in Bancroft for an ice cream cone!
Later, my uncle Ben took over the farm when he came home from the US Army after WW 2 where he and my uncle George fought in the South Pacific in such places as Guadalcanal and Bougainville in the Soloman Islands and my grandparents continued to live on there until their final days. I spent summers there during the 1940's and into the early 1950's where I learned to drive on the Ford tractor and in the Chevrolet truck during some of the happiest times of my life. We'd cut and haul in hay and later cut and shock oats, followed by a "threshing bee" when a large steam tractor and threshing machine was hired to separate the grain from the straw and chaff. On a rainy day I might go fishing for Speckled Trout in Duck Creek about a mile away or maybe we would load up corn and oats to take in to the feed mill in Almond WI to have it ground for livestock feed. My uncle had a dairy herd of about 15, small by todays standards, and always raised Hampshire hogs. My grandmother lived on there after grandpa's death in 1960 and continued to keep a flock of chickens for meat and eggs which she sold for household money. All of my aunts and uncles are now gone and the farm was sold to a neighbor boy who was close to uncle Ben and aunt Berniece. The house is no longer there, having burned in 2001 but this photo brings back fond memories from those wonderful days.
My grandparents, some of my aunts and uncles, and some of those cousins who enjoyed spending time on this farm, are buried within sight of the place at St. Martin's Catholic Cemetery, just a mile to the northeast.

Am thankful meeting Ben and Bernice. Have many off her recipes. Especially her dill pickle recipe.