Grandma's Gift

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and are looking forward to 2024. I am certainly anticipating the new year as I’m counting down the days to coming home.

It’s been a tradition for Grandma Faye to gift me a national geographic coffee-table style book for Christmas, which after nearly a dozen books I have kept in my library to share with my own children. However, this year was a notable exception to the trend. For the past two years my grandma has been compiling stories to complete a living memoir of her life on the Borgard Family Farm. She recounts stories regarding her lifetime of growing up to raising a family and to eventually retiring on the same land over her 90+ years.

Before highways and bridges were constructed in Coos County, the primary method of pre-World War II travel was the waterways and mountain roads. A thirty-minute drive to Coos Bay today, would have taken several hours as there were few bridges that crossed the Coquille River. Grandma would have to travel to school by ferry to Riverton, until the road was completed to attend high school in Coquille.

One of the individuals that stood out in her stories was her father Conard Borgard (My Great-Grand-father). Conard would milk nineteen cows twice daily by hand since there was no electricity. He would have to store the milk in the cold creek overnight until he would wheelbarrow the morning and evening collection down to the river ferry. Conard worked hard to make an income off the farm and was well respected in the community, helping neighbors whenever he could. I never had the opportunity to meet my great grand-father, but his memory is unquestionably reflected in the land that he worked and the daughter that he raised. I look forward to continue his legacy and work the farm that has been in operation for over 100 years

Above is the Borgard Family home, which was the house I came home to as a newborn.