Earliest Memories
My first memories of home are of a neat little frame house built in a clearing with big oak trees all around. Stumps dotted the long grass around the house. On the west and south side Father had planted two rows of little evergreen trees. Most of them he moved out of the woods. On the north and east side Mother had planted apple and plum trees that she had grown from seed. Mother and Father said I never tired of listening to them telling about how things were when they came to live there.
Father immigrated from Norway when he was 25 years old. He was educated as a school teacher from Norway and he taught in parochial schools around and in Highland Prairies for several years. He also was a carpenter and built several houses.
When Mother was 18 years old her parents’ home burned down. Tarkjel Landsverk was hired to build a new roomy frame house. And thus Father and Mother met. After the house was completed, Mother’s parents, Gunhild and Ole Oian, hired father to teach their teenaged children to write and do arithmetic work. Up to that time, Mother had had only five days of formal education. The nearest school was five miles away.
Many years later when Helga Oian had promised to become his wife, Father bought a 60 acre farm from Iver Heglie. On it he built a frame house. In May 1898 they were married and moved into their new home. He moved the log cabin that was there closer to his new house and used it as a barn for the cow and calf that Mother had received from her parents when she married. There was also room for an old mare called Nellie. The upstairs housed a few chickens.
The house Tarkjel “built for his bride” (at left) was the subject of Margit’s painting “Landsverk house with chickens”.
Notice the carving over the back porch. That triangular panel was later donated to Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, Decorah IA.
The first months the lived there they carried all their water from a little creek about one quarter mile away. During the first summer Father dug and built of stone a 12 foot by 12 foot rainwater cistern close to the house. Rain from the roof was gathered in eave toughs which ran into the cistern. Now when water was needed, it was pumped up and carried in pails for drinking and washing.
The stone cistern Margit mentions can be seen here to the right of the sleigh.
By the way, the horse Nellie was the topic of one of Tarkjel’s poems, Til Hesten Min (“To My Horse”).
Father had never owned or taken care of a horse. It was Mother who showed him how to put on the harness and hitch Nellie up to the cutter or buggy.
I remember hearing about one of our first rides in the cutter. There was deep snow with a crust on top. When one of the runners suddenly cut into the snow and the other runner slid on top, Nellie jerked forward and tupped us out in the snow. Mother said I was so well bundled up, I didn’t even wake up.
Margit at 18 months
Father was away carpentering sometimes for a week at a time while Mother took care of the work both inside and outside. Besides doing the chores, she planted little strawberry patches where the brush piles had been burned. She gathered the berries into 14 quart cans and pails and sold them for seven cents a quart or $1.00 a pail to friends and neighbors. They brought their cans and pails to carry them home.
Next chapter: My Brothers and Sisters
Margit Mindrum 