Stories and histories of Divide County

• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: North Dakota State Library
• Subjects: Granite Falls; Homestead; Lofoten; Minot; Monson; Norway; Rock Pile; Roland; Sitter
• Online Access: http://cdm16921.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ndsl-books/id/40350

Laila Gudrun married Oscar W. Letty and they have 5 daughters and he is in civil service at Bowie, Maryland. John Alexander married Cecilia Wittmey and they have 3 children. John is at Kansas State University. Roland married Peggy Graham and they have 7 children. He is with the B. F. Goodrich Co. at Miami, Oklahoma. We have 18 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren. We still have our farm. We belong to the Lutheran Church which we helped to build over 50 years ago. Most of our old friends and neighbors have either died or moved away and we miss them. Our young neighbors are nice and friendly and helpful. We want to stay on the farm as long as we are able. "Thoughts for the book" by Mrs. John A. Johnson. For entertainment during the early days we hitched a horse to a stone boat, put a barrel on the boat, filled the barrel with water and set out to drown gophers. We also used the stone boat and horse when we called on neighbors and friends. Other entertainments were our dinners. We always invited our neighbors for dinner even if we had only a one room shack. This we kept up over the years. If we went to a dance we did not hire a baby sitter. We took our children along and made beds for them on the benches. For bedding we used our coats and other wrappings we happened to have along. We also went together and played whist and many times did not come home before the wee hours of the morning. In the early years we women helped make a living with churning butter, raising chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks. I did churn lots of butter and about 40 years later I introduced myself to a lady as Mrs. Johnson from Colgan, and she said , "Oh, are you "Butter Johnson"? We also helped in the fields, with the milking and feeding pigs. Another income I helped with was rock picking. The quarter we bought from Jenson was a rock pile. We picked rocks and we picked rocks. We hauled them home and piled them neatly. When the railroad came west the little town of Colgan sprang up and they started building. We sold rocks to the bank, Knoph's Store, two elevators and others. We even donated rocks when a church in Ambrose was built. I helped load the rocks we sold. We still had rocks left so when we built our house in 1926 we had lots to put in to make a solid wall and floor in our basement. When our evergreens started growing we sold some to R. H. Points at Crosby and Bill Hanson at Ambrose. Our children finished grade and high school in Colgan. Church work in the community started in 1906 when mission pastors came and had services in homes and school houses. We joined the Lutheran Free Church at a meeting held by Pastor E. Erickson in what was called the Monson School in 1913. I had joined the Ladies Aid earlier the same year at the home of Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Pederson. The most outstanding Ladies Aid meeting I have ever attended was at the Soo Depot in Colgan. We had spoken for the depot as we were to have a sale and to serve dinner and our homes were not large enough. It happened to be a cold, stormy day. None of us knew if we should go or not. It turned out to be a very successful day. Amongst other things the members had donated was a doll. The proud fathers kept on bidding over each other so the doll went sky high. Mr. George Monson was the lucky papa. The next day when we came back to clean up everything was frozen solid. We got the stove heated up, water warmed, dishes washed and everything in order. All of us were happy and in good spirits. FRANK JORDAN I filed in 1905, and in 1906 I built my homestead shack and sodded it right up to the peak of the roof, which made it real warm. It was just one room at that time. Later I added on to make three rooms and removed the sod. A part of my present house is my original homestead shack. The lumber for my homestead shack, I hauled from Portal, North Dakota, with two horses and a wagon. I drove a stake in the ground to tie my horses for the night. In the morning the horses were gone. They had managed to pull the stake and had dragged the tether rope all the way to Columbus, North Dakota, where they got the rope tangled around a post. A man there found them and put them in a pasture. I had to walk all the way to Columbus to get them back. In the early days, one Fall, in threshing time, a prairie fire was started by a threshing machine near Westby, Montana. It burned across the prairie along the Canadian border from Westby to Hans Rollie's place near Colgan, North Dakota. It burned everything in its . path except the Buildings which had furrows plowed around them for fire breaks. All of the hay was gone for that year. My sister, "Josie," homesteaded two miles north of my land. After she sold her homestead she married "Ed." Brockamp and moved to Montana. After her husband passed away she came back to live with me and keep house for me. Her son Frank lives with us and helps with the farm work. THE CHRIST PEDERSON FAMILY Christian Pederson was born in Lyngvar, Lofoten, Norway in 1878. He grew to manhood there. In 1902 he came to Madelia, Minnesota. Later he went to Granite Falls. He had not been there long before he heard about free land in western North Dakota, so in the fall of 1903 he and a cousin, Eilert Strand, came out and located land one and a half miles east of Colgan. They stopped in Minot to file on the way back. In the spring of 1904 they came back to North Dakota and built 8' x 10' tar-papered shacks and arranged for the required improvements. They came back the next fall and spring and stayed a few weeks, and in the fall of 1905 they came to stay permanently. 263 Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.