I grew up on a farm west of town, just two miles out on Highway 19, across the highway from where the airport used to be and the city’s gun club. Oh, we never made our sole living there, Dad was a janitor at Central High School and mom worked at J.C. Pennys in Devils Lake. Ours was a “subsistence farm” where we raised our own food – maybe a couple cows for milking, a calf raised for beef, chickens, turkeys, pigs – not all at the same time, however.
Both of my parents were from long lines of farmers, however. Mom was a full-blooded Scandinavian and the Moen home place, just past Six Mile Bay west of town, has been in the family for well over 100 years. It was homesteaded by my grandfather, Matius Moen in the 1800s. He was 42 years old when he married 19 year old Signe Elgin from the Sheyenne River valley near Hamar.
Dad’s parents, Norwegian Albert Oleson and Irish Ella McNamara Oleson, had a dairy farm near Churches Ferry at one time. According to family lore, their home was completely destroyed by a tornado when my dad was about 9 years old, that would have been about 1929. The story goes that as the Olesons were hunkered down in their dirt-sided basement, used mainly as a root cellar and to store preserves, they could hear the house going, so Grandpa shoved young Leland and his sister, Lorraine, into a steel cabinet that had previously held canned goods but was empty at the moment. Even if the whole house went, they should be safe in there. Eventually they could see sky through floor boards broken by the destruction but it was quiet, so Grandpa got his kids out of the cupboard and just then a huge rock crashed through what was left of the house above smashing the cabinet to “smithereens.” Had the children been inside, they would have likely perished or at least been terribly injured. The way Daddy told the story, they thought they were in the eye of the tornado when it grew quiet and didn’t realize the danger they were in, that the storm was not over. When it finally did end, they emerged to find eveything in ruins and their hired girl, who had not made it into the basement in time, was scratched up and left cowering in only her undergarments, the tornado had stripped her of her outer clothing, a work dress and full cover apron. Somehow she had survived, as well, with only her dignity in shreds. Not long afterwards Ella was surprised to receive in the mail the battered and stained, but intact, copy of their certificate of marriage, one of the very few things that had survived the storm. Someone who lived in another county had found it fluttering in their pasture after the storm had dissipated. I cannot vouch for the whole truth in this story for we are a wee bit Irish and you must know what storytellers the Irish are know to be. It does make a good story either way.
The 1950s and 60s
By the time I went to school Grandpa Moen had given my folks an outbuilding from their farm and Dad had purchased land closer to town to build on. It is one of my earliest memories, standing on the bench seat of the old pickup truck and looking out the back window as Dad slowly pulled a flat bed trailer with the machine shed on it from grandpa’s farm to ours. It was long before vehicles had seat belts or child protection seats were required.
It’s a wonder we survived!
That machine shed became the “foundation” of the house I grew up in as they added on to it through the years. We lived in town until it was ready for us to move in, I think by then I was in the third grade at Prairie View Elementary School. Fourth grade I had to move to Minnie H school because then we lived on the farm west of town, it must have been the rule at the time.
East of the house on our little farm we had a piece of land that Dad grew alfalfa in to feed the cattle and later horses we raised or cared for. He and my brother, Daryl, would spend hot summer days “making hay while the sun shone” coming into the house all dirty, sweaty and mosquito bitten. After Daryl left for the Army and the Vietnam War the job went to my sister and I to be Dad’s helpers. Daryl decided that he wanted to move out to California to live when his time in the army was over. I think the mosquitoes were the deciding factor for him! He never did live in North Dakota after he came back from ‘Nam, I remember when my uncle LeRoy drove his shiny little sports car all the way from Los Angeles to Devils Lake to bring my brother back with him. I must have been 11 or 12 years old by then. So I got his room in the attic, my own room!
I loved that room, – it was one of those rooms where the walls were about four feet high with sloping ceiling/walls that ended with maybe a strip of ceiling that was actually only about four feet wide. It wasn’t heated, so Mom made a heavy quilt for my bed and sometimes if I went to sleep with a glass of water beside my bed, it was frozen by the time I woke up. One window provided “air conditioning” at the far end of the room in the summertime.
As Daddy’s helpers we helped clean the barn and feed the animals. We played with them as if they were pets. I had a pet chicken named “Pepper” – because she was all white with tiny black specks. I taught her to ride on my dog Queenie’s hind quarters when we played “Ringmaster” for the grown ups. We were quite creative and imaginative little girls, now that I think of it.
Our farm was just a quarter of a mile from the city dump, it was located on what is now known as Walleye Drive, and we would go over there to scrounge things that had been thrown away. You could do that in those days.
We were recyclers before it was cool to recycle!
I was in college before I owned a bicycle that didn’t come from the dump. We would drag our “treasures” home, like rusting old bikes others had thrown out – dad would weld them together and turn them into bikes we could ride. Slap on a bit of paint and we were happy.
In those days Highway 19 was gravel, but we rode our bikes only on the approach to our house and all around the farm, never on the road. The Devils Lake Speedway, a dirt oval race track had been just to the east of our place but I barely remember actual races happening there. I did, however, go over there and ride my bike on the abandoned oval track. The dump yielded my first jewelry box complete with ballerina and wind-up music – after Dad fixed it a little. I also remember a pair of brightly painted maracas and lots of old cars just waiting for someone to hit windshields with a pebble to shatter the glass. Yes, we were naughty, too! I learned that from my big brother who was 10 years older than I was. And I passed it along to my little sister, Lynn, who was only two years younger.
Our farm was on lake bottom, the pasture on the south side of the property was where we played baseball and softball when all us cousins would get together on holidays and hot summer Sunday afternoons for picnics. It had a huge pussy willow bush that we enjoyed snapping off limbs to add to wildflower bouquets we’d pick for Mom. Dad planted an L-shaped shelter belt along the west and north side of where the house stood. In between the cottonwoods and Russian olive trees he planted sand cherries and we loved the jelly and pancake/waffle syrup they made. The shelterbelt was one of my favorite places and I would find a branch of one of the cottonwoods to make a seat for myself and get lost reading a book. Mom would call and call if she had chores for me, but I would be so obsorbed in reading, I wouldn’t hear her calling. That IS my story and I am sticking with it!
I remember one Easter our Daddy brought us home each a baby rabbit, real ones, one for Lynn, one for Louise. The fellow who sold them to Leland swore they were both boys. By the end of that year we must have had almost 100 rabbits living in one of our outbuildings, an old pig pen with a “yard” attached. There were bunnies everywhere, burrowed underground, continuing to multiply. It’s hard to be friends with that many bunnies, so, yes, some of them ended up on the dinner table, but only the ones we didn’t know very well. Speaking of talking Leland into things ….
The barn
I remember the barn on the farm was made of a unique building material once manufactured right here in Devils Lake called Strawmat. The Strawmat plant was somewhere around where today’s industrial park officially stands. They used the remaining wheat straw leftovers after harvest to press between layers of tar paper to create a lightweight, nearly two-inch thick sheet of building material. I’m not sure how long or wide those sheets were, but I remember how delighted my dad was with using this lighter weight material that was both inexpensive and manufactured right here in the area from waste products from the farms around the Lake Region – it brought in some additional income for the farmers and perhaps made jobs for those in the manufacturing process.
After we built the barn using this material it was not long before we noticed there was a flaw in the concept. When spring came and/or when it would rain the grains of wheat trapped between the layers of tarpaper (or whatever that material was) would germinate and start to grow. The cows and calves and later the horses we boarded for folks who lived in town and couldn’t keep horses on their own property – they were all really smart animals.
Why do I say that? Because when those tasty green shoots would start to burst forth from the strawmat walls, the animals would go after those tasty morsels using their lips and teeth to peel back the paper and get at the tender greens growing right in the wall – a buffet for all grass and hay lovers.
It didn’t take long for our barn to have large oval-shaped holes in the walls as the hungry, green-loving munchers worked and worked at it. When you walked by, if there was an animal in the stall of the barn, they would stick their head out of these ovals and MOO at us, the horses would WHINNY! It was embarrassing.
Dad would mutter under his breath about that “so and so salesman” who talked him into buying all that strawmat ……. I didn’t get all of it, but you get the gyst.
During the winter he did his best to board up the “portrait holes” in the walls of the barn, but come spring and they’d add to the mischief done to the once cozy warm space.The holes growing ever larger and larger.
The multi-vortex tornado that damaged many of the hangars on the city’s airport, including several smaller aircraft, too, also hit our farm that year. I was in the 10th grade by then. It took much, but not all of the poor old strawmat barn. I think secretly Dad was happy that tornado had happened.
The remainder of the old barn was taken down by my sister Lynn and her pals from the girls’ football team, I think it was supposed to be flag football or touch football, if I recall correctly. My dad would laugh and wipe his eyes with his red hankey when he told the story of watching those girls swinging sledge hammers and knocking down the remaining walls of the sad, old barn’s remains. Most of us were good sized, strong girls, not afraid of a little hard work. Let us destroy something on purpose and we were delighted!
It was only two miles into town, so as we girls got older, we would walk into town on a Saturday morning or meet up with friends in town and walk to our home together. The biggest problem was getting past the lagoon (and it’s lovely odors especially in the springtime). If you live here, you know what I’m talking about!
We weathered the blizzard of March ‘66 in that house with no heat or electricity for four days and nights. Mom had us drag our mattresses into the living room and covered the drafty wiindows and doorways with heavy quilts, nailed to the window and door frames. She used our old metal camp stove to heat up soup and to cook for us – we slept in our clothes, used the chemical toilet in a closet and played lots of games. Our neighbors from the west just beyond our shelterbelt, Judy and Archie Harveland bundled up, tied a long rope to their front door and trudged over to our house because Archie had run out of cigarettes and knew that my dad would at least have some loose tobacco to roll into cigarettes to curb his craving. He was right and they stayed and played cards with us while it was daylight although the storm continued to roar outside. When it was getting to be dusk, they bundled back up to trudge back home using the rope to find their way in the blinding white-out weather. When the storm finally subsided, at the end of four days, the wind had whipped the snow around so that immediately outside the east side of our house we could almost see bare ground, but then there was a wall of solid snow. We had to cut steps in that wall to climb out and survey what we could see. Dad’s old 3/4 ton Chevy pickup was completely buried, with just a few inches of the antenna sticking out of the snow. I remember the National Guard helped clean up the roads and they had to have specialized equipment to do that. Like many others, we lost some of our livestock in that blizzard – one pig, I remember, froze solid but others, in the barn, fared much better.
We sold the farm in the early 70s and purchased a fixer-upper house in town. The old house I grew up in no longer exists, although I do dream about it now and then. Where our little subsistence farm was located nothing really remains that we built or planted there except maybe a old cottonwood tree in the shelterbelt.
It was good place to grow up, we worked hard, played hard and enjoyed living in space where you could ride a horse, have a couple dogs, some chickens, a pig or two and all the cats and rabbits you could keep track of.
