SOME RECOLLECTIONS AT AGE 88
~By Florence Lindquist Kulberg
In 1905 my father, Andrew Lindquist, decided to leave Minnesota to homestead in North Dakota. With his brother, Gust, they each got a homestead of 160 acres south of what is now Hazen.
Mother, Arthur, Laura, and I joined them in late fall the same year. Oh, what a bare and lonely place. There were very few people living in the area, they were so far apart.
New Salem, our closest town, was 35 miles away. The folks would buy groceries there, going one day and coming back the next. Mama would go twice a year to buy materials and supplies. The men went more often to haul grain and buy groceries. We lived in a stone house in a coulee. The wind blew so hard. Mama made rugs for the floor and put lots of straw under them. I was so lonesome for my Aunt Anna, who lived in Minnesota, that I would sit in my little rocking chair (which I still have) and cry a lot.
Dad built a house on our homestead in 1906, and a few years later he and Gust put up a phone line between our places. The lines were fastened to fence posts except over the driveway, where they had to be built higher. If the phone rang, we knew it was Gust’s calling because nobody else had a phone. Years later, we had 20 or 30 parties on the line, and as kids we had a lot of fun “rubbering,” but we had to be quiet when we listened.
There were no schools or churches. We took turns with the neighbors having church services in our homes. We were hosts about once a month. A traveling pastor conducted the services, usually attended by 30 to 40 people. The lady of the house fixed dinner for all the people.
Our first school was at Julia Ramsteads, also on a claim. She had been a teacher in Minnesota. Together with my brother, Arthur, and our cousin, Amy, we went to her place for two terms (about 12 weeks.) I must have been about 9 then. I had a terrible time with language. I understood English, but answered in Swedish, and that didn’t go over very well. But it didn’t take long to learn English when so many kids were together. Arthur had a dog cart with room for only two. He would pick up Amy and I had to walk because she was lighter!
When my folks added a kitchen to our home they used that for a school room. About 26 children attended as more people moved into the area. Our home was used a couple of years for school. Julia Ramstead had married Alfred Soland and came every day to teach school. Dad and the neighbors got together and built benches and desks, the type where two students sat together. A country schoolhouse was built two miles from home as more people moved in.
I was 18 when I finished the eighth grade. The folks wanted me to go on to high school which had been started in Hazen, but I didn’t go. I stayed home and worked hard, as did my parents, for times were very hard.
I remember as a young girl going with Dad when he helped the neighbors thresh grain. My job was to help care for three young children, but in addition I also helped a lot with meals and lunches. At the end of the three days, instead of paying me they deducted 75 cents from Dad’s threshing charges. Later my folks raised geese and gave me two of them as wages. When they were grown, I sold them for $5. I carried that $5 a long time before spending it.
Laura and I weren’t much help to mother. We helped outside, doing chores of any kind, milking, caring for and harnessing several horses, and often plowing day in, day out. At harvest time we drove the binders, helped shock grain, loading and unloading bundles. At threshing time, it was a family working together. Mother had all she could do cooking, washing clothes by hand, and carrying lunch while we girls helped with the outside work. To tell the truth, I really didn’t know much about housework when I got married. My bread making was the worst. I’d mix it too stiff and didn’t let it raise enough, so it was heavy and tasteless.
My kids tell me, I turned into an expert bread baker. I had a big, round aluminum bread bowl and after we got a freezer I would make as many as 25 loaves a week.
Albert Kulberg, who became my husband, came from Minnesota to look for work around Hazen when he was 17, arriving by train with his bike and suitcase. After he came to work for us, he built a house on our farm and was joined by his cousin, Albert Beck. While Albert K. was in Minnesota for Christmas, Albert B. went into Hazen on Christmas Eve for a drawing. He had filled the stove with coal and forgot to shut the drafts. While he was at the drawing someone told him his house was burning. He understood the “hotel” was burning and didn’t get excited about it. When he got home, he found their house had burned to the ground.
After six months’ service in the Army, Albert K. bought a 12 by 34 foot house for $125 and moved it from the Soland farm. It was a one-room house which he divided into two rooms and put wallboard on the inside walls. He included a 3 x 12 foot closet, and put a heater in the cellar to serve as a furnace. When we got married in April 1919, we had only one dresser.
For a time we lived on the folks farm when they went back to Minnesota to run a restaurant at Kerkhoven, but after about two years my brother, Art, came back and took over the folks’ 320-acre farm, and we went back to running our 160-acre farm where we lived in the two-room house with the one closet, one dresser, and in time with our four small children (Esther, Lawrence, Clarence, and Walter.)
Albert mined coal at the farm. He got $1 a ton if they picked it up at the farm. When they did that, it meant I had to feed them a meal. If they got the coal in Hazen, it was $2 a ton.
Our little house was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. We had a barrel in the kitchen for snow and chunks of ice that were used for wash water. No washing machine—lucky to have a washboard, two tubs, a boiler and a clothes wringer. The tubs and boiler hung on the outside of the house when not in use. We didn’t have room for them inside.
In winters we would take our clothes off the line and bring them in at night to dry in the kitchen. It was really cold on the fingers when the clothes were frozen on the line, and sometimes the clothes would break so there was lots of mending each week.
In summer months I would go down to the coulee and carry two five-gallon pails of water up the hill. Later we made a cistern and hauled water from our good neighbors, the Solands.
In 1930 we left for Minnesota, arriving there on Halloween with our kids, some clothes, and our sale bill. Five more children were born in Minnesota: Duane, Vern, Beverly, Carol and Doris.
Albert died at age 90 on Jan. 1, 1983. I make my home in Hector, Minn., Aged 88, I have 32 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren.