Grant-Kohrs Ranch Historic Resource Study/Historic Structures Report/Cultural Resources Statement

B. The Warren Hereford Ranch: 1937 to 1972

Cattle prices crept slowly upward as Con continued to improve the quality of his herds. And the cattle and horses continued to gain in national and especially in regional repute. During these busy years of the late 1930s he kept a crew of four to six cowboys (utility workers, really) who lived and ate in the bunkhouse and worked for $50 to $100 a month. [23] The ranch continued the careful management and measured growth approach that Warren had used since 1932.

By 1940, as the Conrad Kohrs Company manager at the ranch in Deer Lodge, Warren had constructed a functioning and profitable commercial cattle operation as well as a ranch stocked with purebred Herefords and Belgians. That year he purchased the home ranch from the Conrad Kohrs Company. (The ranch was part of the capital assets of the Conrad Kohrs Company and could not be given away—not even to Con Kohrs's grandson.) [24] The improvements Warren had made as manager now became costly to him, for they increased the value of the ranch considerably. The ranch he had lived at during summers as a boy, had worked at as a ranch hand, and then managed successfully and dynamically for eight years now was his— or would be once he paid off the debt he had signed for. He had inherited the great tradition and the spirit of Con Kohrs and John Bielenberg, but the ranch had come to him through hard work, heavy investment, and only after he had been able to show his ability to pay off the considerable figure the Conrad Kohrs Company charged him for the establishment. One small part of the ranch, however, had been a gift, a most gracious one. It had come in 1934 from his Grandmother Kohrs, a wedding gift for Con and his bride Nell, the cost of a new house on "71/100 acre of land." [25] Con and his men had built the cottage just east of the main ranch house, and across the railroad tracks. The design of the structure had come from a magazine featuring "a country home for apartment living." [26]

The upper ranch had been repossessed by the company in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 Con bought that too. So Warren had carved out a complex about half the size of the original home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg. Having started under entirely different circumstances, ones as unfavorable as Con Kohrs's had been favorable, this was not an insignificant accomplishment.

But things could not remain static, and the same year that Con signed on the dotted line for the ranch—now, incidentally the Warren Hereford Ranch, but still carrying the old CK brand—he sold the beautiful and renowned herd of Belgian draft horses. The satisfactions of raising them had to yield to practical economics as the nation began rising rapidly out of depression and into the bustling economy of the early war years. During the depression few American farmers had been able to buy new tractors, at least up until about 1937 or so, and the demand for horses remained steady. Warren even recalled, when questioned about the draft horse venture, "the horse business kind of saved us during the depression." [27] But America's farms became more and more mechanized during the last few years of the 1930s. The draft horse business tapered off then, so when the Holbert Horse Importing Company of Greely, Iowa. approached Con on the matter, he sold the entire herd. They soon became a prize of the Rockerfeller Estate. The Warren Ranch dropped both the horse operation and the dairy business as World War II brought rather austere days to the ranch.

While austere, the war years remained busy and productive. Although the government put ceilings on cattle prices, they levelled off high enough to warrant the effort but not high enough to produce significant profits. In a word, things remained static. Con fed steers and maintained the registered Hereford herd, which was supported, in part, by feed made possible by a new water pump that made formerly dry pastures productive. [28] Ninety to a hundred steers formed the commercial operation, which, in addition to bull sales of the registered Herefords and grain farming on the upper ranch and on the lands around the ranch house, kept the whole business going. But with little or no help available, there would be little or no expansion. Warren recalled the frustrations that faced stockgrowers and farmers during the war years, when "you couldn't develop very much. You couldn't get equipment. I had one F-20 Tractor that was down two years during the war for the lack of a thirty-five cent magneto cap." [29]

With the moderate profits during the war going toward the interest on the contract to purchase the ranch, the operational debt—normally a heavy burden on most modern ranchers—was a tremendous weight on Warren. In 1945, anticipating a drop in cattle prices (an erroneous assumption, he ruefully discovered), he sold the upper ranch and paid off a great part of this debt. [30] He now operated with freer capital but with smaller territory to carry cattle.

Quality continued to be as important as it had been before. To make things pay well, the herd's characteristic excellent quality would have to be maintained. It was, and continued to develop. Beginning in 1946, the Warren Hereford Ranch began to take bulls to consignment sales [30] throughout the northwest: to Dillon and Billings (the Tri-State Futurity), Montana, and annually to Ogden, Utah, among many other places. The Warren Ranch itself became the center of numerous sales as hundreds of buyers and spectators gathered in the tent erected on the south edge of the thoroughbred barn to watch and bid as the heifers and bulls came out, led by handlers, onto the fresh straw of the ring. The Warren Herefords gained and maintained national prominence.

The big barn west of the ranch house served for the sales until 1954, when Con built the large sales barn on the higher ground just east of the railroad tracks. Smaller sheds and attendant corrals had been built earlier (about 1950), and with the erection of the large barn, active operations at the old place ceased. By 1954, "we'd kind of abandoned the old place. The mud was so deep over there in the spring that you would have to take some buyer out to show him the bulls and would have to give him a pair of hip boots to wade out into the mud." [32]

The move to the newer buildings across the tracks spelled the end of the active history of the group of structures that had been known for seventy-two years as the Home Ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg, and that since 1940 had been the Warren Hereford Ranch. The cattle business was now carried on across the tracks, while these buildings remained in use for storage and for limited occupation by the Warren Hereford Ranch stock.

Con dispersed his registered herd in 1958 and entered the business of feeding and selling feeder cattle working a herd of about 350 animals. Then in 1963 he went into the yearling cattle business for another three years; following that, he worked raising cows and calves. [33]

By 1972 Warren's efforts to interest the National Park Service in obtaining the home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg at last bore fruit, and the buildings and the field immediately around the home ranch house, and that large structure and its furnishings, came into the possession of the government.

The Conrad Kohrs-John Bielenberg period at the home ranch had lasted fifty-six years, from 1866 to 1922, the year of Bielenberg's death. Then had come the ten-year caretaker period, followed by the Warren era, 1932 to 1972, with Warren as manager the first eight years and as owner during the succeeding thirty-two.

While Con Warren's tenure with the ranch continued the Kohrs family association, unbroken from 1866 to 1972, the imprint of Warren's style of ranching and of modern techniques lay heavily on it. Under Warren's ownership, the place had its own identity—highly individual and dynamic. In the continuities shared and in the differences between the home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg and the Warren Hereford Ranch lay the story of the open-range days of the late nineteenth century, of the transition that began following the hard winter of 1887 and the influx of homesteaders who followed close on its heels, and of the ever-developing changes of the twentieth century. Conrad Kohrs began the story in 1866; 106 years later Conrad Kohrs Warren closed it.

Introduction
Historic Resource Study | Cultural Resources Statement | Historic Structure Report