TE SELLE

Harmen Jan te Selle Farm
Firth, Lancaster County, Nebraska

Note:  In the year 2000 Robert TeSelle (great-grandson of Harmen Jan te Selle) wrote this description of the farm in Firth, Nebraska.  Harmen Jan originally homesteaded this property in 1871.  Robert's grandfather, Herman John TeSelle (1888-1963), and Robert's father Floyd Merle TeSelle (1914-1972) were both born and raised on this family farm.
 

This aerial photo shows the Firth farm that was originally established by my great-grandfather Harmen Jan te Selle when he moved to Nebraska from Wisconsin in 1871.  My grandfather Herman John TeSelle was born and raised here, and remained on the farm with his wife Jennie van de Wege to raise their own family. My father, Floyd Merle TeSelle, was born here in 1914, along with his brothers Orville Harold (1916) and Glenn Alvin (1918).

My father and his brothers all moved away from the farm, since they had no desire to remain as farmers themselves. When my grandparents were ready to retire from farming in about 1956, they sold the farm and moved into the town of Firth itself. My grandfather Herman used lumber from the old farm buildings to build his own new house in town, where he and Grandma Jennie lived until they died.

This photograph was taken in July 1956, probably in preparation for selling the farm. The photo may have been used as part of a sales brochure describing the property.  (Click on the photo to see a larger image.)

On a separate page I have identified most of the buildings, and I tried to find Dutch translations for each description if possible. My Dutch-English dictionary is not the best, but hopefully you can figure out what each building is.

I remember all of the buildings quite clearly from several summer vacations I spent with my family visiting my grandparents. We would drive from California to Nebraska every other summer to visit both my paternal and my maternal grandparents. My mother’s parents lived in the western part of Nebraska on a farm outside the town of Giltner, near the city called Grand Island.

Grandma Jennie would send my sister Patricia (“Patti”) and me out to the chicken coop every morning to gather the fresh eggs. We would also go out with Grandpa Herman to milk the cows and feed the pigs. Sometimes we would help him separate the cream from the milk, and make some of the cream into butter. In the afternoon Grandma would take us out to her garden, where we would pick the fresh vegetables for supper. The vegetables always tasted so much better when they were picked fresh from the garden.