10/24/2026
Farming Pioneer – Perry Humm
By Dave Briggs, BWAHS President
With the fall harvest season in full swing, it seemed to be an appropriate time to feature one of the farming community pioneers for this article. Agriculture certainly forms the backbone of our community and we want to take the time and tell the story of early agriculture in Gratiot County.
Perry Humm was born in Gratiot County outside of St. Louis, on the banks of the Pine River, in 1881. His parents had moved to Gratiot County from Seneca County, Ohio, while he was still in his mother’s womb. His was the oldest of seven children born to his parents, August and Sophia Humm and they moved to Gratiot County when land was selling for 50 cents an acre. Much of the land along the Pine River had been logged off, so his family purchased 40 acres on the corner of Bagley and Adams Roads and began farming. August was the third generation of farmers in the Humm family, and his son, Perry, took to it like a duck takes to water.
Perry managed to attend the Myers School through the fourth grade. His main interest was farming, not schoolwork, so his education was mostly hands-on instruction on farming techniques. He drove horses, hoed weeds, and did chores, and this was his education. When it was time to go out on his own, he tried some other jobs. He drove a gravel wagon for the county to help make the roads passable. He stood 6 ft. 6 inches at this time and worked for a while up north around the town of Mesick as a lumberjack. But his true love was farming and so he returned home, bought an 80-acre farm about a mile east of his father’s, and started earning his living by farming.
In 1906, he married Wilhelmina Schultheiss. Her family owned the farm adjacent to Perry’s and that union lasted for 57 years. They had two sons; Elmer and Lou, and those two boys also became farmers. Around 1929, an opportunity arose that Perry was looking for. He wanted to expand and he found a man that wanted to down-size, so they just traded farms. Perry moved to the Breckenridge area and William Leach took over Perry’s St. Louis farm. Perry’s new home was now a 140-acre farm at the corner of Wisner and Harrison Roads.
Perry grew the major cash crops of the day. They included sugar beets, corn, oats, wheat, navy beans, barley, and alfalfa. Now at this point, we must remember that he was farming with horses. The beets had to be lifted with a horse-drawn plow-type implement, picked up by hand, topped off with a beet knife, stacked, and then loaded into a horse-drawn wagon to take to the sugar beet company in St. Louis or the beet dump by the railroad tracks in Breckenridge. They could only do two wagon loads a day.
Despite this labor-intensive work, Perry continued to expand. In 1940, he added 75 acres by purchasing the Muscott farm, and in 1942 he added another 75 acres with another farm purchase. At one time or another, he owned over 500 acres of land during his lifetime.
As he aged, Elmer and Lou convinced him that he had to give up the horses and start using tractors and bigger equipment. He thought it was a huge jump to go from a two-row cultivator to a 4-row, but he did have to admit that it did work fine. He did have some trouble with the tractors, however, and one time drove one of their tractors into Beaver Creek while yelling “Whoa” in a loud voice but forgetting about the clutch and brake features on a tractor. He was still hoeing beans at the age of 90, but not really fast and he always had a 5-gallon bucket at the end of the row to rest on before starting back to the other end. He died at the age of 95, but the family tradition of farming lives on with the Humm family to this very day.
Stories like that of Perry Humm, are woven throughout the fabric of our community. There are many farming families in the area that can trace their roots back to a patriarch, like Perry Humm, who started the farming tradition that runs through their blood. The agricultural community is truly the foundation of this area and many people are employed due to agriculture. The family owned 80-acre farms are a thing of the past, but the farming tradition lives on in Gratiot County with the many farming families in our area.
