This aerial view of the Jones Family Farm was taken in 1987. This is actually the second location of the Jones Family Farm as it was originally located across the field from this present location. The first one was settled in 1874 by Henry Jones. Later this site was added and became the main farmstead for the Jones family.

This year there is just one farm in Faribault County that is being celebrated as being a 2024 Sesquicentennial Farm.

That farm is currently owned by the Eldon Jones Family Share Trust. It has been in the Jones family for 150 years.

“The family farm is located in Section 19 of Delavan Township,” says Linda Jones, who, along with her husband Tom, are the trustees of the trust. “The current farmstead is across a field from where the original homestead was located.”

That original homesteader was Henry Jones, who came to the land and took ownership of it in 1874.

“Family lore says that he was a coal miner in Wales and was looking for a better life in the United States,” Linda Jones says.

He first came to Michigan with his wife, Catherine. They had two children, twins, John and Mary.

After his wife died, Henry Jones moved to Illinois and married Ellen White there in 1853. They had four sons; Oliver, Charles, Edward and Walter.

In the spring of 1874 they moved to Minnesota and on Sept. 9, 1874, Henry and Ellen purchased 40 acres in Delavan Township for $33.75 per acre.

“When they moved to Minnesota they brought their children Mary, Oliver, Edward and Walter with them,” Linda Jones explains. “We don’t know what happened to John, and Charles had died in Illinois.”

On June 12, 1890, Henry and Ellen Jones sold the farm to their son, Oliver, and his wife Marion McKay Jones. Their other sons had moved to California and Henry and Ellen moved there as well.

Henry Jones died in 1899 and Ellen Jones died in 1915.

Oliver Jones bought another 40 acres in Section 19 of Delavan Township from his father-in-law for $35 per acre.

Oliver and Marion Jones raised three children on the farm; George Jones (who never married), Harry Jones and Effie Jones Wittmer. They were married for over 60 years until Oliver died in September of 1939.

Their son Harry Jones married Metta Crays on March 12, 1908. They purchased the Jones family farm in 1944.

“At some point adjoining land in Section 18 of Delavan Township was purchased and a new building site was established,” Linda Jones relates. “That is where Harry and Metta lived, with Harry’s mother and brother living on the original farm site, just across the field.”

Harry and Metta had three children; Edmund, Marion Louise and Eldon.

Edmund married Mildred Tjaden in August 1939 and they moved to a farm west of Blue Earth. They had four children.

Marion Louise married Maurice (Pudge) Bottomley and they lived on a farm adjoining the original Jones farm to the south. They had two daughters.

Eldon married Opal Tjaden, a sister to his brother Edmund’s wife, Mildred, on May 27, 1942. They moved onto the second farm site on the property and raised their three sons there – Douglas, Steven and Tom.

Eldon inherited the farm from his father, Harry, in 1963.

“Eldon continued to live on this farm, still crawling in and out of the combine and tractors until he moved into Parker Oaks in Winnebago in the fall of 2016,” Linda Jones relates. “His wife, Opal had moved in there earlier.”

Eldon Jones died a year later, in May of 2017, still wanting to keep farming, his family says. Opal passed away in June of 2018.

Eldon and Opal’s oldest son, Douglas, continues to live on the Jones family farm.

Their son Steven and wife Nancy, live on a farm a few miles to the west of the family farm site. They have two daughters, Sheila Jones Van Reisen and her husband, Matt, and son Logan and daughter Aliesha, who live in Park Rapids, and Shari Jones Walker and her husband, Joshua, and two daughters, Liberty and Brytain who live in Winnebago.

Eldon and Opal’s son Tom and wife Linda live on a farm a few miles to the east, north of Delavan. They have three children: daughter Erin Ann Jones lives in Big Lake; son Keith, and his wife Erin Lynn Jones, and children Dylan, Avery and Evan, live in Hudson, Wisconsin; son Clint lives on a farm to the south of the original Jones family farm. He has three sons, Will, Preston and Wyatt.

There is not much left on the old, original Jones family farmsite.

“The only structure left on the place is an old granary building,” says Tom Jones. “Everything else is gone.”

Well, not quite. One of the original buildings is still in good shape and being used, it is just not in the same place.

That building is a barn that was originally built on the old homestead.

“In approximately 1955 the old barn from the original farm site was moved across the fields to the second farm site,” Linda Jones relates. That would be the farmstead where Harry and Metta lived, then Eldon and Opal, and now Douglas Jones lives.

But, the barn is no longer there. In June of 2021 that old barn was moved from the Jones family farm to the farm where Clint Jones lives.

Clint completely restored the barn and uses it to raise cattle in it. His sons, who tend to the cattle, are the seventh generation of Jones’s to work in that barn.

A barn with a 150 years worth of history inside.

That old granary, the last remaining structure on the original home place, has some history to it, as well.

“My grandpa (Eldon) remembered when that was built and there was a sort of a barn-raising party there,” Clint Jones says. “There was this cartoonist at the party, and he drew some cartoons on the walls, my grandpa said.”

Clint said he had to go look and says years and years of having grain inside have faded the cartoons so they are very hard to see.

Clint also found an old, original windmill on the land, and he has saved some of the blades and has them in his house on display. His other family members also have some of the blades.

While there have been quite a few changes to the Jones family farm operation over the last 150 years, there are still a few things that have remained unchanged.

While crops today are mainly corn and soybeans, Tom Jones recalls when the soybeans were just harvested as silage.

“And then there was that period when they were planting sugar beets,” he adds. “That did not work out well.”

There have been cattle and hogs on the farm, as well as other livestock over the years. Clint remembers his grandfather having registered black Angus cattle.

Faribault County’s only Sesquicentennial Farm for 2024 almost did not get registered in time, so there might have been none this year.

“Clint was looking at some history and we saw the year was 1874 when the farm first was homesteaded and I realized that was 150 years ago,” Linda Jones says. “So I looked up how to become a Sesquicentennial Farm and I saw the deadline to enter your farm was only a few days away.”

They did make the deadline just in time, and the rest, as they say, is history. About 150 years of Jones family farm history, to be exact.