FCS Financial: One Hundred Years July 2016 | Page 23

A Claim to Fame

regardless of the amount of stock
he or she owned. In addition, “A”
stock would be available for sale to
members or non-members but it
carried no voting rights with it. Two
years after a member ceased to be a
borrower their voting stock would
be converted to non-voting stock.
In addition, twelve district Banks
for Cooperatives were established
to provide credit for farmers’
cooperatives, as well as a Central
Bank for Cooperatives for providing
large loans.

One of the best-known recorders of life on the frontier—Laura
Ingalls Wilder—hails from Missouri and has ties to the Farm
Credit System. She was born in Wisconsin in February 1867,
just two years after the end of the Civil War. In 1894 she and
her husband Almanzo moved to Mansfield, Missouri, where
they purchased a forty-acre farm that eventually grew to a
two-hundred-acre poultry, dairy, and fruit farm they named
Rocky Ridge Farms. Their early years together were beset with
challenges and the couple moved into town where Almanzo
found steady income as an oil salesman and general delivery
man. Laura took in boarders and earned money providing
meals to the men working on the railroad. By 1910 they were
able to return to Rocky Ridge, improved by their hard work
over the years and by selling their house in town.

Historians continue to debate
exactly when and how the Great
Depression finally ended. Most
attribute its end to America’s e ntrance
into World War II. The farmers had
several years yet to make it through,
but at least now there was hope.

Laura had made a study of farming and was now recognized
as a bit of an authority in poultry farming and rural life
in general. To share what she’d learned, Laura submitted
an article to the Missouri Ruralist in 1911 that was so well
received she was offered a permanent position as a columnist
and editor for the paper, a position she held until the mid1920s. In the meantime, she supplemented her income by
working for the National Farm Loan Association from 1917 to
1928, issuing loans to small farmers from an office she set up
in the farmhouse.
At age sixty-one, Laura resigned both positions and
settled in to enjoy a comfortable retirement with her
husband. Those plans were dashed when the stock
market crash of 1929 erased all they’d invested,
except for their farm. Encouraged by daughter
Rose Wilder Lane who was an accomplished writer
in her own right, Laura began writing the stories
that would become the Little House on the Prairie
series. Spurred to preserve her childhood memories
of life on the frontier by the deaths of her mother
and sister during the 1920s, Laura also hoped to
generate some income for her and her husband, a
goal that was fabulously achieved.
During Laura’s eleven years with the National Farm
Loan Association, she wrote over $1 million in loans.
Her handwritten papers, found several years ago in
the Springfield FCS Financial office, were donated to
the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Mansfield where
they remain on display.

American Farms at the Turn of the Century

19