In 2019, when you’re sitting in a tractor for hours at a time like I’ve been doing lately, idle until it’s time to meet the combine at some designated place on the field, there’s often been an opportunity to lazily gaze across the expanse of field all around and just think.
Such as happened when it dawned on me, that I’m taking a role in an activity because of which my three sisters and I were born. Our folks, Guy Reynolds and Violet Palm, met during wheat harvest on the E.L. (Alex) Haaven farm near Osnabrock, North Dakota in 1928.
Dad was twenty-three. Mom was nineteen. In fact, as almanac facts go, my folks would’ve celebrated their 90th wedding anniversary this last March 6th, as this chance romantic meeting lead to their marriage in 1929.
As I explained to my neighbor, David, during a terrific conversation after a day’s work was done, Dad had been dating a young woman named Ruth Brubaker, back in Illinois, near Franklin Grove, for, as I understand, three years before he was going to pop the question. And although she was apparently willing, her father was not, declaring Guy too poor, monetarily, to support her, and so denied Dad his wish. Thanks, Mr. Brubaker!
Meanwhile, 700 miles northwest, Violet, a young teenage Minnesota woman; her father, Wilhelm (known as ‘Willie’ to friends and neighbors); and her younger brother Raymond were gearing up for their yearly wheat harvest trek to Osnabrock, Nort’ Dakota, as were many of their rural neighbors in Palmville and surrounding townships hired by the hand-labor intensive needs of Bonanza farms one hundred or more miles away. This work was ‘extra’ money to see these Minnesota families through winter.
https://www.mnopedia.org › bonanza-farms-red-river-valley
Violet, Willie, and Raymond had worked for the Haaven farm for three years by 1928.
Her dad was an engineer of a steam engine (a steam-powered steel-wheeled tractor) that was slowly moved, under its own power, to what became its stationary location on the field, in front of the threshing machine.
His job was operator of the steam engine. He maintained the engine making sure everything was lubricated at the right intervals, and steam pressure was maintained and controlled. He operated the levers and valves necessary for the operation of the threshing machine.
Raymond was a fireman, (in this case stoking a fire instead of putting one out) who shoveled coal or wood into the firebox of the boiler to heat the water that created the steam that, under pressure, turned the flywheels of the steam engine which conveyed their rotational power, via very long belts, to the threshing machine; that consumed ‘bundles’ (or sheaves) of wheat, that had been cut in the field either by hand or horse-drawn reaper, then shocked (or stood) upright in the field until, at some point later, they were stacked high on wagons often drawn by horses.
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| A horse-powered reaper a precursor to the modern combine |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYp0fECDs10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC8bXkYbsRU
As a threshing camp cook, Violet’s job was preparing meals, by hand, for a large crew. Working in a small wood ‘cookshack’ on wheels, she cooked from dawn to dusk using a woodstove, heavy cast iron pots & pans and fresh vegetables and meat. If she had help, I’m unaware, but I imagine cooking five meals from scratch a day, for even a small crew of working men would be a lot to expect out of one person, though Ma was, seemingly, never out of energy and gumption. Her exemplary cooking skills gleaned from her experience as a threshing camp cook always showed through at church suppers where great numbers of people were fed. I don’t think short-orders were ever her specialty; we ate plenty of left-overs when I was growing up.
Meanwhile, broken-hearted Dad collared his best friend, Ed Holbrook, (maybe because Ed had a car) and they took off to Texas to work the harvest back north to North Dakota and the border country, where harvest would end; after which they planned to go up to Winnipeg and blow off some steam, before heading back home.
Dad flirted with the Haaven’s threshing camp cook by criticizing her pie or some meal she had made; and Violet, as the story goes, not one to take such criticisms lightly, admonished this harvester with her sharp tongue in reply, setting him straight on all matters culinary and otherwise, then ultimately said, “Yes,” when the lout proposed to her within six weeks before it was time for he and Ed to leave for Winnipeg.
The old folks there said she’d never see or hear from him again, and assured her that she wasn’t so old, at 19, not to get another chance at marriage. They were wrong. The next year, in the spring of 1929, after exchanging a year of love letters, Guy sent her a train ticket to join him in Des Moines, Iowa where they would be married. No one of her family could attend, that I'm aware, but Willie and Raymond had met Guy and worked with him and so knew the kind of man he was; they trusted him to do right by her.
Moving back to Franklin Grove, Guy and Violet moved-in with an elderly farm couple for whom they began working, Dad in the fields and Mom as a housekeeper and caretaker. My oldest sister, Ann Marie, was born there in Franklin Grove in 1930, and as an infant went with the folks to Palmville to meet her grandparents so eager to meet her too.
Mom and Dad were married for 53 years; until Mom died at age 73 with a heart ailment. Dad died at age 87.
Now this story would’ve ended there, had I not met Orlin Ostby of Gatzke, Mn., in 2005 or thereabouts, who asked me to join him for a Minnesota sesquicentennial project involving an ox and ox cart; he thought I may be interested writing about his project because I wrote and published a local magazine.
And so it was by chance, that Orlin had many friends and relatives along the Red River of the North of whom he often talked about in conversation.
Mentioning the little towns of Milton, Crystal, and Park River one day as we drove toward Edinburgh to help build a sod house, I asked him where they were in relationship to Osnabrock, North Dakota.
“Osnabrock?? he said, shocked I would ask. “Who do you know in Osnabrock?”
“Nobody,” I said, suddenly very interested in his reaction. “My folks met on a wheat field there in 1928 and I’ve always wanted to know where it was, exactly. I wouldn’t be here talking to you, if it wasn’t for that meeting.”
“Whose farm?” he said, excitedly, like I had just told him of a stash of gold bullion hidden in the hills.
“The Alex E.L. Haaven farm,” I said, looking at him now grip the steering wheel with both hands. “I’ve looked around the town cemeteries and can’t find any family plots, so I don’t know where they were or where.”
“I don’t recognize the name,” Orlin said, obviously thinking hard about the name ‘Haaven’. “I’ll call my mom!”
It fascinated me that, Orlin’s mom was still living, Orlin being as old as he was -- my age now, of sixty-eight-- and now thanks to this new world of cellphone technology he could simply call her as we sped west on a rural two-lane blacktop toward Walsh County.
“Ma?” Orlin asked, not presuming the voice on the other end was, in fact, his mother. “Hey, Ma. I got Steve here with me and he told me about how his ma and pa met on the Alec Haaven farm in 1928 by Osnabrock. You know this farm?”
Clear from the other side of the pickup, I heard her practically shout, “ORLIN! YOU KNOW THAT FARM! IT’S THE DENAULT PLACE!”
Orlin’s eyes practically burst from their sockets. He looked at me, speechless. (An extremely rare circumstance--ask anybody that knows him) His ma went on to say, “The Denaults bought the Haaven place and moved in with all them little kids. You know them!”
All the light bulbs went on in Orlin’s brain--and mine, when I heard that. How was it, that here I sat on my way into North Dakota with a guy who had been on the farm where my folks met some 77 years earlier? What were the odds of that?
“The Denaults!” Orlin said, drifting into silence as his memories began replaying his childhood spent at his grandparent’s farm near Osnabrock when he rode horseback with the Denault kids all over that very same farm country. “I know them!”
Orlin and his Ma talked about the Denault kids getting off the schoolbus and going up to “Gramma’s” (Orlin’s grandparents) for milk and cookies, often staying there until their parents came home from work.
“The house and barn are all gone, you know, just the foundations remain, but Denaults built a new little house in its place,” his ma went on to say.
“Thanks, Ma!” Orlin said, adding “Yah, I’m going to take him over there so he can see it.”
So it was, after our expedition to Edinburgh and the sod house, the next day we took a drive to the Denault place with no forewarning to them of our arrival. Driving into their driveway about nine on a sunny Sunday morning, Orlin told me and his son Chris to wait in the truck--something Chris and I were both eager to do given our element of surprise. Chris slid down in his seat real low; I just sat there tentative, trying to just look straight ahead.
But we could hear Orlin knock loudly on the door, and saw people look carefully at us through slits in various curtains. Orlin knocked again, standing on their porch, looking into the rising sun. The door opened, just a little bit.
I heard Orlin say, “Hi. I’m Orlin Ostby. You don’t know me, but I knew your family when you first moved in here and, judging by how young you look, you weren’t born yet, but I used to know ...” and he went on to rapidly name six older children, apparently her siblings, to which she responded with some laughter, repeating what it was she heard to someone else in the house behind her.
“I used to ride ponies with your brother Adrian,“ Orlin said, stepping away from the doorway.
Looking south into the distance, he said, “His pony was named, “Flint.” We rode all over this country, these hills.”
She squealed and the door flew open. Both women stood at the door, all caution aside.
“The reason we stopped here today--I’m sorry I didn’t know your phone number or I would’ve called--is that Steve here ... Steve! Come up here and tell them your story!”
And so I did, happy that Orlin had smoothed the way and thwarted their apprehension on such a beautiful Sunday morning. They said I could look around the old foundations and stuff and apologized that no one had mowed down the sentinels of sweet clover standing guard around them. There was nothing left of the house, its ruin long since bulldozed from the earth, just an open clearing remaining. Tall old cottonwoods, perhaps old enough to have known 1928, stood silent to the west; their debris of fallen limbs and uprooted trunks, below.
One of the women asked for my address, saying her dad had bought an aerial picture of the farm, not long after he bought the place that included the house and barns, and that she would send me a copy of it. I was elated, but didn’t hold out hope she would follow through, as good intentions don’t often come to fruition.
But, sure enough, one day about four months later ...
Thanks, Steve! I've always wondered how you ended up in Des Moines.
ReplyDeleteLove these true stories, as told to us by the progeny of Reynolds and Palm! Who'da thunk?
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