He said, “Well, then, go get one from the log house.”
After the tornado destroyed their home, the family had to live with relatives until they could rebuild. By this time the grandparents, Jakob and Karen, had died and the roof of their log house was gone, so the Walstads couldn’t live there.
Eventually, like most homesteaders, Hans and Sofie were able to build a frame house. Finally they had a permanent home and a farm that did well, after surviving many hard years of drought, hailstorms and grasshopper invasions. Then, a few weeks after the older daughter, Mathilde, was married, Hans died. Sofie continued to live on the farm with Anton long after her husband died and both girls had married and left home.
Uncle Anton was a gifted musician who played the accordion. If he heard a song once, he could play it. He would play at dances, although his mother didn’t like that, so he wouldn’t tell her about the dances.
One time, when he was a young man working as a hired hand, he took ill and lost all the hearing in one ear and most of it in the other, but he could still play his accordion.
Uncle Anton loved to read, especially the newspaper. He took several Norwegian papers and also the Chicago Tribune, and could talk about current events. He’d save the funny papers for me and bring a whole roll of funny papers over to our house. I looked forward to that so much, and I’d lay on the floor reading them for hours.
He never married, because he had a large growth on his forehead that, along with his deafness, made him selfconscious.
My mother would drive our horse and buggy five miles west to see her mother and brother and take them food and things. I remember going along one time and seeing Grandmother Sofie in bed in a little room off the kitchen. She couldn’t walk very well when she was older. She was very hunched over because of being gored by a bull years ago and thrown over. It had broken her back, and she just laid on the couch for a long time until she could manage to get around.
Her house smelled stale, like dank coffee, because a pot of coffee sat all day on the stove. Outside was the shed and the old machinery and wagons. Uncle Anton didn’t farm but would work for neighboring farmers. The Walstad land was rented out to other people who farmed it. Mother would talk about how she’d like to restore the old farm with a sod barn and a dugout house like her father had lived in. She wanted to recreate a historic place for people to come see.
For awhile, when Uncle Anton was no longer able to care for her, Grandmother lived with us. She couldn’t speak English. She’d take my hand and say, “Oh my lieten yenta.” She’d show me her finger with a big scar where she’d run a needle through it as a seamstress in Chicago. I was nine when she died. Her casket stayed in our living room, where someone would come and sit all night with it. Neighbors and friends would “sit up with the casket” as a customary service to the family.
She was the only grandmother I knew, because my dad’s parents, John and Annie Marker, died before I was born.
Sophie Walstad in front of their frame house
Side porch of the Walstad home
John Wilson Sr., of Winchester, Virginia
Chapter Two:
The Markers
The Markers and Wilsons came to Nebraska from Winchester, Virginia along with several other families. George Cather was the first, so the area was called Catherton Township and referred to as the New Virginia Community because of the many homesteaders from that state. However, my grandfather Hans Walstad always maintained that he was there before George Cather.
The youngest boy, Albert, got the Wilson migration started. In Virginia he was working for George Cather and one day just disappeared. He was gone several years, no one knew where.
Then one day he reappeared and told his family about homesteading in Nebraska. He had come out with the George Cathers. Now he had his own place and was proving up his claim, and he talked his brothers into coming out there to homestead. So the Wilson brothers and their brother-in-law John Marker decided to go to Nebraska, to that area called New Virginia.
John and Annie Wilson Marker brought three little children with them and then had seven more in Nebraska. Elizabeth was the oldest, then Tisha who died as a young woman of tuberculosis, and a son Joseph, who died at age two. Then came my dad, also named John. After him, there was Dora, Carrie, Bernice, Albert, Leone and Ford.
Uncle Albert was the rebellious one of the Marker children. When he was sixteen, they were living in their sod house and somehow scraping by. Setting on the porch were a couple barrels of molasses to get them through the year for their sugar. One day my grandmother found a dead cat in the molasses, so they had to pour it all out. Years later Uncle Albert admitted that he’d been the one to tip the lid so the cat could fall in. He’d been scolded for something and was mad, so he stormed out of the house past the molasses barrel and tipped the lid, sticking his fingers in for a lick.
He ran off shortly after and no one knew where, but Omaha seemed to be his headquarters. He tramped around the country riding the railroads, spending his winters in Omaha.
One day in the 1930’s, my dad came in and said, “Albert’s home.”
Uncle Albert said he would stay and help Uncle Ford on the farm, but he insisted on sleeping in the barn. After a couple months, he was gone. Another year he showed up and worked for a few months, then disappeared again.
One time an Omaha hospital called to say Albert died. Ford and Bernice buried him in the family plot at the New Virginia cemetery but refused to get a tombstone. Later, after Ford and Bernice had died, my cousin Cecil Johnson bought a tombstone for Uncle Albert when he ordered the ones for Ford and Bernice.
Uncle Ford and Aunt Leone were the youngest Markers. Aunt Leone and her husband went to Missouri during the drought and bought a farm there. Uncle Ford stayed on the family farm to work the land after the father died in 1904.
Except for Albert who ran off, the Markers were a closeknit group and did what they could to help each other. Even though I was an only child, I had a very large extended family on the Marker and Wilson side—many aunts, uncles and cousins who lived nearby—who liked to get together for family reunions and to visit one another. We always celebrated Christmas with Aunt Dora’s family, Uncle Ford and Aunt Bernice.
One summer about 1928, we had a Chevrolet with an open trunk on the back for carrying suitcases. Dad, Mother, Aunt Bernice and I drove that car out to visit Aunt Carrie and Uncle Ed in Greeley, Colorado. They lived on the edge of town, had a big garden and a milk cow. Uncle Ed also raised hogs. He’d go to the lodges in the mountains near Estes Park and get their garbage to feed his hogs. When the hogs got fat, he’d sell them. He bought apples, peaches and cabbage from different farmers and would bring them to Nebraska to sell, usually staying at our place.
Their daughter Gladys, who had Downs Syndrome, was about eight and she kept telling us, “Go back to Nebraska.” We disturbed her routine. She always wanted the kitchen cabinets shut and they were open a lot with visitors in the house. She’d scowl at us and say, “Go back to Nebraska,” then slam the cupboard doors shut.
Their son Clayton had run away and while we were there, he came back home. He’d been gone awhile, Aunt Carrie didn’t know where and oh, how glad she was to see him. She decided to send him to a religious school in Denver that fall. He went there and turned out alright, not like Uncle Albert. He became a metal worker, working with furnaces, and did well in his business, married and raised a family.
On that trip to Greeley, we stayed with Aunt Carrie and Uncle Ed about a week. One day we drove up to the mountains and Clayton and I sat in the trunk of the Chevrolet. Boy, that was fun. He and I had such a good view of the mountains.
As Gladys got older, she lived at home where Aunt Carrie always took care of her. When Carrie died, Uncle Ed had to put Gladys in a home. She was in her twenties when that happened but didn’t live very long after that.
Uncle Ford was our closest neighbor, living on the Marker farm one mile west of us. He never married. When school let out
for the summer, Aunt Bernice who also never married, would come back from Lincoln where she taught third grade and stay at Ford’s. After the Marker parents, John and Annie, had left the sod house, they bought land nearby and built a frame house in 1896. That was where Ford lived up until 1949, when Aunt Bernice retired. Then he built a new house on the same property. Those two, brother and sister, lived there and took care of each other until they died, first Ford then Bernice.
Aunt Bernice, like most of the Markers, saved her money and invested carefully. She had almost $100,000 when she died in 1970.
Young John Marker
LUCILLE MARKER
Granddaughter of Homesteaders
The old farm
The new farm
Chapter Three:
The New Farm
As a child, I lived on a new farm in Webster County, Nebraska, near the Kansas border. My parents had lived nearby on a farm with old buildings and a little three-room house, but now that they were expecting a child, my dad built a nice house. He wasn’t a carpenter, he had someone else do the work. It cost about $2000 for the house back in 1916. Sears Roebuck would send out books about their houses with floor plans and descriptions. Mother drew her own floor plan based on what she saw in the Sears Roebuck book.
My parents moved there two weeks before I was born in 1917. They kept the old place and hired someone else to work the land. Uncle Ford’s farm joined ours, so he and my dad often worked together.
Our farm was eight miles from the closest town, Inavale, which was very small, only 120 population. Our post office was in Inavale, and the mail carrier usually managed to deliver the mail in all kinds of weather, the mail routes being kept in better condition than some of the other roads.
Our house on the farm was two stories plus a basement. In the basement was a pressure tank. Water would run from the windmill into that tank, and from the pressure tank it would be pumped into the bathroom and kitchen. We could flush the toilet, very unusual at that time. Most people didn’t have running water in the house or an indoor toilet.
Upstairs in the bathroom was a clothes chute that went down the basement to a basket. Mother had her washing machine down there, an electric one with a ringer. She’d rinse clothes in the big concrete tubs of rinse water, then run them through the ringer and rinse them again if necessary. We hung the clothes out to dry on the heavy wire fence that surrounded the yard. She had a clothesline, but that was outside the yard so she always just hung them on the fence. In the windy Nebraska weather, the clothes dried fast.
The fence had a wide, wire gate that opened for coal to be brought into the coal bin down the basement. We didn’t use the coal furnace much, because the kitchen cookstove kept us warm. It used corn cobs and to hold the fire we’d use coal.
We mainly lived in the kitchen during the winter. I had a bed in my parents’ room off the kitchen and slept there when I was younger. When I did sleep upstairs, I didn’t want to be up there by myself, so Mother would sleep up there with me. I’d dress downstairs and run up to bed, it would be so cold.
For hot water, Dad had an oil heater in the basement that he lit on Saturdays for our baths. One time he lit it and it exploded, catching the kerosene tank on fire. Dad grabbed the burning tank with his bare hands, carrying it up the basement stairs and outside before anything else caught on fire.
His hands had to be completely bandaged, with Arnica salve to help relieve the pain. I’d help Mother change the bandages and saw the skin peeling. He couldn’t work for at least two weeks, so Mother had to milk the cows and put the hay out for the animals. Uncle Ford did any other work for Dad during that time.
Under the basement stairway a Lolley engine ran the power to give us electricity. It was a half basement, the other half was just dirt under the house. An area about two feet high under the floor joist and the finished basement, Mother used for storage of boards, old dishes and pans, things she didn’t want to throw away. She hid it with a curtain, so we always called that area “under the curtain.”
One thing about our house different from most farmhouses was a tunnel going from the basement to a storm cave. In case of a tornado, you could get to the storm cave from the outside or through the tunnel. When Mother was a little girl, her family’s sod house was destroyed by a tornado, so she always feared them and wanted us to be able to get to safety quickly.
One half of the storm cave had a lot of glass-sided batteries, about six inches wide and ten inches long, full of liquid, to store the electricity from the Lolley engine. After about fifteen years, the engine wore out, then my dad put a wind charger on top of the granary, and that charged the batteries and ran the electricity.
Aunt Bernice, one of my dad’s sisters, had an Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene. Mother wanted one of those so badly, but they cost $350, a lot of money back then, and my dad didn’t think it was worth it. We had 32V electricity that ran a fan, washing machine, lights and a radio, but it wasn’t enough for a refrigerator. Instead, we used an ice box. Finally, in 1950, Mother got the 120V electricity when the REA lines were built through our rural area, and she bought an electric refrigerator.
The first car I remember was a Hupmobile touring car with a canvas top and no windows, just open on the sides. In the winter my father would snap on canvas curtains with ising glass windows so the driver and passengers could see out. Those curtains helped to keep out most of the rain, wind or snow. For real cold weather we kept a bearskin in the back seat to put over our legs for long drives, like to Red Cloud fourteen miles away.
The speed limit was 45 miles per hour, but on the dirt country roads my father only drove 20-25 mph if they were dry. When it rained, the roads turned to mud and became slippery, then Dad put chains on the wheels and drove even more slowly. We tried never to drive on muddy roads or go anyplace if it looked like rain. More than once the car slipped into a ditch on one of the hilly roads close to home. If my parents couldn’t get it out, we’d walk home, then Dad took a team of horses and equipment back to pull the car out of the ditch.
On rare occasions, maybe two times a year, we drove to Hastings forty miles away, the biggest town anywhere near us, population about 10,000. Sometimes my parents needed to see the eye doctor there; or if Aunt Bernice was coming in from Lincoln on the train or the bus, we went to pick her up at the station. Once in a long while, during the winter when there wasn’t much farm work and if the weather was good, my parents and I would drive to Hastings just for fun, to spend the day.
We left early in the morning as it took over an hour to drive there. On the way we crossed over the Oregon Trail that so many covered wagons traveled back in the early 1800’s. I saw the old wagon wheel ruts crossing a pasture and thought about the hardships and adventures of those early travelers. Another place we passed was the fancy home of the man who had invented Kool-Aid.
One thing I liked about going to Hastings was eating in a restaurant. One restaurant had meals for forty cents. Another time when I was about six or seven, we went to a cafeteria where we picked up the food we wanted. Dad was ahead of me and Mother behind me. I liked everything I saw and filled my tray with lots of things. My dad just laughed and let me take whatever I wanted. Mother knew I had more than I could eat, so she didn’t take much. I took about a dollar’s worth of food, more than my dad had. I ate only a small portion, so Mother had plenty after all.
One winter we drove to Hastings with the side curtains on our Hupmobile. A cousin, Mildred Lutz, came along. On the way home, driving through the little town of Holstein, the sun shone in my dad’s eyes and he didn’t see a car turning in front of him. We collided and I ended up on the floor. Mildred would have been thrown out, but she got caught between the side curtains and the car. No one was hurt, just shaken up, because we were going so slowly, and soon we were on our way again.
When I was three, Dad and Uncle Ford dug a big hole back of the shop and were putting cement in. Ford was shoveling and I got in his way, wanting to see what they were doin
g like I always did, and the scoop shovel hit me right above the eye and cut a big gash.
They were building a cement foundation for the ice house. The foundation went two feet above ground, then a frame over that, with a door in one end. The door opened on the enclosed end where the frame was taller and went to a point.
In the winter when the ice got deep on the pond, Dad and Ford would cut ice and load it on the horse-drawn wagon, insulated by straw. They’d layer the ice and straw in the ice house clear up to the top, then heap it with gunny sacks and straw. All summer we’d have that ice. Mother would go out there with the wheelbarrow to get a block of ice for the refrigerator, or ice box, on the back porch.
One time Dad and Uncle Ford got the idea that snow would work just as well. They got snow that was heaped up along the banks and shoveled it into the ice house, with straw all around it. Then Mother shoveled snow into a gunny sack and put it in the ice box. She eventually moved the ice box from the back porch to the basement because the snow was messier than the ice.
When we wanted to freeze ice cream, we’d just scoop the snow into the ice cream freezer along with the salt. You wouldn’t have to break it up like you did the ice. Once they decided on snow, they always used snow.
Mother had to work pretty hard to get that snow out of the ice house, especially when it would get down deep near the end of summer, but she would do it without any help. She took great pride in being strong and able to lift heavy things. She could lift a fifty pound sack of sugar and carry it down the basement. She was nearly as tall as my dad, but pretty, too, with lots of reddish-gold hair piled on her head.
My dad’s hair was black and thick. I had dark hair like my dad but no curls. My hair was straight as a stick, and I wore it cut to chin-length with bangs that went across. I never thought I was pretty, but that didn’t bother me. I was too busy playing or helping my dad to worry about how I looked. My parents had made this farm where we had a comfortable home and everything we needed. I felt like they could do anything.
Farm Girl Page 2