Copyright
WiDo Publishing
Salt Lake City, Utah
Farm Girl Copyright © 2007 by Karen Jones Gowen and WiDo Publishing
Cover photo as well as most of the additional black and white photographs in this text are by Julia Marker.
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Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Foreword
Introduction
THE HOMESTEADERS
Chapter One: The Walstads
Chapter Two: The Markers
LUCILLE MARKER, GRANDDAUGHTER OF HOMESTEADERS
Chapter Three: The New Farm
Chapter Four: Mother and Me
Chapter Five: My Pretty Cousin Catherine
Chapter Six: The Best Dad in Nebraska
Chapter Seven: The New Virginia Community
Chapter Eight: The Little Country School
Chapter Nine: Our Cather Connections
Chapter Ten: The Big City
Chapter Eleven: The Stock Market Crash
Chapter Twelve: A Sad Tale
Chapter Thirteen: Dust Bowl Days
Chapter Fourteen: Seven-Year Drought
Appendix A: Chapter Endnotes by Lucille Marker Jones
Appendix B: The Writings of Julia Walstad
Appendix C: Additional Photographs
“Home is where your story begins.”
(From a plaque hanging in my house, author unknown)
Foreword
I want to express my appreciation to my daughter, Karen Gowen, for her interest in my early life and for her skill and effort in writing this book. The part about my life was done entirely by telephone conversations over a period of several weeks. She, in Salt Lake City, would ask me a question to get my memory started; then she wrote on her computer what I, in Aitkin, Minnesota, told her over the telephone. It was a very enjoyable process as she encouraged me to recall happenings I hadn’t thought about for years.
It has made me realize more fully how drastically times have changed for children growing up today. Perhaps this will serve a purpose in helping my grandchildren and others understand history a little better as they realize how very different conditions were for my childhood on a Nebraska farm in the 1920’s and 1930’s than what they experience now. Then, too, how much progress and improvement there was in 1920’s farm life compared to the time of my mother’s childhood in a sod house on a prairie homestead in the 1880’s. After all, history is just the story of people’s lives.
To me, my life has been very ordinary and typical of others in our community of that era. It is rather humbling to think that anyone other than family would find much interest in my experiences. Nevertheless, I am thankful to Karen for believing that these memories are worth saving.
—Lucille Marker Jones
Introduction
Since the nearest neighbors lived two miles away, Grandma didn’t keep blinds at her windows. The spare bedroom faced east, and a flood of morning sunlight woke me much earlier than I was accustomed. But I didn’t mind because it felt so pleasant to lounge in the high old-fashioned bed and remember where I was.
How quiet and peaceful it seemed here without the early traffic noises of city people rushing to work. Instead, I heard the gentle low of cows in the field, the occasional crow of a rooster, and old Pet whinnying for her breakfast. I snuggled up to the great fluffy pillow and lay still, watching a mild breeze play with the yellowed lace curtains—back and forth, in and out—until I had nearly hypnotized myself.
Soon the clattering of pans in the kitchen downstairs warned me that Grandma had started breakfast, and I’d better get up if I wanted my eggs hot and my bacon crisp. The faded linoleum, patterned with large pink roses on a beige background, felt smooth on my feet as I climbed out of bed. I quickly pulled on my shorts and top. The appetizing aroma of frying bacon was beginning to prevail over the usual musty smell of the house.
After breakfast I ran outside into the summer sunshine to explore the farm and see if everything was the same as last year. Grandma’s two-story frame house seemed as grey and bent with age as she was. Tall bushy pines and spreading cottonwood trees crowded the sides. Her front yard was like a cool, shady forest, a perfect place to escape from the hot summer winds that blow relentlessly across the Nebraska plains.
I sat on the porch steps, drinking in the tangy pine scent that always reminded me of camping in the Rocky Mountains. A magpie chattered angrily from its perch on the low branch of a cottonwood tree. These brazen birds frightened me because Grandma had said they once swooped down on one of the farm cats and pecked its eyes out. I decided to go around back.
Outside the back door there struggled a patch of heat-singed, windblown grass that gradually thinned out into the well-worn dirt road that led to the barn. As I ran, my feet kicked up dusty smoke signals behind me.
I looked out over the pasture toward the pond. The green meadow rolled forward in dips and hollows and hills just right for running. The cow pond was barely visible from where I stood. It looked like a narrow slit of mirror set in the ground. I knew that between here and there were many inviting patches of buffalo grass, a tender grass that grows short and dense and feels softer on bare feet than the best carpet.
Such are my memories of the farm where my mother was raised and where I spent many summers. The house, barn and outbuildings are gone now. Even the great trees, planted and nurtured so carefully by her father John Marker, have been cut down to make room for crops. A person traveling that road today would see unbroken fields of corn growing where the farmhouse once stood. There would be no clue to the passer-by that here once stood a home, a farmstead, the hub of a hard-working Nebraska farm family.
Yet I can visit that place any time I wish by calling up rich and vivid mind pictures of my summers there. These memories are part of my heritage, the fabric of my personality, and as real to me as the land itself. I can remember the summer visits exploring the farm, riding Pet, the gentle old horse, to the New Virginia Church and back; flying down a hilly dirt road in a little red wagon, then making the steep climb back up to have another turn. In the winter, my sisters and I ice-skated on the pond while our parents built a fire next to the banks for us to warm up and roast hot dogs. We didn’t dare let Grandma Marker know about the bonfire, because she was deathly afraid of prairie fires blazing out of control, even in the winter with snow on the ground.
Still, as I grow older, my childhood memories begin to fade and I yearn to somehow revisit the Marker home. For many years, I longed to write a book about my mother’s childhood on the farm, to somehow capture the reality of it in print. The few attempts I made were dismal failures, as I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the
daily life on a 1920 Nebraska farmstead.
Then while taking a folklore class at Brigham Young University, I learned how to interview and collect information for a folklore study. For one assignment, I interviewed Mother to get her memories of the Dust Bowl days in Nebraska. A folklore study differs from most writing, in that the tale is told in the voice of the individual telling the story, not by the collector. Finally I understood that the story I had always wanted to write must be told in her voice, not mine. Farm Girl is written by me as folklore collector rather than by me as author.
I spent many hours collecting the information, typing as Mother opened up her very extensive memory bank. What an exciting endeavor! Finally I was getting the authentic account of the Marker farm, her childhood, the New Virginia community and country school, and a glimpse into her high school years in Lincoln. Even the many aunts, uncles and cousins eventually got straight in my mind and became real characters. Before this, they were unknown, distant relatives who came up now and then in her conversation. Except for Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ford, who were part of our childhood like Grandma Marker and the old farm itself. Best of all, through collecting these memories, I became acquainted with my grandfather John Marker, who died when I was a toddler.
The advantage to this book being told by Mother rather than written by her, is that when she recalls her early years, she talks like Lucille Marker the Nebraska farm girl; but when she writes, it is Mrs. Jones, the English teacher. Despite the opinion of her senior English teacher, Miss Elsie Cather, my mother is a wonderful writer who clearly and concisely creates a picture with words. However, I wanted her memoir in her true voice as a farm girl rather than that of a highly-educated English teacher. To accomplish this, it was essential that she tell her story rather than write it.
A disadvantage of the telling is that it doesn’t come out in a nice, readable narrative form; one’s memories don’t usually organize themselves like that. It required many more hours of editing and arranging to create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And once I was familiar with her voice, I could occasionally depart from my role as collector and take some license as an author, adding here and there to fill in story gaps, yet maintaining the voice of the farm girl, Lucille Marker.
The Endnotes after the text are the dates, facts and additional information Mother provided that might be interesting to a reader but couldn’t fit into the narrative.
Julia Marker, Lucille’s mother, was a gifted, self-taught artist and writer, evoking emotion and creating an image with words as effectively as she did with brush and canvas. She had been painting for many years when, in 1948, she decided to try writing. She saw how rapidly American life was changing post-World War II, and she wanted to record the story of the Nebraska homesteader as she remembered it.
Julia Marker’s written memories and stories of her childhood on the homestead in the 1890’s and her life as a farm wife are included in Appendix B, as well as photos of several of her remaining paintings. The entry about the early homesteaders is written from stories told to her by her father Hans Walstad, who came to Nebraska in 1870.
Many thanks to the Wido Publishing team for their extensive skills in printing, designing and editing; and for their willingness to contribute their time and talents to help create this book.
—Karen Jones Gowen
February, 2007
THE HOMESTEADERS
Oil painting of a sod house by Julia Marker
Hans Walstad
Chapter One:
The Walstads
My grandfather Hans Walstad lived alone in a dugout near Farmer’s Creek, back when cottonwood, elm and ash trees crowded the banks. Lots of fruit grew near that creek—grapes, plums, chokecherries, berries. Indians would come by his dugout and want tobacco and sugar, and he’d trade with them for buffalo meat and furs. Somehow they communicated, by signs I suppose, because he spoke only Norwegian. He was one of the first settlers to stake a claim in this part of Nebraska.
Hans would have stayed forever as a single man in his dugout because the girl he had loved back in Norway had married another man. Her name was Sofie Maren Stav, and she chose to marry Andre Pederson rather than him. So Hans decided to come to America and homestead in western Nebraska and live by himself in this dugout. He was happy here and had everything he needed. Soon his parents, one brother and three sisters came to the area and settled nearby, so he wasn’t at all lonely.
His parents, Jakob and Karen Walstad, left Norway when Karen was 72 and Jakob 67, to be with their children in America. The older couple wanted a log house like they had in Norway rather than a sod house, so they cut logs from the trees along Farmer’s Creek and built a house across the draw from Hans.
The young woman, Sofie, who Hans had loved, and her husband Andre Pederson, had been neighbors to the Walstads back in Norway. So many of their friends and neighbors had left for America, and Sofie and Andre decided to come as well. They came in 1865 and settled in Chicago, where Andre found work in an iron mill.
He would carry the hot molten iron in pails and not dare set it down or it would burn through the wooden floor. Two men would carry a large kettle between them, and sometimes their clothes caught fire when they poured the hot metal into the molds. Hundreds of people were employed in this foundry. Andre worked there from 1866 to 1870, when he contracted typhoid fever and died, leaving Sofie with their young son Anton.
Sofie worked as a tailor making men’s suits, only missing one day of work, the day her husband died. She was in Chicago when the great fire started in 1872. She lived in an apartment house several blocks from the river. She had all her belongings packed and ready to move out, but the fire didn’t cross the river.
That night people paraded up and down the streets, some in their night clothes carrying a single picture, or a looking glass. Half-crazed by fear of the fire, they just picked up anything and left their homes. Some carried bundles. No one knew where to go. The fire had destroyed their homes. The people who were fortunate enough to have their homes spared had to share them with the less fortunate. Two girls lived with Sofie for several years after the fire.
One summer in the early 1870’s, before the Great Chicago Fire, it was prophesied that the world would come to an end. People were supposed to meet Jesus in the park at a certain time and should be dressed all in white. It was on a hot, sultry afternoon, clouds were gathering and at the hour Jesus was to be there a rainstorm appeared with great force. Those who had not gone to the park were sure this was the end of the world.
Sofie had not gone, and she tried to comfort people, saying, “This is just a rainstorm, not the end of the world.”
Despite all this, Sofie liked living in Chicago and did well at her work, being a talented and capable seamstress. She and Anton lived for several more years in their apartment on 54 West Erie Street. The boy stayed with her when she worked, until he started school. After school, he’d be alone, buying food for dinner with the money his mother left for him on the table. She worried about him home alone, especially after he fell and broke his arm, and she worried that the city wouldn’t be a good environment for a boy to grow up without a father.
The summer of 1877, when Anton was eleven, Sofie left for the West, thinking the country would be a better place to bring up her son. She had written to Karen and Jakob Walstad, her former neighbors from Norway, and they invited her and Anton to stay with them out in Nebraska. She and Anton rode the train out with a girl she knew from Chicago. When they reached Hastings, they had to ride the rest of the way with the mail carrier, in the mail wagon.
The mail carrier told her, “Wherever you see smoke coming through the bank is where people live in a dugout.”
Hans Walstad lived right across the draw from Jakob and Karen, and now here was the girl he had loved in Norway so many years earlier living at the log house with his parents. They began to keep company again and soon were married.
Hans still lived in his dugout, a cave-like home that was made b
y digging out the earth in a hill, a bank or raised area on the prairie. These dugouts could be quite comfortable, with a front door and even glass in the windows. Early settlers usually lived first in a dugout, then would build a sod house, and then a frame house when they were able.
His new wife didn’t like the dugout, not wanting to live underground like a prairie dog, so she talked Hans into building a sod house. He was so happy to at last have Sofie as his wife, he would do whatever he could to please her. They worked together building the sod house.
The settlers used sod for their houses as trees were not so plentiful. The land had never been tilled, and the many roots from the prairie grass held the soil together. Homesteaders would cut a slab of sod one foot by three feet, laying three of them down like bricks with one foot on the outside and the other end on the inside. The next layer they’d lay the opposite direction with the three foot end out and the one foot in. This made the walls three feet thick, making them very warm in winter and cool in summer. The window sills were so wide that children could sit on them. Some were cemented on the outside and plastered on the inside, so if you didn’t know it was a sod house, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see the dirt.
Hans and Sofie raised Anton and had two daughters, Mathilde, the older daughter, and then Julia, born in 1882, who became my mother.
One day in 1896, when my mother was about fourteen, the family’s sod house was completely destroyed by a tornado. Here’s how it happened. They saw a tornado coming and ran to the storm cave. When it was over, they came out and saw one of their cows upside down on the ground, completely wrapped in twine.
Hans said to his younger daughter, “Go to the sod house and get me a knife.”
Julia replied, “There isn’t anything left there.” The tornado had taken the sod house, leaving only part of the walls.
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