Mrs. Gus Freiderichs Maysville Iowa Turkey Farmer

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs and some of her turkeys

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs didn’t set out to build the largest turkey farm in Iowa. She just had an idea, one of those quiet, stubborn ideas that settles in your chest and refuses to leave. Her friends and neighbors near Maysville tried to talk her out of it. “Turkeys are impossible to raise,” they said. “They die if you look at them wrong.” But she didn’t budge. She bought a book called Hints for Amateur Poultry Raisers, propped it open on the kitchen table, and started anyway.

The early days were rough. The first twelve eggs gave her one bird—one tiny, lonely turkey. The rest hatched and died as if trying to tell her: “Turkey raising doesn’t pay. We told you so.”Anyone else might’ve quit, but she tried again. The second batch—twelve demanding little birds—felt like the universe giving her a reluctant nod.

 

From there, it snowballed. She added more birds until by November 1930 her farm was home to nearly six hundred turkeys. She built four sheds, fenced in a long run, that protected her flock from thieves, coyotes, and every other creature that thought a turkey looked like lunch. By spring, she planned to top a thousand birds.

Iowa Corn Gospel Train Perry Greeley Holden

Perry Greeley Holden

Perry Greeley Holden was out of his mind—in the best possible way. A lunatic prophet of corn. A man who could stand on a railway platform in a three-piece suit and make a crowd of Iowa farmers believe a seed could change civilization. He wasn’t selling religion. He was selling yield per acre. “Gentlemen,” he’d boom, “God helps those who plant the right hybrid.”

Born in the back end of Minnesota in 1865, Holden clawed his way through Michigan Agricultural College. He drank deep from the gospel of science, and came out convinced that ignorance was the devil. He looked around and saw farmers doing what their grandfathers did—planting blind, praying for rain, and calling it wisdom. “We are farming by superstition,” he said, “when we should be farming by reason.” He made it sound like sin, and in a way, it was.

When he hit Iowa in the early 1900s, he found his pulpit: the railroad. He commandeered a train, covered it in corn posters, and filled the cars with seed jars and soil samples. Then he took off across the prairie like a man on a mission. They called it The Corn Gospel Train, and that wasn’t a joke. Reporters wrote that it “preached the word of better seed and fuller ears to the unbelieving.” Farmers came out of the timber and off their plows to see this strange show—part carnival, part college, and part sermon.