Bucklin Bros on Wallis Tractor

I don’t really know that much about this photo.  I’m pretty sure it is a photo of my maternal grandfather Fred D. Bucklin and his brother Clarence circa 1928.  The photo came from Clarence’s daughter Carla, so I think that information is reliable.  Who else is going to have old family photos except for the descendants of the people involved?  Not that the identity of those photos is always known.  But most of the photos from the 1920s are pretty well identified.  In the Bucklin and Hine collection of old photos, the generations before my grandfather are often not identified.

Mainly, I just like this old action photo taken about 100 years ago of my family.  It looks like Fred and Clarence are making hay on the old Bucklin family farm.  The Bucklin farm in Louisiana had started 50 years previously when their grandparents James Bucklin and Mary Ann McGrath Bucklin had moved their family south from Iowa.  James was a Massachusetts native, while Mary Ann was an Irish immigrant who came to the US during the Great Irish Potato Famine.

The family came to Louisiana in 1884 and were able to get three sections of land to homestead around Hathaway, Louisiana, in Jefferson Davis Parish.  Most of this was passed down to the descendants of their son Louis, mainly because none of their other children have any descendants.  Louis was the father of Fred and Clarence, and he was involved with the day-to-day farm life for many years.  He kept a lot of journals talking about some of his activities.  He married Addie Hine in 1898 and they worked the farm.  Addie gave birth to a dozen children, so that kept her busy for a while.

Louis died in 1927, and that left the farm to Addie and the children.  So this is a photo of Fred and Clarence helping their mom to keep the farm going.  They were doing that by making hay on this old Wallis tractor.  Or maybe they were just posing for some interesting photos when they were youngsters.  It’s been known to happen.  Just look at these old photos of me and my sisters from 1978.  That’s what we were doing.  You can pretty much tell this because we were definitely not dressed for work.  We were just riding around the countryside taking photos.  We saw this old tractor and thought we’d take some photos.

The funny thing about these photos is that they were taken not far from the older photo.  And also, the Case tractor in the photo has a shared history with the Wallis tractor.  They had the same parent company.  We weren’t thinking of any of that, though.  We didn’t know about that old photo.  I didn’t discover that until a few years ago.  We were just playing around on an old tractor in the field and being silly.

But I really don’t think that’s what Clarence and Fred were doing all those years ago.  Just look at them.  They were doing serious farm work.  That Wallis tractor belonged to their mother.  You can tell they were serious by the overalls that they were wearing.  That’s the only thing I remember my grandfather wearing in all the years I knew him.  This is also around the time that they were getting involved with growing all types of trees, shrubs, and flowers.  It wouldn’t be long before they would set up their own nursery business called Bucklin Brothers.  The area around Jennings and Hathaway were familiar with the name, because their Uncle Joe and Uncle Ed had run a nice men’s clothing store in downtown Jennings called Bucklin Brothers in the first decade of the 1900s.

Like the first venture, it didn’t last too long for reasons not known.  There are still a few Bucklins in the Jennings area.  There are even some Bucklin descendants who farm in the area.  The Bucklin family farm has never been divided.  Some of my cousins have 1/8th interests.  My line had larger families, so I own 1/240ths interest.  One of these days I’m going to figure out what that means.  Maybe.