FCS Financial: One Hundred Years July 2016 | Page 7

A Claim to Fame

The earliest record of minutes found for Dover National Farm Loan Association
from December 11, 1917, indicate the acceptance of the resignation of a Peyton
Tabb as director and loan committee. A special meeting of stockholders to elect
a new director was ordered for Saturday, December 28, 1917.

The agricultural recession that followed World
War I lasted through the 1920s. What farmers needed
were lower interest rates, payment schedules that
allowed for the seasonal fluctuations of agriculture,
and short-term loans for operating expenses and
purchasing equipment. The Agricultural Credits
Act, signed by President Harding on March 4, 1923,
established a network of twelve Federal Intermediate
Credit Banks, one in each of the twelve land bank
districts. However, the FICBs were not set up to lend
directly to individuals. They were only to serve as
banks of discount to other lending institutions. As yet,
there was no organized avenue for getting the money
in the hands of the farmer.

The author of the wellknown Little House on
the Prairie series, Laura
Ingalls Wilder, had
ties to the Farm Credit
System. In 1894 she
and her husband Almanzo moved to a
forty-acre farm in Mansfield, Missouri.
Financial struggles led them to move
into town where Almanzo found work
as an oil salesman and 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 their farm. Laura
became recognized as an authority in
poultry farming and rural living and
began writing for the Missouri Ruralist.
From 1917 to 1928 Laura supplemented
her income by working for the National
Farm Loan Association, issuing loans
to small farmers from an office she set
up in the farmhouse. At age sixtyone, Laura resigned both positions
and settled in to enjoy a comfortable
retirement with her husband. While
in her sixties, Laura began preserving
her childhood memories of life on the
frontier, stories that would become the
Little House on the Prairie series.
During Laura’s eleven years with the
National Farm Loan Association, she
wrote more than $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.

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