The Farm on the Wall

A simple poster was all it took to change the lives of a German immigrant and his family, sending them over 800 miles away from their home in Lockport, Illinois. In 1910, O.R. Winkler, an iron foundry worker, chanced upon a glowing advertisement for fertile farmland and ended up purchasing a half-section in southwest Kansas, the driest and least populated part of the state. Taking a leap of faith, he and his wife and sons loaded their belongings into a boxcar and traveled to Gray County where they began farming land that had never been plowed.