problem was solved. Some of the youngsters in the township wore wooden shoes.

        How they ever endured the winters was a mystery! There was not a pair of overshoes in the entire settlement. The men wore heavy boots with heavy wool socks and so did the women. The children wore whatever they could get. The winters were mighty long; yet the old residents will tell you there was less sickness than there is today.

        One of, if not the most important part of the women's list of apparel was the sun bonnet. They wore it in the spring, summer and fall. Some of them were re-inforced with cardboard and no woman would be seen out of doors without one. They were deep affairs, some of the young fellows said. They knew the girls wore them to keep their complexions from getting tanned.


THE EARLY HARVESTS

        The first wheat of record was planted by C. Christensen in 1873. He broke up about five acres of prairie and sowed it to wheat. The wheat was cut by hand, bound by hand, and, after being in the stack for a while, was threshed by hand. Mr. Christensen used the flail. He was an expert flail maker and supplied many of the settlers. In two or three years, a machine, from the eastern part of the County, came up and did the threshing. It was a horse power outfit. Six teams of horses attached to sweeps would circle the big bull wheel, which supplied the power to the tumbling rods, and from there to the separator. The driver stood on a platform above the bull wheel and, with a long handled whip, saw that a steady motion was maintained. It took a lot of men for the horse power outfits.

        There were the driver, two separator men, four pitchers, two band cutters who cut the bands on the bundles of grain, a man who measured the threshed grain in half bushel measures, a sack holder, from two to four men in the strawstack, two grain haulers, and two men in the granary. The horse power machines would thresh about 1500 bushels in a day and what long days some of them were! When steam power came in, the amount of help was reduced and the output upped to over 4,500 bushels a day.

—42—

---

        The threshing season was the big event of the year for the farmers' wives. Feeding a crew of that size in limited quarters was a real job and what wonderful meals they produced: Breakfast consisted of either oatmeal, (that is in the 80's) or corn mush, boiled potatoes, ham and eggs or steak and eggs, and they finished up with a stack of pancakes with syrup, not the maple kind, but the thick heavy sweetening and gallons of Arbuckles coffee.


THE SOD SHANTY ON THE CLAIM

        The housing shortage held no terrors for the early settlers in the prairie section of western Minnesota. These men and women, when they reached their claim, took the plow from the wagon, hitched the oxen to it and started breaking up the virgin sod.

        There was only one door and one window in most of the sod houses in this section of Murray County. Both the window and the door were small, as the total size of the shanty was 12x14.

        The furniture was crude. Nail kegs and boxes and, most of the time, benches were used for chairs.

        The beds were home-made and some had wooden slats across the frame. On the slats were placed ticks filled with prairie hay, straw and later on, corn husks. Others had ropes across the frames in place of the wooden slats. The beds were made high enough so that trundle beds for the children could be pushed under them and most of the settlers needed the trundle beds. In many homes, two trundle beds were used and then some of the older children slept on a tick on the earthen floor. There were no wooden floors and keeping the floor clean during wet weather was a bigger problem than the housewives have in these later years. In dry weather, the earthen floor was as hard as a rock. The home was heated by a small cast-iron stove. The tables were home-made, as was every other article of furniture. There were very few dishes and the younger element had to wait at every meal until the elders had finished. What was true of the dishes was also true of the linens, blankets and cooking utensils. One little light sufficed for the whole house. Life was a stern reality to those men and women who built western Murray County.


—43—

Previous Page Next Page
Table of Contents Index of Names
Home