The Search For Homestead Stories

 

Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 10:11 AM

Subject: Re: Homesteads

 

THE RAVEN is full of homestead stories, but one such issue that comes to mind is one of the most popular issues because it contained two homestead stories, one from Marshall County and one from Roseau County. 

Volume 8 Issue 1

 

From Marshall County comes

 The Martin & Anna Olafson Story, by Steven G. Reynolds

 

The story is about family whose homestead log cabin stands NW of Grygla, one that I had taken photos of years before we published its story. One of our subscribers told me of someone who would know all about it as the gentleman's wife had been born in that cabin and so could provide much information. 

 

Thinking about that era, I could imagine:

 

   " Wolves howl eerily in the distance. Below the star-studded black sky, wide eyes look nervously about in the immediate darkness of the new land. The cattle's huge nostrils inhale the piercing cold of the bleak northern landscape through glistening broad wet noses. Ears pivot toward the shadows beyond. Heavy cloven hooves settle, one beside the other on the frozen pockmarked soil of the crude corral; irregularly patterned hides, around swollen bellies white with frost, collide reassuringly against another. A falling star streaks across the sky unnoticed..." 

   The Roseau County story is about "Thor and Selma Folling were Sandridge Settlers"... The late Ray Geroy gave us written permission to use his book, "The Sandridge Settlers," about the families who homesteaded in Beltrami Forest, "on the sandridge" and who later were moved and relocated elsewhere as the land was unfit for farming. 

 

   Also included in the story is a poem of some length titled, "To A Sandridge Settler," by Helen Holcomb, an excellent visual. Helen became a subscriber, as well as a good friend. We've used one or two more of her poems since then. She was a good writer. 

Volume 9 Issue 1 

 

(A Roseau County Homestead) Great images. Postcards dating from 1911-1945."Homestead Walk Through Time" by Steven G. Reynolds

   " ... A one room shack stood south of the mobile home, it had been used for storage in later years although by the looks of things someone had lived in it as there was a fuel oil stove in it and a bed or two. The only light in it came from the sun through a broken window. Steadily dripping through pin-hole streams of light from the attic darkness, water has seeped, pooled, soaked and swollen the old ceiling plaster ... "

   " Near a stack of cardboard boxes crumpling under the weight of many old shoes and boots, an overturned swivel chair crushed the contents of another, spilling them across the floor. There laid checkbook blanks and registers, bank statements dating back 23 years, creamery reports of 1926, elevator sample and weight sheets, moisture impregnated paperback bricks of cowboy westerns, detective stories, mysteries, thrillers, and epic war novellas priced at twenty-five cents each..."

" ...A talcum-like feel of fine dust, the spore of mold, coats the paper layered page upon page. Colored inks bleed along broken and torn edges and stain one another in soft pastel rainbows of folded lines and numbers..."

   A deeper look into the archives...

Volume 2 issue 12 (back in the day we were a monthly...)

  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

"A Cold And Wintry Land," by Joe McDonnell 

(A Roseau County story)

   "When he saw how the snow capped the fenceposts, he knew this was good country for cattle,' Sylvia says, "The wind in South Dakota never lets snow build up on the fence posts."

Olaf bought an abandoned homestead nine miles south of Wannaska, and two miles east of Highway 89. "There was nothing there but the land,' Sylvia says, "No house, no well, no fences, nothing but mosquitoes ..."

   "Inside our house there was just one room, divided with blankets. there was just a single wall between us and the cold. No insulation. My mother tacked up cardboard from grocery store boxes on the walls inside ..."

   There's another story about a neighbor who nearly froze to death coming home from Stephen, Minnesota driving a team and bobsled...

 

   So, we have some stories. I know a few other writers who may have some stories for your project. 

Steve