When Horses Pulled the Plow: Life of a Wisconsin Farm Boy, 1910-1929

In 1910, when Olaf F. Larson was born to tenant livestock and tobacco farmers in Rock County, Wisconsin, the original barn still stood on the property. It was filled with artifacts of an earlier time—an ox yoke, a grain cradle, a scythe used to cut hay by hand. But Larson came of age in a brave new world of modern inventions—tractors, trucks, combines, airplanes—that would change farming and rural life forever.

When Horses Pulled the Plow is Larson’s account of that rural life in the early...