interview with arnold maring
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Interview with Arnold Maring
Interviewed at Mr. Maring's home in Kenyon, Minnesota Interviewed by Barbara W. Sommer
May 25, 1999
BWS: Tell me first about the name for the valley. People call it Sogn Valley. AM: It has become Sogn Valley because it has extended out this way in recent years. But we had a Nansen community in the old days when the cheese factory was functioning. The Sogn Valley extends towards Cannon Falls. It is a large valley. We like the name Sogn Valley, so we adopted it. BWS: Where did it used to end? AM: [Highway] 14 follows the valley to 52 and it ends there. BWS: All of this stretch of 14? AM: Is pretty much Sogn Valley. BWS: Why do you like the name? AM: It is a place in Norway, you know. It is Sogndal in Norway. That is how we have the name. The people that lived in the area, previously anyway, were from that area. We didn't feel as if we were Sogn people here years ago, but we do now. BWS: Why? AM: I don't know. Nansen was the community. We had a store there. We had some popular people that operated the store. It became a community center for a while. We even had an orchestra there at one time. The Nansen Orchestra. That was before my time. BWS: When was that? AM: 1924 or '25. In that area. BWS: Who played in it?
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AM: They had a man by the name of Arthur Anfinson. He was the director. Voxlund, our representative for a number of years, played the violin, I remember. I don't remember all the people who were in it. BWS: What kind of music did they play? AM: I think they played some Norwegian numbers. This was a strong Norwegian community, you know. I spoke Norwegian until I was fourteen years old, you know. I went to public school and we spoke Norwegian at recess time. And we went in and spoke English for the teacher. BWS: And when you started school? AM: I was confirmed in Norwegian, if you know what that means. I was in the last class that was confirmed in Norwegian. After that, it became English. We had an old minister at that time. It was his last year. He preached in Vang Church. He confirmed my dad and he also confirmed me. He was there a long time. There was a difference of twenty-five years between my dad and myself. BWS: You were the last class to be confirmed in Norwegian? AM: Yes. BWS: That is quite a milestone. AM: It was kind of nice for me, because I have been able to go to Norway and have a good time visiting with people over there. I didn't have a very good vocabulary. I had a fourteen-year-old vocabulary. BWS: I suppose it was a vocabulary that hadn't changed with the times either. AM: In Norway, they call it Minnesota Norwegian, you know. We use some English words in there. But they understood us well. BWS: Where in Norway did your family come from? AM: Originally, my grandfather's family came from Flom, Norway. Then, his father moved to Vas, Norway. They lived in a very rugged area. A valley there in Norway. He and one brother came to this country. BWS: What were their names?
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AM: The name in Norway was Maringen. They had an "en" on it at the end. But they dropped the "en" and we have been Maring ever since. BWS: What did that mean? Did it have a meaning? AM: I don't think so. I don't know. Ingen in Norway means pasture or place for the horses to graze. BWS: It might have been a connection with farming. AM: It may have been. It was a very rough place where he grew up. When they lived in Flom, the name wasn't the same. It was another name. I can't think of it right now. And that is when we became Maringen, when they moved to the other place, you know. BWS: Can you find it on this map? AM: Flom is at the end of the Sognfjord. It goes way to Bergen. They lived in Tundselle, that was the name. They lived back in the mountains there. BWS: Tundselle was your grandfather's father in Norway. (looking at genealogical chart.) What was your father' s name? AM: Mons. Phillip's second name is Mons. BWS: Your mother's family. She was Norwegian, too? AM: She was very much Norwegian. Andrew Flom was her father. He came from Norway. Her mother came from Norway, also. BWS: Do you know where? AM: Andrew Flom came from Flom, of course. But the mother came from Telemark. The name of the town, I don't know. BWS: Have you gone back to visit these areas and relatives? AM: I have visited many of my grandfather's family. He had three brothers over there. I didn't get to meet all of them. I met two of them. BWS: When did your grandfather come to this country? AM: It was around 1860. '64. Somewhere in there.
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BWS: Pretty early. Where did he come? Straight to Minnesota? AM: No, he came to Dane County, Wisconsin, first. Then they came here. And he spent a lot of time in North Dakota. When he was first married, he lived in Mayville, North Dakota, for a while. He ran a small hotel up there. My dad was born up there in Mayville, North Dakota. When he was old enough to have Social Security, we had to get his [birth] certificate and they didn't have one up there. We managed to get one through St. Paul. BWS: What made him decide to go to Wisconsin originally? AM: I think there was a Norwegian settlement. I don't know much about that. BWS: And why North Dakota? AM: His wife was a Lee. His wife's father was a kind of an enterprising person. He went to the Red River Valley and bought farms. That was a time when wheat was growing so well up there in the Red River Valley. He would go up there at harvest time, sell his wheat and buy another farm. He did that for several years, they tell us. I believe that is why they went up to North Dakota. BWS: There were a lot of Scandinavians in the Red River Valley. AM: My grandfather had some land up there. That is why my dad was up there for five years. And then, when he came back here, one of his brothers went up there. Bert. They lived up there all their lives. I have relatives up there. BWS: What town? AM: Between Pearlie and Georgetown. In the Red River Valley. But none of the Marings are living on the farm anymore. They became educated. Two of them are attorneys. Two of the grandsons. BWS: Do they still own the farms up there? AM: They do. Yes. They have someone running the farm for them. BWS: And why did they decide to come here? AM: My dad? I think Mother had some influence on that. She wanted to get back to her family. So, we bought that farm that was next to my grandfather's farm. That became
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available at that time. They bought the farm adjoining my grandfather's farm. It was only about three miles from my mother's people. BWS: The Flom family? AM: Yes. There were ten children in that family. Seven boys and three girls. BWS: Did they all stay here? AM: One of her brothers spent some time in New England and North Dakota. But he came back, too. Bought a farm in this area. Mother had three brothers that didn't marry and two sisters that didn't marry. They lived on the home farm. It became known as the Flom Brothers. Grandmother lived with them for a long time. I remember her very well. I never did see my Grandfather Flom. BWS: What do you remember about your grandmother? AM: She was a hardworking person, I think, because she was all wrinkled up. Having ten children. She didn't speak English very well. I don't think she spoke English at all. BWS: Your mother spoke Norwegian? AM: Yes. There was some friction in the family sometimes. Mother wanted to go to high school and one of her brothers didn't want her to go and spend the money. She never forgave him for that, I don't think. She didn't say much about it. BWS: How much education did she have? AM: An eighth grade education in the local, rural school. BWS: Education was important to a lot of people. AM: She had a brother who went to St. Olaf, but unfortunately, he had tuberculosis and he died as a young man. BWS: That was pretty early to go off to college. AM: At least they sent one person from the family. Times were hard. BWS: Where did your mother go to school?
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AM: It was the rural school where I went. Two miles from my home farm. I had to walk two miles to school every day. Maybe that is why I lived so long. Lots of exercise. BWS: Did that serve this area? AM: It served most of the Nansen area. It was a large district. We had up to forty students there in eight grades and one teacher. It was one room. BWS: The people came from where? AM: This place (the Maring Brothers farm in section 36and the location of Mr. Maring's home at the time of the interview) went north to school. It ended at my grandfather's farm (the Maring Brothers farm in section 1). We were at the edge of the district because we walked two miles. It was a circumference of two miles. It was a radius of four miles. BWS: Where was the school that served this area? AM: That was down on 14. It is made into a home now. It is about a mile and a half down the road here. BWS: In Sogn? AM: No, it is on this side of Sogn, about a half a mile. On the west side of the road. BWS: What about your school? AM: It is off on 44. It is a gravel road now. It is a county road now. It wasn't a county road when I went to school, but it became a county road over the years. BWS: Where did you go to high school? AM: When I went through eighth grade, my dad said that if I could study hard and finish the eighth grade, I could stay home and work with him. And I did. After graduating from the eighth grade, I stayed home for a year and worked with Dad. But then my mother thought I should have some education. My mother had a lot of religious faith. She wanted me to go to a church school. Red Wing Seminary. I went to Red Wing Seminary for two years. Then the depression came along and they didn’t have enough students. Then they added a junior college to it. But hard times made it necessary for me to go to Kenyon to finish my high school education. BWS: Red Wing Seminary was what branch or synod?
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AM: Hauge Lutheran Synod. BWS: Your mother was Hauge Synod? AM: We were Synoden, or whatever it was. There were several branches of the Lutheran church and they merged several times. But the Hauge people don't feel they belong to our church yet. BWS: Why did she choose that one? AM: One of her nieces went there and graduated the year before I went there. BWS: You finished at Kenyon? AM: Yes. Then I became sort of interested in sports and decided to go to college, too. I went to St. Olaf College in Northfield. I went there for four years. Graduated in the depression class. 1933. Couldn't get a job. The first year, you couldn't buy a job. As a teacher, anyway. All the schools were downsizing. So, I stayed at home on the farm that first year. But then, the second year, I was asked to come and teach at Nerstrand, Minnesota. That is small town west of Kenyon. I taught seventh and eighth grade and I was principal of the school. We only had four teachers. They also had a high school. It was quite an experience for me because I didn't know how to be a principal, but I got along. Then I went to Berret, Minnesota, the following year. Then in 1937, I went to Ceylon, Minnesota, near the Iowa line. The following year, there was an opening at Fairmont and I applied for that. I taught there for five years until World War II started. I taught math and science. Mostly junior high. It was all junior high in Fairmont. BWS: When the war came along? AM: I was still single. I went to the post office one day and I saw this notice that said if you had a physics major, you may qualify. So I applied. Within a week, I received notice that I could go to Bellevue, Illinois, and work for the Army Signal Corps. I learned radio transmission and the Morse code. I studied hard and thought I was going to teach radio and wound up teaching Morse code for the next six or eight months. It wasn't very pleasant to be in an Army camp as a civilian. We found out that the Navy wanted people to teach. I applied for a commission with the Navy and they accepted me and I became a Navy officer. Lieutenant jr. grade. Which was quite an experience for me. They went me directly to Boston. I took anti-submarine warfare training. After my training, I received orders to go to Miami, Florida. I had seen this young lady in Boston by the name of Priscilla Daley. Before we left, we got married and we had our honeymoon in Miami. I was an instructor in Miami, Florida, until May. This was in October. In May, they called me back to Boston for some extra training and gave me orders for Australia. So I had to leave my wife in Boston and I went to San Francisco. It took a long time before they sent
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us to Australia, but we finally… I got a ride on a beautiful luxury liner. The Lurleen. We had a nice ride on that ship to Brisbane, Australia. We had practices to debark several times, but it was safe. We didn't have any trouble. It was a little later in the war and it was pretty well taken care of in that area. In Australia, I taught anti-submarine warfare with some Australian or English equipment that didn't work very well. But I had officers coming off ships that were anti-submarine warfare officers. And I was there for about six or eight months. Then they sent me to the Admiralty Islands. We had another training place there on a small island beyond the bay. Started another school there and did the same thing. Trained officers coming off battleships. Especially destroyers. We were there for quite a while. Almost a year. Then, finally, the war was coming closer to Japan all the time. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. On the west side of the Philippines Islands. We were supposed to start another school there, but the war was coming to a close and we never got it off the ground. I stayed there until we went home. You had to get a certain number of points before you got home. You had points for length of service. You had points for different things. And when you had a certain number of points, you would get sent home. That was the way they handled it so that those that had been there the longest would go home first. I went home on a submarine tender. They would repair submarines that had problems. We went home by way of Hawaii, so we stayed overnight in Hawaii. We had a chance to get a nice meal in Hawaii. We went through the Panama Canal and on to some place in Baltimore, I guess. And then, of course, I called my wife and we met each other in Chicago and then went on to Kenyon. BWS: You had decided to come back here? AM: I pretty much decided to come back and be on the farm. Yes. BWS: What brought you back? AM: Sympathetic reasons, I suppose. And I always liked farming, you know. I farmed with my dad for a year between eighth grade and high school. And I could tell that I couldn't stand this teaching. I was getting too heavy. And I thought for health reasons, I really wanted to go back to farm. It wasn't exactly what my wife thought I was going to do. I told her I had been a teacher. But she finally adjusted to it also and we had a good life together. Raised three boys and a girl. BWS: All here? AM: Yes. Up at the other place. BWS: You knew, by the time you got out of the Navy, you both knew that this is what you were going to do.
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AM: Yes. Actually, I went to the university for winter quarter and then I started farming in the spring. My dad was still living on the farm at that time. He did buy a house that spring and moved in as we came in. He helped me, of course, a lot at first. He was still pretty active. BWS: It was you and your sister in the family, so you were the only one to take over in the family? AM: In the family, I was the only who could take it over, yes. BWS: What about your sister? AM: She married a local person from the high school. She was a teacher also. She went to normal training down at Winona teacher's college. She taught at Worthington, by the way. Did you know Marie Satre? BWS: Yes, I did? AM: Marie Satre was my sister's sister-in-law. She was married to Leonard Ugland. She taught in Worthington until she married Leonard. But I think Marie had something to do with her getting the job. She taught a couple of years in the rural schools before she went there. It was awfully hard to get jobs in those days. During the depression. BWS: Good teachers. AM: I don't know if I was a very good teacher. I didn't have very much patience. BWS: When you came back, you had been away for a while, describe the valley as you remember it. What did you find when you got back here? AM: It still had small farms. It is a strange thing with this valley. You don't have much cropland because of the hills and the timber and the forests and the river. And still you had very small farms. Consequently, the people who lived here really struggled to get along. They lived mostly off the farm. They would have cows and they would have milk and they would have chickens and they would have beef from their cattle and probably raised a couple of hogs or a few hogs. And they would butcher and have their meat that way. I remember Mother would can meatballs and spareribs. And they all tasted good when you opened them again. BWS: What is an average farm size?
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AM: My dad had one hundred and sixty acres. My grandpa alongside (the current Alden and Margaret McCutchan farm) had two hundred and forty. We were probably two of the larger farms in the area. There were many eighties and forties. Eighties and forties. They really struggled. Many of them had to do outside work. They painted or did carpenter work or something of that nature. BWS: What brought your ancestors to this area? Did they ever talk about it? AM: They lived in the mountains and the hills over there. They came back to the same thing. They wanted timber and they wanted water. It was a problem in pioneering days. You needed those things. When you lived on the prairie, you had to dig a deep well to get water. On our farm, we had the spring water. On my grandfather's farm, which adjoins it, there was a huge hill there. On the side of the hill, there were springs. There is an area there called Calcaria's (??) Fen. Where the whole hill is just a swamp and water veins with springs coming out of it several places. BWS: This area has some natural springs. Was that a reason they chose the area to live? AM: It had something to do with it. We had spring water running through our house and barn all the time which was a nice thing to have in those days. You didn't have to pump water or anything. The hill is situated where it would take water down to my grandfather's farm and it would take water down to our farm. It went both ways. By gravity, we had water running all the time. And then, we ran it through a tile and into the river. It was running twenty-four hours a day. It was cold. It was about fifty degrees. That was kind of nice to have in those days when you didn't have refrigeration. I remember I had to run to the milkhouse and bring in…Mother had it in the tank all the time. BWS: What did she keep in it? AM: Things that needed to be cold. BWS: Were there other springs around in your area? AM: Our neighbor up to the north had a big spring, too. There were two of them in the area. There were others in other areas around here, I suppose. But ours happened to be situation where we could use gravity, which was nice. BWS: Is it still running? AM: Yes. We never had a well on our home farm. BWS: Are most of them still running as far as you know?
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AM: This one has never dried up. BWS: What about the wood. Did you have woodlots on your property? AM: When I was growing up, we used wood for fuel all the time. Cut wood. BWS: Did you have a woodlot or did you cut wood from your property? AMA: We had wood on our property. Timber on our property. And that happened. But, over there, there was a big woods that runs on highway 29. On that road, there are woodlots, even now, that people own. People who lived perhaps seven or eight miles away. They would come and get their wood for winter fuel in the old days. BWS: They would have a farm down the road, but then they would own a woodlot? AM: Yes. So they would have fuel for the winter. [phone rings] BWS: The family east of you divided the farm? AM: Divided the farm so that two brothers own it. One of them was a bachelor, but the other one had a large family. And the one with the larger family couldn't make it. He had to sell. First he sold part of it to my dad and then later on, he sold the whole eighty acres. So, we had two hundred and forty acres at one time there. BWS: Is the school still there? AM: It is made into a home. BWS: The one you went to? AM: That is made into a home, too. I don't know who lives there. It has changed several times. You see [highway] 44 and the [James] Flick farm. It is in that area. About in the center of that farm. BWS: People are still using woodlots? AM: No. They are selling them now. I have a four-acre woodlot. It came with this farm. I don't know why they had a woodlot. They didn't need it. They had all kinds of timber here. But it came with this farm. I still have it. I have sold the farm to my sons.
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BWS: How big were the woodlots? AM: Mine was only four acres. They were four to ten acres. A lot of them were five acres. If you take that highway, 29, you go through a wooded area. There is a lot of timber there yet. BWS: What do people use them for now? AM: Occasionally, you sell some logs. My son sold logs out of that hill across from the farm for between six and eight thousand dollars. BWS: Lumber? AM: Just logs. They hired a forester to sell it for them and paid them a commission. He set it out on bids and sold all the logs that we had that were not black walnuts. We do have some black walnuts, but they are not selling very well right now. The demand isn't very good. Japan isn't buying black walnuts, I don't think. They have been good customers of black walnuts. BWS: Usually, that is a valuable tree. AM: But they aren't as valuable as they were for a while. They are holding them for a while. BWS: What kind of wood has been selling? AM: Oak and basswood and maybe some cherry. They were piled up by the driveway. BWS: People were cutting in April. Do you have any stories about woodlots from when you were a kid? Or your family using them? AM: Both my grandfather's farm and my uncle's farm, they had timber. With these hills, you couldn't farm them. So you had woodlots. BWS: How did you figure out what would be cropland and how did you decided on how to use the land? AM: The flat portions of the land and where the hills didn't exceed a certain degrees of being too steep where they would wash too much. And, of course, we became more and more conservation minded after a while, you know. We saw the way the water would gush, make waterways, and wash the soil away. When I came and farmed, I became a beef farmer. I didn't like to milk cows, so I had beef. I turned a lot of our homeland over
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into pastureland. I had about up to a hundred beef cows. Herefords. Now, the boys are more interested in Angus. They have changed. They have done some crossbreeding, too. But they seem to favor the black Angus more now than the Herefords. But they still have a herd of cows. You have to on these hills. The land is not tillable. You can't use it for anything else. We don't milk cows. BWS: About how big a herd did the farm support? AM: Of beef cattle? I had about ninety head most of the time. Ninety cows and then I would have calves. For a long time, I would keep the calves and sell them as fat cattle. They would be two years old. So, I had quite a herd of cattle. I had up to two hundred head then. But I didn't have much cropland. That is why I bought this farm. I didn't have enough cropland. I didn't have enough corn to feed my cattle and so forth. BWS: Is that what you used the cropland for? Primarily feed corn? AM: Yes. We raised corn and soybeans. Soybeans as a cash crop, of course. And most of the corn…today the boys rent several farms around here. They don't worry about not having enough corn. But I did when I was farming. BWS: You had to raise enough corn to feel the cattle? AM: Yes. BWS: What percentage of your land, would you say, was in cropland? AM: Less than fifty percent. It is not a good farming area. It is a nice place to live. That is all. BWS: What was the average size of a field? AM: A lot of small fields. When the boys were farming five hundred acres, they had about seventy fields because they farmed the farms around them. The people that I grew up with were farmers and they struggled along and tried to get along on the farm. Their children would leave them and go and get a job in town. So, their farm would get sold. What has happened is we now have several airline pilots living in the area. We have two attorneys and we have a high school principal. All these people don't farm the land. They rent it to my sons. And they are very fine people. We are very fortunate. We have a very nice community still. BWS: But they are fortunate to have your sons. AM: Yes, I suppose they are.
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BWS: When you were growing up, what kinds of crops did people raise on the farms? AM: In those days, you didn't have as much corn as you do today because you had to pick the corn by hand for a long time and then, by the time World War II came along, we finally had cornpickers. BWS: There weren't cornpickers or you didn't have them? AM: They weren't even made in those days. You had to pick your corn by hand. In those days, you struggled to keep the weeds away from the corn because you didn't have herbicides and you didn't have… you had cultivators, of course. Then, sometimes, you would check the corn so that you could cultivate east and west and north and south. It was difficult to make checking come out so the rows were even. BWS: What kind of corn? AM: In those days, we didn't have hybrid corn either, of course. Minnesota 13 was one of the popular numbers. The University of Minnesota would breed new varieties of corn. But they didn't have hybrid corn. BWS: What was Minnesota 13? AM: It was one of the popular ones bred by Minnesota. It was a corn that had about the right maturity for our season. BWS: What was the growing season in the valley? AM: We grow mostly hundred-day corn now. Some ninety-five-day corn. A few people will get one hundred and five-day corn, but they take a chance on getting frost on it before it matures. BWS: When do you plant? AM: As soon as you can in the spring. BWS: When do you harvest? AM: Last year, we planted all our corn in the last days of April and we almost made it this year. It is very important to get it in as early as possible. We harvest it mostly in November, I suppose. If you have bad weather, it goes into December. Then, if you get a snowstorm, you wait until spring.
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BWS: What about when you were a kid? About the same? AM: Yes. It was late then, too. We weren't as smart about our corn as we are now. Getting corn to be dry enough to put in a corncrib, you had to build corncribs so you would air the corn. So it would dry out. Otherwise it would mold. And if you had too wide a corncrib, it would mold in the center of the bin. You had to be careful not to pick your corn until it was dry enough. So, it got to be cold weather in November before you picked your corn usually. BWS: What other crops did you grow? AM: When we didn't have cornpickers, we grew more small grains. My dad used to grow a lot of winter wheat. We had river bottomland and the winter wheat did very well on that ground. And then we grew barley for a while. Especially back when Roosevelt became president, he brought liquor and beer back to us. And then barley became a good crop. Especially malting barley. There are two kinds of barley. Feed barley and malting barley. We sold a lot of malting barley in those days. Got a good price. BWS: Where did you sell it? AM: In Cannon Falls, there is a malting house right there. But you could sell it on the market anywhere and they would be sold to malting houses. BWS: I suppose that was a good crop for the kind of terrain you have here. AM: Yes, it was. The growing season is rather short. For the barley and winter wheat and oats. Oats for cattle and horses, especially. We always had some oats in the old days when you had horses. You fed them oats. They do well on oats. BWS: What about rye or alfalfa? AM: We had some rye occasionally, but didn't like it very well. It grew so tall and it was very difficult to handle. In those days, you didn't combine it. You shocked it. And then you had to haul it to the threshing machine and so forth. Well, your shocks … the rye straw was very slippery and your shocks would fall down and slide down and that would spoil some of the grain, of course. Dad never grew much rye and I never grew any rye, of course. BWS: Alfalfa? AM: Dad started alfalfa quite early when it became available. Grimm alfalfa was the variety that first came into this area.
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BWS: Was it a good crop? AM: Great for milking cows. Dad milked cows. BWS: What kind of cows did he have? AM: Dad had mostly shorthorn cattle. He had dual-purpose cattle. He liked beef, so he kept some for fattening for the beef market. In later years…the Holsteins produced much better, so we bought some Holsteins, too. We had some of each. I finally encourage Dad to quit milking cows altogether because I didn't want to milk cows. After that, we had only beef cattle. BWS: Why not? AM: I didn't like milking cows. It spoils your whole day. You have to be up early in the morning and you have to be there at night at the same hours. If you have any social life at all, you can't have it. BWS: Milking machines? AM: Yes. DeLaval milkers. BWS: What about potatoes or flax? AM: Dad grew some flax occasionally, but not very often. We had a hard time controlling the weeds in flax in those days. We used the binder to make bundles. We had a flax field one time and it was all covered with weeks. Especially a certain kind of a weed that would clog up the binder all the time. I was thirteen years old. Dad was on the binder and I was on the tractor. We had an old Fordson tractor. We had to stop all the time, we had to stop, stop, stop. Dad would get out in front and take away the clogged material. Well, I didn't take my tractor out of gear. I just had my foot on the clutch. And I had slippery feet and my foot slipped off the clutch one time and I hit my dad right across the knee and hips here. Those pointed guards on a binder. One went in on each one of his legs. He was laid up for some time that year. He did recover OK. That was an awful experience for me when I was thirteen years old. I thought it was my unlucky year. BWS: It can happen so fast. AM: That's right. It happened very fast. It wasn't very far from the building, so I ran up and got the car. I was able to drive the old car at that time. I got Dad in there. We had a hired man at the time. Hired help. He came along and we got Dad into the car and hauled
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him up to the house and called the doctor. Doctor Leland from Kenyon. An old doctor. He put iodine in both sides. It almost killed him. It hurt like everything. BWS: The doctor came to you? AM: The doctors called on people out in the country in those days. BWS: Iodine disinfected it. AM: It certainly did. It had a little alcohol in it, too, I suppose. It stung like everything. BWS: And then it had to heal. It didn't break his legs? AM: No. The bones were OK. But he was laid up for a while. They had to try to get it to heal from the inside out. Keep it open. That was a terrible experience. BWS: A terrible experience. What your dad grew, was that what most people grew in the area? AM: We never grew flax after that. BWS: I can imagine. What about the other stuff? AM: They always had a lot of oats because they needed it for livestock and their horses. We would have some barley and winter wheat. Or spring wheat, occasionally, too, of course. But Dad liked to have winter wheat on that river bottomland we had. We had good yields. BWS: Where did you sell it? AM: Kenyon Farmer's Elevator. That was organized way back in 1896. Something like that. It wasn't a coop when it started, but it became a coop in later years. It was an independent company, stock company, originally. BWS: How did it end up becoming a coop? AM: They had some problems with management and so forth. And then it became a coop. [Tape interruption] BWS: Would you say that again about your farm?
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AM: This was my grandfather's farm and then it was my uncle's farm. And then when my uncle died, they sold the farm to (Alden and Margaret) McCutchans. BWS: He is the school principal. AM: And he is still living there. Yes. And we both get water… before my uncle died, I got an easement from my uncle so that I have water rights forever. So, when McCutchan came, he got in well with the DNR [Department of Natural Resources] with many things. With the river and the spring and so forth. And when they had a committee come out there and look at it, they decided to lease it from him for I don't know how many years. Anyway, leased to the DNR, we can't use it anymore. We used to pasture part of it. But now it is fenced off and we can't use it for anything. That makes it clean, of course, too, for our water and everything. And they said it was a Calcaria's Fen. There aren't many of them in Minnesota. They are rather rare. BWS: What does that mean? AM: I think it is because water oozes out of it all over and it is all wet most of the time. This is quite a hill. BWS: It sounds different than the spring bubbling out of the ground. AM: That spring that we use is quite large. It takes care of McCutchan's place and our place both. It runs twenty-four hours a day both ways. And then there is water running down the hill in addition to that. Overflow. BWS: Underground aquifer? AM: Where the vein is, we have a tank. And we have a pipe leading to his place and a pipe leading to ours. BWS: Where does the water come from? AM: Out of the ground. There is a big hill behind it and beyond the hill, there is that big wooded area. I always felt that the wooded area was the source of the water, but I may be wrong. And it comes out of the hill. It is kind of in the lower third of the hill. It is a steep hill there. That long one. Where the vein is. BWS: That is down by the other farm? AM: The other farm. That is the home farm. It is the farm my dad had.
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BWS: Did your dad ever talk about what he wanted to have in pastureland and in cropland? How he wanted to divide up the farm. AM: Dad had fences all over. And wherever there was enough land to put it into a small field, he would put it into a field. And I tore them all up and made it all into pasture. Except the river bottom land. And that is about all the land I had. BWS: Did he plant windrows? Trees? AM: No, we didn't plant many trees. We just had wild trees. Timber. We had a hedge around the home. That has been there since my dad bought it. A cedar hedge. That has been a long, long time. BWS: Was that done when he got there? AM: I think so. The hedge was. You might call it a windbreak. BWS: Around the house? AM: Yes. In the wintertime, the pheasants liked to stay in there. You could hear them cackle once in a while. BWS: How did they decide where to put the house on the property? AM: The house was there when we bought it. We had an old, old house. A great big one. Fourteen rooms. And in 1938, my dad tore the old house down and built a new one. That was the year that rural electrification came. So we had electric lights at the same time we had our new home. That was 1938. We were one of the first ones in the area to have electricity. Not everyone would take it in. They were afraid of it. But my dad was very progressive that way. BWS: It was easier to put electricity in a new house. AM: Yes. And we knew we were going to get electricity. And we managed to get it that fall. 1938. BWS: Do you remember the first time you turned on the lights? AM: I was gone. I was teaching at that time. BWS: Who built the old house?
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AM: Dalbotten was the name of the family that lived there before we were. And they decided to move to California. When they sold the farm, they moved to California and they raised grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. There may be descendents out there yet. BWS: You hear about people from Minnesota moving out there to raise grapes every once in a while. AM: Actually the man who owned it who was a bachelor. He had a brother who lived there, too, that was married. And they both moved out to California. I went to visit them back in 1941. He was still living then. I saw some of his grapes. The brother was in charge of a place where they brought the grapes together like our elevators here in Minnesota. They brought them together in one place. I guess they dry them out in the field. They were made into Sunmaid raisins. BWS: So they went from raising one kind of crop to another. AM: That's right. BWS: Were the farms pretty close to the roads? How would you describe that? AM: Our road was entirely too close to our buildings. We would get the dust from the road on our lawn. And it would even get into the house when you had open doors and screen doors. We were fortunate when they built the new road, they moved it over about one hundred yards or so. BWS: Did the roads follow old trails? AM: Down here in the valley, they seem to. They aren't straight, you know. They don't follow section lines. They aren't straight. They had to follow the river valley and the creek valleys and so forth. We still had to make a number of bridges. BWS: Were there any Indian trails you heard about? AM: When I walked to school, I would cut across the fields and into and across the wooded area. There were some mounds in there that I always thought were Indian mounds, but I don't believe they were. I thought that when I was a kid. BWS: Were there ever any stories about things like that? AM: There were stories about Indians, but I don't recall any of them offhand. It was before my time.
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BWS: It seems like the roads follow the contours of the land. AM: Yes. They did. BWS: Did you contour farm? AM: Yes, I laid out some contours. I used the Soil Conservation Service. After the war. I didn't get started until after the war. BWS: Did your dad use contour farming? AM; No, he didn't. The old-time farmers didn't think much of soil conservation. They didn't use it. I think my dad learned to use it a little, but he used hay crops on his hilly fields and so forth. But there are some farmers that you couldn't convince them at all, it seemed like. We had some kind of a club or soil conservation group that got together. Tried to get the neighborhood to do more conservation work. We talked to some of them and they didn't understand it. That was in the '50's. Maybe '60. Some of our neighbors didn't practice soil conservation at all, but it is getting better all the time. BWS: Why didn't they want to? AM: I don't think they understood why it should work better. They farmed that way all the time and they didn't want to change their ways of doing things. BWS: Did they rotate their crops? AM: Most people did rotate their crop pretty well. Dad always liked to put alfalfa in the different fields and then rotate them that way. It is always nice to get a brom, legume crop in there. BWS: Replenish the soil. AM: Yes. It brings nitrogen and other minerals back into the soil. BWS: How often did he rotate? AM: It takes at least five or six years. Four or five years rotation usually. Some have three-year rotations, but …. When you have small fields here and there all over, you have to use the hilly land for alfalfa as much as possible and your flat land for crops. BWS: Did your dad use barbed wire?
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AM: Yes, he did. And that is what my boys are doing now. Using electric fences. They put up electric fences for people. I started electric fences as soon as they were available, but they weren't always very good when they first came out. BWS: What kinds of barbed wire? AM: Just regular barbed wire. Until I started using electric fence. I used barbed wire for that, too. You could electrify the barbed wire, too. BWS: What kinds of buildings did you have on the old farm? AM: Dad remodeled the barn in 1918 and put in stanchions and bins for calves. And for cows when they were calving. At calving time, they could have a pen for that. A bull, a sire, you would have to have a pen for him. Then he bought the milking machine the same time. So, we really had a modern farm at that time. And we milked cows for a long time. BWS: Was that when he first got cows? AM: He had cows before that, too. But then we had horses and on the other side, we had a horse barn. As time went on, Dad only had two horses when I came on the farm in '46. And I sold the horses as soon as possible. I didn't want horses. They were just a nuisance to me and I wanted to use tractors. Then we converted the horse barn. We put a new floor in there and we took out all the stalls and moved that into a loose housing area for young stock. Having beef cattle, I didn't know cows either. Our 1918 modern farm got to be a beef barn. Loose housing. But some of the pens are still there. BWS: Did he have a dairy shed on the farm? AM: We had a milk house right along side it. And then we had our spring water running into the tank there and then it was running on to the next tank outside and then we had some tiling down below and it drained right into the Little Cannon River. Dad didn't like to bother to run over to Nansen with his milk all the time. He was kind of a rebel. He quit going to Nansen with his milk. He started using the separator and sold cream for a while. And he gave the skim milk to the hogs. We had some hogs at that time. BWS: Why didn't he go to Nansen to the cheese factory? AM: I guess he was a little disap…I don't know why. You had to drive over there every day, you know, with the milk every morning. It was kind of a nuisance. Whereas, when you had cream, there was a trucker that came and picked it up for you. Eliminated that trip to Nansen every day.
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BWS: Tell me about the cheese factor. AM: I guess at one time it was privately owned, but then they either quit or something and the farmers then had to form an association and it was farmer owned. Each farmer had a share of stock in it. And then they had a board of directors. It only included the area around here. A small area. It wasn't a large place. Then they had to hire a cheesemaker and the cheesemaker usually had to have to help, so he hired someone. It was two-man operation. BWS: Where did you find the cheesemaker? AM: We had different ones. We had many of them. Some of them were good and some were not so good. BWS: What kind of cheese? AM: It was cheddar cheese. We sold most of it through Pine Island. Pine Island was a cheese center. It still is, I guess. They had a man down there by the name of Roach and he bought all the cheese from us. And then you would have the whey, you see. They had that, some of the farmers would like to make primost. Do you know what that is? It is a cheese made from whey. You take the whey after they have taken the cheese solids out, you have some cream left in there. So, the people who made this cheese called primost. It is a Norwegian name, by the way. They would come and get the whey and take it home and they would have a big vat and boil it down until they had the solids again from the whey. And they would add some sugar to it and form it into a little …. BWS: Sort of a soft cheese? AM: Yes. It is kind of a soft cheese. It is brown, kind of a caramel color. BWS: Did your folks do that? AM: No. My folks didn't do it. Just two or three families did it in the area. Pearl's mother, when you speak to Pearl [Lee Underdahl], she can tell you more about. They made some. And then, there was a family down here that made a lot of it. Name was Charleson. They would separate the cream out of the rest of the whey and they would put it into a vat and sell the cream to the creamery in Kenyon. Then the farmers would pick up the whey and feed it to the hogs, of course, It was good hog feed. Sometimes, farmers would come from… if local farmers wouldn't use all the whey, they would have others come and get it from other places. They used it up that way. BWS: A busy little operation?
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AM: And of course, Nansen became… they had the country store there. So, they would go over to the store and buy their groceries at the same time. BWS: Nansen's ran the cheese factory? AM: No. Pearl was asking me about that. Nansen was the name of a Norwegian explorer who went to the North Pole. That is what I think. BWS: And that is where the name for the cheese factory came from? AM: I think the store got the name, really. And then it became the Nansen Cheese Factory, too. BWS: Where was the store? AM: It was alongside, on the east side of the factory. There were different proprietors there. The final one had it and then it burned down for him and never was rebuilt. BWS: The building is not there? AM: No, the building is completely gone. BWS: Isn't there something like a house there now? AM: The cheese factor has a living quarters upstairs. BWS: Where was the store? AM: Alongside on the east side about forty or fifty feet away from it. BWS: Who was first? The cheese factory or the store? AM: The store must have been there first, I think. I really don't know, but there was a man by the name of Pynten that lived there. He had the store and he lived on the farm alongside of it. It was a post office at one time, you see. In the store. He had a store and a post office. BWS: What did he sell in the store? AM: Groceries. During my time, there wasn't a post office there. But they had groceries and general merchandise. You could buy overalls and shirts and things like that. It was a general store.
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BWS: Served the people of the area? AM: Yes. BWS: Your mother, for instance. What would she buy at a store like versus what she would raise? AM: Flour. Sugar. Salt. Just like an ordinary grocery store. She would call over there when they went with the milk and then they would have the groceries ready for him when he came to the store. Most of them would have a charge system. They would pay at the end of the month. BWS: They kept a record of what you bought. AM: That's right. Then when you got your milk check, you would pay for your groceries. BWS: Did she ever raise chickens for eggs? AM: Yes. We had chickens. We had an old chicken house and a newer one. We raised some chickens. And she sold eggs. Even I had eggs for a long time. We even put lights in there, when we had electric lights, so they had a longer day for the chickens so they could lay more eggs. We had a time clock on it that would turn on and off. BWS: Did you have sheep? AM: No, there never have been sheep on my farm. I was always afraid, a sick sheep will die, you know. Every time. They are very hard to take care of. BWS: What kinds of chickens? AM: Mostly white ones. They were heavy. We never had many pigs on our farm. When we bought that one little addition to our farm, there was a family that lived there that had seventeen acres. Of course, they couldn't make a living on that. So, they sold it to us and they sold their house to another party. And there was a little barn over there. When my boys went to high school, we had an ag. teacher that liked hogs so well. So, to get a good grade, you had to have some hogs. When Phil went to college, he went to Concordia College at Moorhead, he had pigs and we had pigs in that barn over on the other place. It was a very fortunate time to have hogs. They were sixty-five cents a pound and you know what they have been this year. So, he more or less, made his way through college on his hogs. But that was the best experience I ever had with hogs. We didn't have very good facilities for hogs. The best facilities we had were over there in that barn.
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BWS: Where did your kids go to college or advanced education? AM: Walter, my oldest son, graduated from the university. But he got caught in the Vietnam War. He was there for two years. He came back and went on his GI program. Nancy went to Concordia because she wanted to teach elementary grades. She turned out to be teaching special education. That is what she is doing. Phillip got a scholarship. When he went to high school, it was the first time they went to the state. So, he got a little reputation and he got a little scholarship at Concordia for basketball. He went there, also. And then, Nate came along. I thought he was going to have to be the farmer, so I sent him to NDSU [North Dakota State University]. But then Phillip became a farmer, too. I didn't expect him to be a farmer. But he wanted to be a farmer, too. So, they both came back to farm. They have done much better than I did. They have been doing real well. BWS: And four kids through college. They have all got that degree. AM: I am glad they do. BWS: You mentioned a little bit about equipment. The tractor and cultivator your dad had. What else did he use to farm? AM: The two first tractors he had were Fordsons and sometimes they were awfully hard to start. But, they were small. And then he probably still had the Fordson when he bought a John Deere that was a three-plow tractor. It had steel wheels. The Fordsons did, too. Then the first rubber-tired tractor Dad had was in 1941. He bought an H International. And we still have it, but we don't use it very much. We use it for power take-off. Dad liked to plow, so he used that John Deere to plow all the time. He did a lot of plowing for me. BWS: You didn't like it? AM: I didn't care for it. No. BWS: Did he use horses? AM: Oh, yes. When he farmed in the Red River Valley, he had over thirty horses when they had the auction up there. He farmed a lot of land up there. Had hired help. Both Mother and Dad worked very hard when they were up there. I am sure they did. BWS: What did he use the horses for here? AM: We did all our chores with horses. We cleaned the barns. We drove through the barn with a bobsled in the wintertime. We had a special box for manure and stuff. We would
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haul it on the fields and pitch it out by hand. Now we use Bobcats and load our manure spreaders and don't handle it at all. BWS: What was your parents' day like when you were a kid? AM: A long day. Mother was a good cook and she always had lunch for us. Afternoon lunch. And then when we had threshers and silo filling, we would have lunch in the morning and lunch in the afternoon and we had a big noon dinner and supper at night. She did a lot of cooking. She liked to cook, too. She always had cake and cookies around, so that anyone that came to the house, they would always have to have coffee and cake and cookies. But, she got to be diabetic toward the end and she got pernicious anemia. That was difficult. They didn't know much about anemia in those days. I remember we used to buy liver extract, the little box of thirty-six bottles, and she used to take one of those every day to build her blood up again. But it wasn't enough. But she didn't die from anemia. She had two strokes. One stroke, she recovered from and then she had the final stroke and she died right away. She was seventy-four years old. BWS: What about your dad? AM: He was killed in an accident. They moved to Kenyon when I came on the farm. One evening, my sister came down from Minneapolis. He was an auditor with International Harvester, her husband, and they lived in Minneapolis. They came down to visit one Saturday evening. Dad went up to get some fruit for them to have for breakfast and as he came down the street and walked across the street, a car came along and hit him. Actually, there was an oil station there. There were a bunch of people there waving and talking to him. He wasn't watching where he was going. It killed him. He died that same night. He never regained consciousness. He was almost eighty-two years old. It happened in the spring of the year. I think it was in April. And his birthday was in May, like mine is. He was almost eighty-two years old. He could have lived some time more, because his health was quite good. He was a strong man. He had worked hard. He had arthritis, of course. I think it was caused by the hard work in the Red River Valley and on the farm at home, too. He worked hard. Dad was kind of the helper in the community, you know. When someone needed to castrate some hogs or calves, he would have to come and do it for them. And then if they had to de-horn some horns off their cattle, he had a de-horning machine and he would clip them off for them. He did that for all his neighbors and he would never charge anything for that. He was a good guy. BWS: How did you mark the calves. Brands? AM: No, I never did. What you can do now, you use eartags. BWS: When you were younger?
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AM: We didn't have that many. In addition to our barn, we had a livestock shed where we had a silo and fed young cattle and cattle that were sold for beef down in that area. BWS: Where did you sell them? AM: South St. Paul, mostly. Occasionally, they would have cow jockeys that would come and buy cattle. Occasionally, milk cattle. Sometimes, they would come and buy springing cows. Ready to calve. Dad also raised horses and he was a great one to sell the horses. He sold some horses to people in the Twin Cities. They used them for drayline work and stuff like that. They were big horses. I remember we had to walk… they wanted to pick it up in Cannon Falls and we led that horse all the way down to Cannon Falls. Ten miles. The hired hand took it half way and my dad took it the other half. BWS: He must have had a reputation for having good animals. AM: He liked animals. BWS: Good ones. He gave good value. AM: Farming was his life, entirely. Worked hard. BWS: And the farm provided the food. Good, solid food. Fried potatoes and lots of things we aren't supposed to eat today. AM: And when we sold cream, Dad loved butter. I remember one time, when we sold cream at the creamery, we would pick up the butter and take it off the cream check. At the end of the month, we used a pound a day of butter. We had used thirty pounds of butter during the month. We had a hired hand most of the time and my sister and I. BWS: Where was the creamery you went to? AM: That was the creamery in Kenyon. It is not there anymore. They tore it down. That went haywire, too. I shouldn't get into that. Because they didn't have enough patrons, they had to discontinue operations. It stood idle for a number of years and then they finally tore it down. BWS: Did it end about the time the cheese factory ended operations? AM: Oh, no. The cream factory went on for a number of years beyond the cheese factory. BWS: Did they have a buttermaker at the creamery?
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AM: Oh, yes. Sure. BWS: It was a busy area. AM: You lived off the farm back in those days. You had your milk and you had your cream. Chickens. You had eggs. You had a few hogs. You lived off the farm in the old days, pretty much. BWS: And you had good meals. AM: They were heavy meals. BWS: What about a garden? Did your mother have a garden? AM: Yes. But there never seemed time for us to keep a good garden. We never could keep it very clean. But we did have a garden. BWS: What did she grow in it? AM: We always had a patch of potatoes, of course. Then we always had tomatoes and carrots and beets and onions, mainly. Not much beyond that. Strawberries once in a while. BWS: Who took care of it? AM: I think Mother had to do most of it. BWS: Who built the new house? AM: We hired a contractor to do it. We built it at such a wonderful time. We paid fifty cents for the carpenters and sixty cents to the contractor. Sixty cents an hour. And fifty cents an hour. So, you know, our house didn't cost very much. BWS: Who designed it? AM: The manager of the lumberyard helped with that. He had built a house something similar to the one we had. We took his design. He had built a house himself, I remember in Kenyon. It is quite a large house, too. It is two-story and it has got an attic and basement. And now, Nate has added a little more to it than we had. To get a basement garage to it, he had to add on to it a little bit. We didn't have a basement garage when I lived there. His wife is a pharmacist and she works at St. Mary's in Rochester. She has to drive quite a bit and in the wintertime, you have to have a warm place for her car.
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BWS: That's a long drive. AM: That is forty miles. But you get onto 52 and it doesn't take too long. It takes less than an hour. And Marcia over here is a maternity nurse. Both of them work part-time. They don't work full-time. I think Marcia works three-fifths. And I think Laurie works four-fifths. A lot of time, she works at night and sleeps in the morning. It is an entirely different lifestyle than I had, you know. BWS: It helps, doesn't it? AM: Oh, it helps with the income. I should say. And they get their insurance for nothing. BWS: And you can't beat the Mayo Clinic. AM: Wonderful place. I had a tumor on my pituitary gland. That is in the center of your skull. They went up through my nose and broke it off in pieces and then vacuumed it out. It is amazing what they can do. Didn't open me up at all. It is amazing what they can do. BWS: When you were a kid, did your family go to Rochester much? For shopping or anything? AM: Mother went to Rochester when she had anemia and diabetes. BWS: Did you go to the Cities much? AM: No, we didn't go to the Cities very much. We had some relatives that lived up there. Cousins and things. We went there for that. And then my sister lived in Minneapolis after she was married. BWS: It was a bigger trip and took longer. AM: You didn't have cars like you have now. My dad was progressive that way. He was one of the first ones to have a car. He had a Flanders car. It was made by Studebaker. They bought Flanders. Then, after that, we always had cars. We always had cars. All my life. He was early in buying tractors and things like that. My dad was progressive that way. That helped. And he didn't smoke. But he chewed snuff. I never learned to smoke. I never became a smoker for some reason. I don't know how I escaped it, but I did. I feel great about it. Dad would smoke a cigar once in a while, socially and stuff like that. But he didn't smoke cigarettes. But he chewed a lot of snoose. And I couldn't stand it. I never did taste snoose. I don't know what it was like. I never started. BWS: Do you remember social activities in the valley as a kid? Picnics?
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AM: Churches. We had more churches in this area than anyplace, you know. They were built in the horse-and-buggy days. We have churches all over. BWS: You have got the Vang church out here. AM: That is the one we belong to. You have the Holden church. The home of St. Olaf [College]. South of us a little bit, about five miles. BWS: How was that the home of St. Olaf? AM: The pastor started St. Olaf right there in the parsonage. At Holden there. But then they got connected up and went to Northfield. His name was Muus. BWS: He was pretty important in Norwegian American and Minnesota history. AM:Yes. And he started most of the churches in the community. These are satellite churches of Holden. Vang and Urland church over here and the others, too, I think. The Dala church. The Holden parish had two churches, Holden and Dala. The minister serves both churches. BWS: They are Norwegian Lutheran? AM: Not any more. They are ALC now. They merged so many times. BWS: Did the Norwegian Synod ever come down here? AM: No, I don't think so. The Norwegian Lutheran Church. BWS: Over in Mankato, there is the Norwegian Synod Lutheran seminary. AM: Is that right? There is another one in Wisconsin called the Wisconsin Synod. That is very conservative. BWS: None of that? AM: No. BWS: And St. Olaf. Isn't Concordia in Moorhead connected, too? AM: Yes, that is our church school.
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BWS: The Lutheran Free Church, was that down here at all? AM: There are a number of them. Over here at Asplund, there is a church that belongs to the Free Church. And there is one in Wanamingo. And Augsburg College is a Free Church college, of course. But they are merged now, you know. BWS: There are a lot of little churches. AM: There was one on highway 56, too, near Holden Township called the Little Cannon Church. But that was too small. As a matter of fact, Vang Church, you know, was located a mile south of where it is now. That is where we have our cemetery. The church was at the cemetery. And then they decided to build a new church a mile north of the cemetery. And then the people who lived south of us were dissatisfied with that. So, they built a church called the Little Cannon Church. It was kind of a small group and it didn't survive. BWS: How did you decide which church you would go to? AM: My family always went to Vang, so I never had any choice. BWS: Because it was closer? AM: The farm is almost the same distance to Holden as it is to Vang. But my grandfather went there, so my father went there and I went there. BWS: It is a pretty church. AM: It is a unique church. The architect that built it, it is the only church that he built. He came from Faribault. He was deaf. And we have such a good organist now. We have a man from Norway who was a minister in Norway and he lives in Faribault and we got him as our organist. He is very good. He plays the organ very well. And we have a good pipe organ. It is an old one, but it is good. BWS: Still a lot of the same families go to Vang church, as you do? AM: Pretty much. Vang seems to struggle all the time, but in recent years, we even have a surplus at the end of the year. BWS: Are there other cemeteries around, besides the one connected with the Vang church? AM: Urland has a cemetery. Holden has a cemetery. All the churches seem to have a cemetery of their own in the area.
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BWS: Are there any that are not connected with churches? AM: No, not in this area. I don't think so. We have a Methodist church over here that was supported mostly by one family. That isn't used anymore except by the family who has one service there every year. This is mostly Lutheran around here. There are some Catholics. Kenyon has a Catholic church. And Cannon Falls has a nice, large Catholic church. And there are a couple of Lutheran churches there, too. And in Kenyon, you have two Lutheran churches and one just outside of town less than a mile. Three Lutheran churches. That is crazy. You have all these churches in the same denomination. BWS: I want to ask you a little bit about your houses again. Do you have limestone foundations on any of the houses? AM: No. We have a limestone foundation on the barn. There was a quarry right behind the house. So, when I grew up, it wasn't covered up very well. A lot of stone still there. But then we covered it up and made a nice lawn out of it. When I was very small, when we first got there, it wasn't covered up very well. The quarry and the debris, it was still around there. BWS: What did they quarry it for? AM: I am sure they used it to build the barn. That was all limestone. Big, wide walls. Part of it is still there. BWS: The Dalbotten family may have done that? AM: I suppose. They lived there a long time. That was a large family, too. There were many families around here. Many women in the family, you know. The Charlesona and the Haugens and the Floms. The wives were Dalbottens. One of my mother's brothers was married to a Dalbotten. There were two brothers and three or four sisters. BWS: Do you remember hearing that the limestone was used for small houses before they could build big farmhouses? AM: I don't know of anything like that. BWS: Dugouts or anything like that? AM: No. It must have been before my time. My grandmother on my father's side was born in this country. When you speak to Pearl, she is my father's cousin. Her father was the youngest in the family and my grandmother was one of the older ones. We were
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classmates in grade school and then I got one year behind her when I went to high school because I stayed home farming. She got one year ahead of me. BWS: Is there anything else you would like to say about life in the valley? What it was like when you were a kid? When you came back? AM: We didn't go very far. We went to Kenyon, or to town, on Saturday night. That was the big outing we had every week. We used to have a lot of ice cream socials in those days. Much of our social life was involved with the church. They would have an ice cream social to raise some money. Vang would have one. Holden would have one. Urland would have one. And we would go to all the ice cream socials when we were kids. BWS: Fourth of July? AM: We always celebrated the Fourth of July. We always had firecrackers and sparklers and fireworks. We used to have them right on the farm. In later years, Cannon Falls always had a celebration on the Fourth of July. They have their fair then. That is the wind-up of their fair. They have it for three days in July always. BWS: Did you go to the fair? AM: Everybody went to the Cannon Valley Fair, it seemed, in those days. It was a crowded place on the Fourth of July. They would have harness races and things like that. Show livestock and animals and things like that. BWS: Anything else? AM: I spent two years in Red Wing and I got away from our group when I went there. But then when I came back to high school, I played basketball and I played football and did all those things. But I wasn't good enough to play in college. I went out one season, but I could see…St. Olaf had wonderful football teams when I was there. So, I couldn't make it, so I dropped it. BWS: Did you take Norwegian at St. Olaf? AM: Yes, I did. I don't know why I did. I shouldn't have. BWS: I thought you had to. AM: You either had to take Norwegian or Norwegian history. I chose the Norwegian. I thought I could handle that better. It was too easy for me.
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BWS: Anything that stands out in your mind from those times? AM: I remember the depression was awfully tough. When I finished college in '33, I had to borrow money from my insurance and everything. Dad had to sell some cows to buy me a suit for the graduation. It was tough. On the farm, you didn't have any problem getting food, of course. We had our food. Milk and meat. BWS: How did you manage to go to St. Olaf? AM: I was the only boy. They really should have sent my sister to St. Olaf because she was a much better student than I was. [I don't know what my mother had in mind for me. But I became a farmer.] BWS: Thank you, Mr. Maring.
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