4 who grew into roles as modern farm wives

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

For the 21st century farm wife, country and city often blend together. And don’t make any assumptions about who’s driving the combine.

Pat Dumoulin taught full-time at Elgin Community College for 30 years.

Judy Krog drove a combine and fed livestock while her husband worked at a road maintenance job.

Jill Muirhead and her mother-in-law, Betty Muirhead, both began life in the city and ended up farming.

Women such as these actually are continuing some trends that started 80 years ago. Washing machines, refrigerators and smaller families made housework less of an 80-hour-a-week burden. By the 1980s, two-thirds of farm wives also had nonfarm jobs.

As mechanical advances replaced human muscle with diesel engines, it also became more feasible for the lady of the farm to do a lot of the actual farming while her husband became free to take an outside job.

Educated tomboy

When Pat Donnelly Dumoulin was little, country life for a woman centered on canning tomatoes and jam, gathering eggs and hand-pumping pails of water. Her family didn’t move to a farm that had electricity and indoor plumbing until she was 3.

She would go on to earn a master’s degree in business administration plus 70 hours of extra study. For almost half her life, she worked full-time teaching economics at ECC. But she wouldn’t dream of leaving the corn, soybean and hog farm just west of Hampshire that’s operated by her extended family of 28.

In fact, she’s an impassioned defender of farm life and farmers, and can be seen explaining what they do via video and photos on www.soycam.com. She sits on the board of directors of the Illinois Soybean Association.

“Farmers are great stewards of the land,” she says with an energy that belies her 76 years. “You can’t abuse your animals or your soil and stay in this business. Farmers represent just 2 percent of the population, but we have quadrupled our yields.”

Dumoulin wears her hair like a crewcut Marine and admits she grew up as a tomboy. “I loved to drive the tractor. I raked hay. I thought that was a lot more interesting than staying in the house and dusting.”

Her parents made her learn to sew, however. And after she started piano lessons, her father wouldn’t let her quit.

“I’m glad my parents had the tenacity not to listen to what their daughter wanted,” she says. Thanks to those lessons, she now plays the organ at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.

After attending an all-girls Catholic boarding school in St. Charles — another unpopular move forced on her by Mom and Dad — she met a Hampshire farm girl while they were working together at a summer job. Pat says that girl tried to “set her up” with a male cousin. But when she met the girl’s older brother, Bill Dumoulin, she had eyes only for the man she calls “my Romeo.”

After she graduated from NIU and married Bill, he was drafted in 1955 and took her on a new adventure: They lived in Germany, “had a great time and saw the world,” she says.

“When we came home from Europe, they needed teachers so badly, I figured I might as well go back to school. I always just took each job for one year, to help out the school. But I ended up teaching five years. And I just loved it.”

That led to her MBA and her three decades at ECC as she continued to live on the Dumoulin farm. When she retired from the college, that freed up more time for her to serve on the soybean association board and to run this region’s section of that soycam website. She also has been secretary-treasurer of the Illinois Corn Growers Association and vice chair of the Illinois Livestock Development Group.

All the corn and beans they grow, plus some bought from other farmers, now go to feed their 2,100 sows and those sows’ baby pigs.

Pat and Bill share the chore of running that spread with two sons and a daughter, two daughters-in-law, a son-in-law and 20 grandchildren. And Pat and Bill are among the 23 from that assemblage who live in the same farmhouse.

“But it’s a BIG farmhouse,” she reassures a listener.

Lady harvester

If you were looking for Judy Krog of rural Elgin this week, you’d probably find her driving a 15-foot-tall combine. And she loves field work. But she and her husband, Bruce, have often felt the need to take outside jobs, too, to inject extra cash flow and provide their family with health insurance.

“Health insurance is at the top of the list why Bruce wanted another job,” she says. “I’m not surprised that two-thirds of farm women have other jobs. Insurance is very hard to pay for if you’re self-employed.”

Judy, 48, grew up on a farm near Belvidere.

“I did a lot of hay baling, and we rode horses,” she recalls fondly. “My parents never really told us we had to do anything, but I preferred being outside to being inside.

“It was a different kind of world. We knew everybody who drove by, and we’d go away and be gone until dark. When we had our own kids, it was always, ‘Where are you going?’ and ‘Call me when you get there!’ ”

Bruce Krog grew up on the farm where they live now, along Bowes Road.

She says they met through a kind of forerunner of today’s online dating services. The trade magazine Farm Journal invited young farm singles to send in photos and information about themselves, which were printed in a “Farm Girls Book” and a “Farm Boys Book.”

With relatively little land, the Krogs rent many other fields from retired farmers and investment-land owners all over the Elgin-Plato area. They have two grown children — Alex, 22, who is about to start a career as an accountant; and Teresa, who’s a junior in college.

They have shared work both on and off the farm. Judy had a job as a custodian for their church. Then Bruce went to work as a road maintenance man for the Plato Township Highway Department. He continued in that job for several years and even ran unsuccessfully for Plato Township highway commissioner last year, but his job was eliminated amid tense relations with the boss he had campaigned against.

“While Bruce worked for the township, I did most of the farm work,” Judy says. “When we still had hogs, Bruce would load them and I would drive them to market.”

“I probably will get another job,” Judy says now. “You get bored in the middle of the winter. And it’s nice to get some kind of paycheck every week. When you rely on crop farming, you basically get one big pay day a year.”

From city to country

Jill Muirhead is 60-something; and her mother-in-law, Betty Muirhead, is 93. Both began life in the city and ended up farming. But they followed very different paths.

Betty was her husband’s assistant and partner in a world in which careers for women were then limited to teacher, nurse or secretary. Jill lived most of her life in the business world and now runs a farm by herself while her husband engages in a computer business.

The daughter of a mailman, Betty grew up in Peoria during the Depression. Earning a degree at Bradley University, she aimed to become a teacher — of the very feminine topic of home economics.

Her sister, Eleanor Yurs, had moved to Plato Center to teach home ec in what was then Plato Center High School. Betty got a teaching job in Mackinac, Ill. Then, in the year Pearl Harbor was attacked, she learned that Eleanor had become engaged. Plato school rules then forbade female teachers to be married. “They figured both teaching and being a wife were full-time jobs,” Betty explains. So Eleanor left her job, and Betty moved to Plato Center to replace her.

She met a local farm boy named Glenn Muirhead at a church party. When she and Glenn married two years later, Betty became a full-time wife and mother on the farm along Dittman Road that Muirheads had worked since before the Civil War.

Betty says she did relatively little farm work. “When they were harvesting, (Glenn and some neighbors and relatives) would share the machinery and go from farm to farm. So I’d have to feed six hungry men, plus the kids. We did a lot more baking and home cooking back then.”

Betty and Glenn reared three children, all who went on to “city” jobs.

A wannabe farmer

Jill Muirhead, on the other hand, says she grew up as a “wannabe farmer” in Superior, Wis., the daughter of a heating-oil dealer. She says she was always thinking, “If only I could have a farm some day.”

“My mother had brothers and sisters who ran dairy farms, and I spent every summer there, playing in the barns and shocking hay.”

But Jill ended up marrying a drug salesman and moving with him to Elgin. The farm idea had to be put on hold while she worked in an accounting office.

Her husband died at age 41, and she began dating Glenn and Betty’s son, Gordon Muirhead, who sang with her in the Elgin Choral Union.

But Gordon had little interest in being farmer, she says. “His father had warned Gordon, ‘Never be a farmer. You’ll have to do chores morning and night. You’ll never be able to take a vacation.’ And Gordon had taken that to heart,” making a career as a software consultant.

For 12 years after they married in 1984, Gordon and Jill lived in Elgin, raising four children. In 1996 they moved to California, where Gordon worked for a software firm and she worked for a payroll service.

Then a tumble down a long stairway injured Jill’s back. The pain made it impossible for her to sit and do desk work.

“I told Gordon that ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’ve got to do something more physical.’ ”

Driving through the countryside one day, she spotted a herd of alpacas. She researched the possibility of raising these boutique, wool-bearing animals herself. Some day, somewhere.

In 2001, back in Plato Center, aging Glenn also had an accident, breaking his ankle.

“I said to Gordon, ‘If you want to move back to Illinois and help your family, we can.’ Gordon said, ‘And then you could have your alpacas.’ ”

So in 2001, they moved to the old Muirhead farm, bringing with them the first of what would become 24 alpacas.

As Glenn recovered, Gordon went back to his software business and it became Jill who would work alongside Glenn until he died in 2004. She would feed, clean and clip the alpacas and convert their wool into felt hats and slippers. She’d help Glenn with his garden, and Glenn would fix the fences. They rented the grain fields to Bruce and Joy Krog to cultivate.

“After 50 years, I had thought I was too old to ever be a farmer. But it had become reality,” says the wannabe farm woman who’s finally living her dream. “And I will keep doing this until my body says no.”