10 februari 2022

The Larson Brothers

Bill & Carl: 

Together in life,

Together in death

 

 

The late Bill Larson and Carl Larson of Oklee, Minnesota and a few head of their registered Belgian horses pause for a photo op in their field south of their homestead in Red Lake County.

 The Larson farm near Oklee, Minn., in Red Lake County, was homesteaded by John Larson in 1896. Carl said his dad was in Montana working as a cowboy when he heard about free land in northern Minnesota.

"They heard you could get 160 acres of land for nothing. They thought that was too good," said Carl Larson. "So he came to Crookston and walked out here and staked a claim."

To get to Crookston and stake that claim meant a 40 mile hike across country. The free land turned out to be mostly a floating bog.

"I'll tell you; this land was just nothing but swamp. It wasn't drained. It took a hundred years before it was fit to live in," said Carl.

Along with their father, mother and two older brothers, the Larsons expanded the 160 acre homestead to about 1,000 acres. That's nearly two square miles, and it was all farmed with horses. The brothers were working on the farm by the time they were five, feeding chickens and driving horses. They finished 8th grade at the one room country school nearby, but education beyond 8th grade was not an option.

The Larson's modernized, but they also held onto the past. They raised purebred Belgian draft horses for 55 years, as well as registered cattle and hogs.

"When we farmed with horses we figured we made 20 miles a day with the horses, you know," said Carl.

"You make 20 miles a day walking behind a harrow in a loose field, you're kind of played out," added Bill.


Bill and Carl Larson traveled the globe during World War II, but returned to their Minnesota farm.     Each spent four years fighting in World War II. Bill went ashore at Normandy and was in the Battle of the Bulge. Carl was a medic in the South Pacific, and remembered treating wounded soldiers for days without sleep.

After the war they returned to the farm, the business was changing, horses were being replaced by machines. Bill said they bought the first diesel tractor in the county. Diesel fuel cost nine cents a gallon, and gasoline was about 14 cents a gallon.

Bill and Carl Larson loved the land they helped their family change from a swamp to a productive farm. Carl had said none of the brothers married, never had plans to leave, and they never thought about moving to town. Carl admitted to me he had some regrets about not starting a family of his own.

"We felt town was the poorest place you can be in. That's about the same as these nursing homes. If you live in town you just sit and look out the window. But here we can go out and do something, you know," said Carl.

But Carl admitted there were some consolations for age.

"We don't get up at 5 o'clock now, but we get up at 6 o'clock and we go to bed at 9. We take it kind of easy," he had confessed.

 They’d cut and split 10 cords, or about 20 pickup truck loads, each year. In addition to cutting all their own wood, the Larson brothers worked several hours a day in a huge garden. They gave away most of the produce, hundreds of fresh tomatoes and gallons of strawberries to neighbors.

"When some of the neighbors come around they say, 'Have you taken the mulching off the strawberries yet? Are they going to be good this year?' In other words, they're looking for strawberries. Well, you can't blame 'em. Nothing wrong with that," said Bill with a chuckle. "But whenever we need help, all we have to do is go to the telephone and there they are."

Bill said that's one thing that hasn't changed in 150 years. In rural Minnesota, neighbors still look out for each other.

One evening in November of 2009, Bill Larson, at 98 years of age and using a walker, left an outbuilding where he and Carl were skinning a deer, to walk the short distance to their house to turn on the yard light. Apparently, he became confused in the dark and missed the house. When Bill didn’t return, Carl, age 96, went to find him. Not finding Bill in the house, he went searching for him, and in the dark slipped and fell into a ditch along their neighbor’s driveway, across the road from the Larson farm. Unable to climb out of the ditch, Carl in just a lightweight jacket, spent the rest of the night out in the cold, where he was discovered by the neighbor, by chance, then taken to the hospital by ambulance.

Although suffering the effects of hypothermia, Carl miraculously survived, but Bill had not, his body was found on Larson’s field south of the house, by a passing deer hunter.

Three months later, Carl Larson died in a nursing home, never to go home again, on February 11, 2010. Carl O. Larson was born February 5, 1914 in Skanes, Sweden, the son of John and Mary (Johnson) Larson.

 

A 2007 Birthday Poem to Bill and Carl:

Happy birthday to the two gardeners

who start their hundred tomato plants in tiny cups

along the window sills and shelves on the back porch

 in March

whose seedbeds lie by the barn in wait under last fall's mulch

warming in the increasing sun of the coming planting year

where birds search its surface for seeds and worms

in the rich humus called The Garden

where two brothers, eager to be outdoors again

after a long cold winter

lovingly stir it 

prod it, pull it

being there to breathe it in

give some meaning to their long lone lives

for another growing season

their great horses gone, their work aside

their names in uninspired memory wait

for conversation about days gone by

in The Garden

they sweat with dirt under their fingernails

wrinkled skin glistening

a breeze that wafts their foreheads, 

they wipe away with the back of their hardworking hands

then smile

thinking of their lives, family and friends

all these years.