Weeks recalls farming of yesterday

Stanley Weeks may have just turned 92, but that didn’t stop him from running a tractor on a recent fall day.

“I don’t remember everything but I remember quite a bit,” Weeks admits. “It was pretty rough riding.”

Weeks operated a John Deere 4430 pulling a disk on the 160-acre family farm located between Fairbury and Forrest that Thomas Weeks bought well over a century ago.

“People would say you shouldn’t be doing that and I’d say well, I don’t want to forget how,” Weeks notes.

Weeks started farming ground across from his parents’ home north of Fairbury Township High School after he married his wife, Reva, in 1949. The couple started a family at that farm before moving to the farm closer to Forrest a decade later. They had two sons, Steve and Jim.

The family farm goes back a few years as Weeks’ grandfather bought the first 100 acres of the present ground when he came over from England as a 20-year-old back in the middle 1800s. The purchase price was reportedly $12 an acre.

“Now, it’s gone up just a bit,” Weeks joked.

The transition from steam engines and threshing machines happened during Weeks’ time as he recalls serving as the water boy. When farming with his father, Weeks fondly remembers one of his contributions to the operation.

“I bought a four-row John Deere corn planter and the first year, we used the wire.”

Weeks still has the John Deere Model A which was his first tractor. According to Steve, his father still drives and lives alone.

“He helps out at the farm as much as he can,” said Steve.