Petty Farm
Petty Farm
Hubbard and Dollie Petty.
John Marble Petty running the combine at harvest.
Leaving the field for a 20-mile trip to the grain elevator.
Resting the horses at the bottom of Cloverland Grade crossing Asotin Creek.
Robert driving the tractor in 1945.
Robert drives the combine while 10-year old son Tom drives the truck.
The Petty family arrived in eastern Washington in the late 1860’s.
Hubbard and Dollie Petty moved from Arkansas to Asotin County in the late 1860s, with their six children and all the belongings they could fit in a single wagon. The Civil War had destroyed their home and property in Arkansas, so they joined a wagon train going west along the Oregon Trail. When they began homesteading in 1876, the land hadn’t been surveyed yet, so local law required them to make improvements to the land before the government would give them the titles to the land. Early the following year, they paid $4 for a down payment to secure 160 acres near Cloverland.
In the early years, the family raised hogs and grew grain to feed the hogs. In the years since, the farm has grown to nearly 3000 acres, and virtually all of the land is used to grow dryland wheat.
In 1892, their son John Marble Petty took over the homestead. The next year he married Sara Jane Johnson, and they began building a family home on the property. The lumber for the house had to be hauled by an ox team from Dayton, more than 60 miles away. The house was built and they raised their 5 children there. John remarked, “He didn’t want his children seeing the hardships and the struggles he went through”. He helped his children by gifting them parcels of land and a 20-dollar gold piece when they settled in an area. John Marble farmed the homestead until he had a stroke in 1935. Their youngest son, Robert, took on the task of caring for the land and for his elderly parents.
In 1939, Robert married Geneva Parsons and they set out to modernize the farm. From the late 1930s through the early 1940s they made the switch from horses to tractors, but because of the depression and war, they had to share the tractor with three other families. Still, the new machinery allowed them to harvest 35-40 acres a day, which was more than double what a normal horse-drawn combine could harvest. Robert and Geneva built a new home in 1952-53 and the old homestead was moved to Asotin.
Robert and Geneva Petty.
In May 1964, Robert and Geneva were killed in a car accident - a tragedy that changed the farm, the family and their community forever. Their son James and his wife Joan took over the farm for a few years, but eventually moved to Oregon, and handed the farm off to his younger brother Tom.
Tom and wife Vicki still live on the homestead and have raised their 3 children there. The children all drove the wheat trucks in harvest and had to help pick up hay bales in the field. They raised beef, sheep and pigs for their fair projects. “It’s fun to get together with them and listen to some of their farm stories. The saying is, ‘you can take the kid out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the kid’. So true!”
Today:
Their son Justin started managing the homestead in 2019, along with other properties he and Tom have leased or rented in the Cloverland area. Tom, semi-retired, is the helper. Justin’s teenage children, Kayleen and Jacob, help out when they are at the farm.
biggest changes:
Some of the biggest changes they have seen on the farm is moving to direct seeding. They started doing some direct seeding in the 80s, but in 2003 they switched to 100% direct seeding. And the main reason is erosion. “We were running out of dirt. And the more we farmed it the more it went away.” Tom said the results were instant and it has saved the dirt and ground for continued farming. Modern seed drills and sprayers, along with crop rotation, has improved our farming and farm stewardship.