The Buck Stops Here

Emma Buck, who lived in a 70-acre farm that still had a working blacksmith shop, smokehouse, butchering shed and an outdoor bake oven, died at the age of 100. Still pumping her own water, using an outhouse until 2 days before she died, and pulling out her own teeth rather than see a dentist, Buck provided a rare living glimpse into how shitty frontier life was a century ago. In all seriousness, her approach to life is fascinating, and the full New York Times obit is below.

By Patricia Leigh Brown

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Emma Buck, who ran a pre-Civil War-era family farm in Illinois that remained virtually unchanged into the 21st century, died of breast cancer on June 5 on the sleigh bed with handmade ticking she had slept in for 98 years, in the log cabin built by her great-uncle, a German immigrant, in 1849.

She was 100 or 101, said Annie Rieken, a close friend and director of the Heritage Foundation of Monroe County, in southwestern Illinois.

The 70-acre farm, a sort of rural Smithsonian, was named one of the state's 10 most endangered sites in 1998 by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois.

Ms. Buck, who had pulled the last of her own teeth some years ago, lived there without running water, drawing her water from a well. Until two days before she died, she walked to the outhouse, one of many structures on the farm.

It also has a blacksmith's shop, a smokehouse, a butchering shed, a threshing barn and a rare outdoor bake oven, which was restored by conservators in 1999 with sand and mud from the nearby Mississippi River and wood cut by Ms. Buck with a century-old cross-saw.

Ms. Buck sharpened scythes on a foot-operated grinding wheel well into her 90s. The slightly persnickety Ms. Buck, who spoke with a thick German accent, always wore a skirt as she worked.

"Emma could be blunt and coarse and uncouth by Emily Post standards," Rieken said. "But there was a total authenticity about her."

To spend time with Ms. Buck was to feel the evocative power of a place that has all but vanished from the American landscape, a fragile holdover where it was possible to encounter wooden butter churns, hobnail boots, copper kettles for making sausage and apple butter and hoops for a Conestoga wagon in the rafters.

While contemporaries embraced tractors and other modern machinery, the Buck family stuck to the old ways, largely out of conservatism and stubborn resolve. The farm was settled by Ms. Buck's maternal great-grandparents, Christian and Christina Henke, German immigrants who came by boat from New Orleans and settled in western Illinois, about 35 miles downriver from St. Louis, in 1841.

As was the custom among German families in the area, Emma and her sister Anna, who died in 1992, worked side by side with their father, Fred, who died in 1966. A brother, Albert, died in 1999.

"The Buck farmstead is a rare glimpse into the past," said Mike Jackson, chief architect with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. "It is an extremely well-preserved place, maintained by a woman who lived a 19th-century life throughout the 20th century. Its significance is far greater than its humble origins."

In 1999, Ms. Buck deeded the property to Ahne Road Farms Inc., a nonprofit foundation in nearby Waterloo created to preserve the farm as a historic site and interpretive center. The goal is to inventory the farm's historic buildings and to lay the groundwork, through grants or other funds, for long-term stewardship.

Ms. Buck, who never married and left no surviving family members, was buried June 6, in the old-fashioned way: by friends and neighbors who lowered her pine coffin into the ground in a corner of a cornfield, the stalks waist high.

She had left clear instructions. "She said she didn't want an open casket," Rieken said. "She said, 'If people couldn't visit me alive, they have no business visiting me as a dirty old dead woman.' "