farmer. Born in Massachusetts to a William P. Adams was an unlikely
family with lineage stretching back to
John Adams and John Quincy Adams, W.P. Adams owned stock in Interna-
tional Harvester, Illinois Continental Bank & Trust Co. and Union Pacific
Railroad. After his marriage in Mas-
sachusetts in 1884, he and his bride, Nettie Moore, who had studied at the
New England Conservatory of Mu-
sic, moved to North Dakota to land owned by his father. They farmed in
North Dakota until 1893, when they
moved to Wheaton, Illinois, where Adams took an office job in Chicago.
In 1896, dissatisfied with office
work and missing farming, Adams(then 33) purchased nine sections of land in western Iowa near the town of
Odebolt. He reportedly paid $185,000
(about $5.2 million today) for the nine sections that he named Fairview
Farm. He later purchased an addition-al section, and the farm became better
known as the Adams Ranch.
Farming with mules
Farming 10 sections of land with
mules seems inconceivable today, yet the Adams family did it successfully
through the first half of the 20th cen-
tury, using about 240 mules at a time.Roger Rector, Ida Grove, Iowa, grew
up on the Adams ranch in the 1950s
when his dad, Ross, was the muleThe Mule Solution
IOWA MILLIONAIRE FARMED
10 SECTIONS WITH MULESW
hen we talk about farming with mules
decades ago, we tend to picture small
operations. An Iowa ranch established in
1896 is a noteworthy exception.By Darrel Wrider1
2
3