Everyone Laughed When a Little Girl Collected Broken Clay Tiles—Until They Saw Her Field

[00:00:00]The pile behind the Ostroski barn had been growing for a month before anyone thought to ask about it. Broken clay drain tile, short reddish cylinders of fired clay, most cracked, some snapped clean in half, a few crushed to shards.

[00:00:16]The kind of thing that turns up at the edge of any old field in that part of the country. Pieces of drainage systems laid by men dead before the current farmers were born. dug up by plows and pushed into fence rows and forgotten.

[00:00:29]Nobody wanted broken tile. You could not lay it. You could not sell it. It was too much trouble to haul off and too useless to keep. And Ren Ostroski was going around the whole township collecting it. She was 12. She pulled a garden wagon behind her bicycle and stopped at farm after farm in Filillmore County, Minnesota, and asked people if she could have the broken tile out of their fence rows and scrap piles. And people said, "Yes, take it." Because who would say no? And then they watched a 12-year-old girl load cracked drainage tile into a wagon and pedal off with it.

[00:01:04]And they did not know what to make of it at all. Ren did not explain herself. And here is the part that matters, which is that she could not have explained herself if she had tried because she did not fully understand it yet either. Some of them laughed. Not cruy. It was just a comic sight. a girl hauling broken sewer-l lookinging pipe down a gravel road like it was treasure. She had a hunch and a wet corner of a field and a stubbornness that had already survived being wrong twice.

[00:01:36]Two years later, when the whole county was drowning in the wetest spring in living memory, and the low fields turned to standing water, and the crops rotted in the ground, there was going to be one 12 acre bottom on the Ostroski place.

[00:01:49]the worst drained ground on the farm that came up green and dry and planted on time. If stories about persistence, learning the hard way, and the wisdom that comes only after failure means something to you, subscribe and join our farming family. And tell us in the comments where in the world you are watching from tonight. We would love to know how far this story has traveled.

[00:02:11]Filillmore County sits in the southeast corner of Minnesota in the driftless country. Rolling green farmland cut through with creeks and cold springs. It is good ground, some of the best in the state, deep and dark and rich. But rich low ground carries a particular curse, and the curse is water. The soil that grows the best corn is heavy soil, and heavy soil holds water. And in the low spots and old creek bottoms, the water has nowhere to go. It sits. It saturates the root zone. And a crop with its roots in waterlogged soil for more than a few days in spring will drown as surely as if you held it under because roots need air and saturated soil has none. The men who first broke that country understood the problem and they solved it with a patience that seems almost impossible now. They dug trenches by hand 3 and 4 ft deep across the wet fields, laid lines of clay tile in the bottom. Short hollow cylinders buted end to end and buried them. The tile carried the water away underground, drained the excess out of the soil and off to the creeks, and turned drowned, useless bottoms into the most productive ground on the farm. That was subsurface drainage, one of the great quiet revolutions of American agriculture. And by the time Renostki was born, most of it was 100 years old and failing. The old clay lines cracked, silted up, collapsed. Fields that had drained for generations began to go wet again as the systems beneath them died.

[00:03:42]And fixing them properly meant a contractor with a tile plow and money a small operation like the Ostroskis did not have. The Ostroskis farmed 300 acres, corn and beans, and a few hogs.

[00:03:55]Merrick Ostroski was a careful, worried man stretched thin by debt. His wife, Danka, worked in town, and their daughter Ren was the middle child, the one who was good at nothing in particular that anybody had noticed. A quiet, watchful girl who spent a lot of time in places on the farm where there was no reason to be. One of those places was the 12 acre bottom at the back of the property. The wetest ground they had a field Merrick half farmed and half gave up on every year because he never knew until too late whether it would be dry enough to plant. Ren had walked that field since she was small. She knew where the water stood longest. She knew the soft spots. And somewhere around the age of 11, she had gotten it into her head that she could fix it herself. And she had started trying. and she had failed and failed again before she ever collected a single piece of tile. Her first attempt when she was 11 was to dig an open ditch straight down the middle of the wet bottom by hand to carry the water off. She dug for 2 weeks. The ditch carried some water, but the side slumped in the wet soil. It filled with silt and it cut the field in two so nothing could cross it. And by midsummer, it was a muddy, collapsing scar that drained almost nothing and made the field worse. Merrick made her fill it back in. Her second attempt the next year was to dig down to the old tile line she knew ran through that field. The 100-year-old clay line her greatgrandfather had laid and clear it out. She dug down 4 ft in three different spots, and in every spot, the tile was crushed or silted solid or simply gone. Collapsed into the soil.

[00:05:37]finished. There was nothing to clear.

[00:05:39]The old system was dead. She had spent a month of evenings digging holes to learn that. That was the second failure, and it was the one that taught her, though not in the way she wanted, because down in those holes, looking at the broken tile her greatgrandfather had laid. Ren understood two things at once. The first was that the principle worked. That field had once drained well for decades because of buried clay tile and the evidence was right there in the wall of the hole. An old outlet where water still even now seeped weakly out of a broken tile end. The second was that she was never going to afford new tile and that the county was full of the broken old stuff lying in every fence row for free. She did not have a theory yet, only those two facts sitting next to each other and a whole winter to look at them. Here is what she worked out slowly by trial and error over the following year with no one teaching her because the thing she was about to do was not quite the way anyone did it on purpose.

[00:06:42]Water in saturated soil will move toward any opening that offers it an easier path. A buried drainage line works because it is a hollow channel sitting lower than the surrounding water table.

[00:06:52]So water flows into it and runs away downhill. Ren could not build the proper version with sound tile laid end to end at a steady grade. She had broken tile, no two pieces alike, cracked and snapped and crushed. But broken tile has one thing going for it that even a contractor cannot easily buy. It is full of gaps. A trench filled with a jumble of broken clay tile and coarse rock has enormous open space between the pieces.

[00:07:18]thousands of little voids and channels and water in saturated soil will find its way into all of them and run through them downhill exactly the way it runs through a proper tile line. It is crudder. It will silt up faster. It is not what anyone would choose if they had money. But laid in the bottom of a trench cut to a steady downhill grade on the same lines the old dead system had followed, a channel of broken tile and rock will drain a wet field. It is one of the oldest forms of subsurface drainage there is older than manufactured tile, a rubble drain, a thing people built for centuries out of whatever broken stone they had. Ren Ostroski reinvented it from scratch at 12 because she could not afford anything better and would not give up. The catastrophe came in the doing of it. She spent that whole summer and fall digging. Not one ditch this time, but a branching system. A main trench down the low center of the bottom to a good outlet at the creek and feeder trenches angling into it from the wet spots. All cut to a careful downhill grade. She checked and rechecked with a line level she had made herself. Into the bottom of every trench she laid a channel of broken tile and rock, and then the part she had learned the hard way from the silt. She covered the tile with straw and inverted sod before backfilling so the soil would not immediately wash down into the voids and clog them. It was enormous work. Hundreds of feet of trench 4 ft deep by hand over months in November with most of it done and only the final connection to the creek left to dig. The bank of the main trench gave way in a heavy rain, and the whole lower end flooded and collapsed. Weeks of work caved in. Broken tile and rock and mud slumped into a ruined pit, and the water she had meant to carry away pulled in the wreckage. Ren stood at the edge of that collapsed outlet in the cold November rain, and came very close to being done for good. Nobody had made her do any of it. There was no enemy, no neighbor sabotaging her, no father forbidding it. There was only the work and the failure of the work and her own doubt which by now was considerable because she was 12 and she had failed three times at the same field and the whole township thought she was the girl who hauled broken tile for no reason.

[00:09:41]Nothing was stopping her from quitting except herself.

[00:09:45]She rebuilt the outlet. She dug it back wider and armored the bank where it met the creek with the biggest broken tile and rock she had. and she made the final connection in the last week before the ground froze.

[00:09:59]Then winter closed over the field, and she could not know all through those frozen months whether any of it would work, or whether she had spent a year of her life digging trenches for nothing.

[00:10:09]The wet spring came 2 years after she had collected her first wagon load of tile. It came down on Filillmore County without mercy, rain on snow melt on rain, the wetest spring anyone that side of 90 could remember. The creeks ran brown and over their banks. The low fields across the county turned to sheets of standing water, and the water sat, and planting season came and went with half the bottom ground in the township, too wet to hold a tractor. Men who got their corn in watched it yellow and drowned. Week after week, the bottoms did not dry. And the 12 acre bottom at the back of the Ostroski place, the worst ground on the farm, the field that drowned in an ordinary year, dried out and greened up and was planted on time. The water went into the ground and found the channels of broken tile and rock 4 ft down and ran out along them downhill to the creek and away exactly as it had a 100 years before through her great grandfather's tile exactly as she had worked out alone in the bottom of a muddy hole. The field that should have been first to drown was the only low field in view that stayed dry enough to farm. Merrick Ostroski walked that field in the wet spring and did not understand it at first because he had never entirely registered what his daughter had spent two years doing at the back of the farm. He saw his drowned neighbors in his own drowned bottoms and then the one field that should have been worst of all coming up green and even. And he went and found Red and she took him out and showed him the outlet at the creek. Clear water running steadily out of the ground into the stream even now. and she explained the whole thing, the branching trenches and the broken tile and the grade and the straw. And Mor listened to his 12-year-old daughter explain a drainage system she had invented out of garbage and did not say a word for a long time.

[00:12:02]The person who delivered the verdict, though, was not Marik. It was the county drainage engineer. His name was Halver Brandt, and he came out that spring because Morik, half in disbelief, had called the county to ask whether what his daughter built was allowed, whether it was legal, whether it was even real.

[00:12:20]Grant, who had 30 years of tile and ditches behind him, and had seen everything, walked that field with a probe, and traced Ren's trenches, and looked at the outlet running clear water in the middle of the wetest spring on record. And he asked the girl how she had known to cover the tile with straw before backfilling. Ren told him she had not known. She told him she had learned it from watching her first attempt silt up and fail. Palver Brandt was quiet a while. Then he told her in front of her father that she had built a rubble drain, that it had a name and a history older than the manufactured tile the whole country ran on, and that most trained men in his own profession had never laid one by hand in their lives.

[00:13:01]He said she had reinvented alone and out of a scrap pile, a thing people had spent 2,000 years perfecting. Then the county did what counties do, which is nothing dramatic. Brandt wrote it up in a soil and water district newsletter. A few neighbors came and looked. One or two of the poorer ones went home and started collecting broken tile out of their own fence rows, but Ran Ostroski did not stay to see whether the county adopted it. She grew up and she left.

[00:13:30]There was not enough in 300 deadbted acres for all the children and she was not the one meant to inherit it and she had never been the one anybody planned the farm around. She went to the university and then further and she became in the end a drainage and water engineer herself which surprised no one who knew what she had done at 12. And she did her work in other places on other people's land far from Filillmore County. The 12 acre bottom kept draining. It drained after she left the way it had drained for her, quietly underground through a channel of broken tile a girl had laid by hand. Merrick farmed it dry the rest of his working life and never had to explain why the worst ground on the place was somehow the most reliable. He knew that was enough. When he grew too old to farm and the place passed to Ren's younger brother, Merrick did one thing before he handed it over. He took his son out to the back bottom to the outlet at the creek and he put into the boy's hand a single piece of broken clay tile, a cracked reddish cylinder he had kept on the window sill in the machine shed for 30 years. One piece out of the thousands his sister had hauled down the gravel roads in a garden wagon while the whole township laughed. He told his son to keep it, to remember what it was, and to never fill in his sister's trenches no matter what anyone told him. Then he closed the boy's fingers around it and did not say anything else. Have you ever failed at something two or three times before it finally worked? Tell us in the comments. We read every single one. And if this story meant something to you, subscribe and let us know where you are watching from