[AT] Concrete slab

[Francis Robinson]

	My father and I fenced the begeebers out of this place in the early 1950's since we had a lot of hogs 
as well as about 50 milk cows and 30 head of beef running around. In the mid 1950's on any given day there 
were about 600 hogs standing around. After we got wiped out of the hog business in the late 1950's by TGE 
we took all of those fences out... My father always over-did everything. We had an 8" extension in our 
Dearborn post hole digger and we still hand dug on down deeper for most holes. He considered an 8' post to 
be an absolute minimum for a line post. Most end and corner post were 10' black locust post and most were 
too big around to fit in the hole left by the auger without more hand digging. Some of the end post were used 
cross-ties from the railroad that runs across one corner of the farm. They used to replace the ties very often in 
those days and the ones they took out were very solid. He and a neighbor (Scott Pike's wife's grandfather) 
went together and bought all of the used ties from one section of double track one year and we used a herd 
of those for end post. Many of those end and corner post were tamped in dry cement and when we later took 
them out you could tell it very well. Pulling those post was like pulling tight teeth. We always tamped in a few 
inches of dirt first so that we did not create a "cup" of concrete that would hold water and rot the post. We 
would then mix dry concrete and tamp the post in with that up to about 6" of the ground level. That probably 
would not work well in dry areas of the country but here it is not uncommon for a post hole even two feet deep 
to fill up half way with water in wet weather. Since we did fencing when it was not suitable for field work and 
were sitting post very deep we "struck" water a lot.
	Back about 1950 my maternal grandfather was digging a post hole about 15' from where a new 
neighbor had tried digging 3 different dug wellls and all had come up dry. He got the post hole down about 3 
feet when he hit water and the hole filled up and the water ran across the ground and down the hill all 
afternoon. His house had a driven well that was only about 20' deep. It never went dry until many years later 
after a half zillion new houses went up near them and dropped the water table waaaay down.
	One thing I have discovered is that a simple 8" piece of treated 2"X4" spiked to the side of an end post 
near the bottom will make that post extremely hard to pull out of the ground. I have also used a piece of angle 
iron for that attached with lag screws. On some post I have used a long piece of heavy angle iron or pipe as a 
brace bolted or welded to the center of an old car wheel and lagged to the post. The wheel end is buried 
about 2' deep.
	I find that the older I get the less concerned I am about stuff I do here lasting 100 years...   :-)   With 
the massive development going on here now the possibility of this farm staying a farm beyond my lifetime 
becomes less and less each year. The city is now busy building a bypass road that will come within about 
1,000 feet of our north west corner The school district recently bought a large field just up the road about a 
half mile for $39,000 an acre. Lets see, corn was about $1.60 this week. How does that stack up?   :-(    100 
acres times $40,000 an acre... yeah that is probably my sell-out price... It sure would buy a nice place with a 
big shop 20 miles further from Indy and a lot of old tractors... Trouble is I don't want to do it. Son Scott may be 
forced to some day though.




"farmer"


Francis Robinson
Central Indiana USA
robinson at svs.net