Today’s post comes from Cynthia in Mahtowa

The Carlton County Historical Society in Cloquet recently embarked on a project to photograph all the old barns in the county before they are gone. A good number of them have been kept up or restored, but more have not.

When the project was brought to my attention, I asked if they would like to include my little barn, thinking it might not be worthy as it is very small and hardly a barn at all though that’s what I use it for. The volunteer who came to check it out loved it then took photos from several angles plus measurements (14x14x14).

Then I learned that they also wanted to know when the land was homesteaded, when the barn was built, what the barn was used for…and so began another research project — in addition to my previous project: “Why Blackhoof?”.

I retrieved the abstract from my safety deposit box and sorted through the many entries and pages of the land changing hands often, early on for logging purposes, a railroad easement, mineral rights. Then a man named August Wilson bought it in 1915 and likely he and/or his son built the barn. August’s son Herbert and his family owned it until 1948. (The original house is long gone, I live in one built by a widow, her neighbors and relatives in the late 1960s. )

In addition to the abstract I found a neighbor who has lived in Mahtowa most of his 80+ years who was happy to share what he knew and remembered. His Swedish immigrant father told him the Mahtowa area (my land is a mile north of Mahtowa as the crow flies) was once a magnificent, prime White Pine forest. So prime that logging companies fought over and for the right to harvest the trees here…then clear-cutting and leaving huge stumps. My land doubtless was included in the greatly logged so the trees now are relatively young with only a few White Pines here and there.

There still are connections to the Wilson family in the area, so I get a smattering of stories (though so far no one knows when the barn was built). One more connection links me to the history of my land: the eldest Wilson daughter — the Mahtowa postmistress for 48 years — was sister-in-law to a cousin of the woman at MPR who hired me in 1991.

The volunteer committee continues to locate, contact owners and get written permission to photograph and document whatever history they can about the barns. And now I have joined the committee to help continue photographing and collecting histories on other barns in and around Mahtowa and the nearby townships.

What do you know about the history of the land or house you have owned and/or lived in?

Today’s post comes from Wessew

For me the music died on Monday, October 24, 2016 with the death of Bobby Vee.

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) and pilot Roger Peterson left Clear Lake, Iowa for a flight to Fargo, North Dakota. They were to perform at the Moorhead, Minnesota Armory as a continuation of the Winter Party Dance tour. They never arrived as they died when the plane crashed into an Iowa cornfield, February 3, 1959. As news of the tragedy spread in the Fargo-Moorhead area, word went out for performers to substitute for the lost tour members. Fifteen year old Robert Velline and his newly formed group volunteered, were chosen to play and the show went on. The Shadows, as they called themselves on the spot, were well received and Bobby Vee went on to a stellar career before succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. My parents attended that event. It’s not that they were big rock and roll fans but we lived just a short walk from the Armory in Moorhead and were acquaintances of the Velline family. So they went as a show of support for Bobby and his brother Bill, one of the guitar players in the band. My sisters and I remained at home with Grandma. I have no recollection of disappointment in being excluded from “making the scene.” Seeing as how I was only 6, the entertainment value would likely have been lost on me.

Over the years, the significance of the deaths and dance became more pronounced for me. Collecting the recordings was a given. I’m not big into memorabilia but if only Dad and Mom had kept those ticket stubs what a treasure they would be! I became a fan of Holly and Vee. Not so for my parents. It never seemed to matter much to them that they had been part of music history. I have been able to piece together a pretty good picture of what they experienced. They were in their late twenties so were a bit out of place among a crowd of teenagers. Not surprisingly, given my Dad’s two left feet, they didn’t dance at all. They did watch the Shadows perform but left early and didn’t see Dion and The Belmonts.

Time marches on and it is now the late sixties. KQWB radio began promoting a celebrity basketball team composed of the station’s DJ’s and a few college players. The advertising spot included a sampling of the backup singers for Bobby Vee’s hit record, “Rubber Ball” which in 1968 was now a golden oldie. They sang, “Bouncy, Bouncy. Bouncy, Bouncy.” KQWB 1550 was always on our car and home radios so we heard that little jingle frequently. Well, my Father swore that Bobby Vee had sung that song in 1959. The song wasn’t recorded until 1961 but no amount of evidence could disabuse him of the notion that he had heard it years before. The Vellines were no longer in our social circle, so there was no appeal to authority from that source. Now with the Internet, it is easy to prove how wrong he was but back when I was in high school, information resources were rather meager and it was probably best to let the matter drop in any case. But every once in a while the “issue” would come up. Dad would reaffirm his theory that many musicians play songs before they record them. The fact that Gene Pitney and Aaron Schroeder wrote the song, not Bobby Vee, leaves him unfazed. The mysterious song had become part of a conspiracy. The voices in Dad’s head are like a rubber ball going “bouncy, bouncy.”

Do you have a favorite conspiracy theory?

Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato

I have been thinking much about community–what it is, what makes it, how we lose it, why it matters that we lose it. Community has invaded my fiction without my permission. This is a vignette from my stories about Northeastern Minnesota.

A place. Only a place. Indistinguishable from much of the boreal forest covering Northeastern Minnesota and adjoining Canada. A place, only a place, unless you looked at this place with the masterly eye of the original people who first roamed in small bands through the forest thousands of years ago. A Place: a low hill rich in game, with a level area above a clean-flowing stream, ample supplies of firewood, and many young cedars for poles, baskets, and other village needs.

It was many times a Lakota village for a season or two.

It was a village only once or twice for the Ojibwe, who, forced west by the European settlement of the eastern Great Lakes, displaced the Lakota out onto the prairie. The native peoples had astounding geography skills, which allowed them to remember favorite locations for their nomadic villages, but they were weak at geology. They were unaware of what lay beneath the hill and how to use it.

It was never a village for the fur trappers, first French and then English. The stream had clogged up, making it of no interest to the beaver.

It was not a village for the five men who came prospecting for iron ore. With their geology skills, they found the hidden wealth. Five men focused only on rocks for one week do not make a village.

It became a village once again when the first two dozen men arrived to open up the mine and by necessity begin a town. Soon followed more dozens of men, some to work the mine and some to attend the men who did. The third wave of men, accompanied by women and children, helped establish the mining office, a store with post office, boarding houses, and a dining hall.

Ten years later it was a large village, complete with several hundred residents, seven stores, two banks, two law offices, one doctor’s office, three churches, and a committee of village leaders to incorporate it as a municipality under the statutes of the young State of Minnesota, allowing them to plat and try to maintain muddy streets, provide a constabulary with jail, build a pine-framed city hall, organize a volunteer fire department, and grant the mining company and railroad all the exemptions and privileges they desired. The committee named the town for an eastern wealthy industrialist of dubious integrity but who had a proper British surname, unlike eighty percent of the residents.

After another ten years it had grown to a village of more than fifteen hundred residents who, despite some strident objections, added a brick city hall with jail, a larger fire hall with better equipment, a hospital, a small pine-framed elementary school, and parks, which at first were no more than rocky, weedy empty lots. It was a village because people gathered for their commonweal by assigning or gathering in the various roles that a village needs. United they were despite being divided into different heritages with different cultural norms, into different brands of Christianity, into opposing political points of view, and into social strata based primarily on occupation and nationality.

As a village it struggled, like all villages do, to serve the greatest good of the greatest number of people despite the interests of a powerful few. The library was a telling point for the village, opposed by those who saw it as a waste of tax dollars or waste of people’s time and by those who feared books as sources of dangerous ideas. A few years after the first small pine-framed library was built in the alley behind the city hall, it was replaced in the town center by a large-windowed brick and stone building, funded, along with its oak shelves and books, by Andrew Carnegie, who had made himself wealthy beyond the village’s imagination by processing their high-grade ore into iron and steel. His wealth was built with his skill, his ill-use of his employees from his mines to his blast furnaces, his intimidation of those who dared oppose him, and his manipulation of Wall Street, which has never cared what makes a village.

It was a village because most residents knew most of the others, because they gossiped about each other, by which is meant, among other things, knowing and tending to each other’s needs. Through gossip they knew what to help celebrate or who to help grieve. As a village they wove the strands of the web that bound them together, the strongest bonds woven in the hard times, of which there were many. Through boom and bust it was a village parenting each other’s children and finding pride in landmark events, such as their first high school graduating class of only two young women and one young man, others of suitable age having gone to work instead of going to high school.

It continued to be a village as it grew to over 4000 residents who survived the disaffections and deeper divisions that come with larger size. It was a village proud of its new brick and granite grade school and imposing high school on the top of the highest point in town, donated by the mining company. More and more students were graduating, more and more were heading south for a better jobs or to add to their education for a fuller life.

It was a village united behind their sports teams which played other mining villages, united in elation when their teams were victorious over the teams from their rival town ten miles to the east or untied in dejection when the teams lost.

It was a village when it proudly and naively marched boys off to wars, stunned but united in grief when the sad telegrams began to arrive, and bound in relief when men came home.

It was a worried village when the ore of their mine began to dwindle. The population started to fall, more young people headed south, and businesses began to close. As a village it stood through it all, taking the loss as too-personal when their high school closed, sending their young to the rival school ten miles to the east. To the village’s relief, the grade school remained, but only for a few years until the population dropped back to a few hundred residents, most of whom were beyond the parenting stage.

It remained a village after the downtown closed and house after house was abandoned, a village whose residents drove elsewhere to bank, to shop, to visit the medical clinic, to treat themselves to a restaurant meal, and to hire lawyers to write their wills.

It is a village still, a village of mostly retired people, more women than men, who gather to mourn the impending death of the village and to pass around photographs of children and grandchildren who live in distant large cities where people have no sense of what makes a village and why villages matter.

© Clyde Birkholz 2016

What has not endured that you thought would endure?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

One of the reasons we traveled to Bremen, Germany in May was to visit the towns where my mother’s family came from.

My maternal great grandmother’s family came from a town a few miles south of Bremen. The family last name was Cluver, and they came from Verden, a town with about 25,000 people. It was a very important place in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne slaughtered 4500 Saxons there in 782 for sliding back to pagan worship after they had been baptized. I imagine some of them were my relatives. The town was closely connected to the Old Saxon Law courts nearby. The town was considered a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire. A medium size cathedral,  built  between the 12th and 15th centuries, was home to a Prince Bishop from 1180 on, from whom my Cluver ancestors enjoyed great political patronage. That relationship also caused the eventual downfall of the family.

We have extensive records on the Cluvers. They were very wealthy in the centuries before the Reformation. Northern Germany is flat, low,  and swampy, and the Cluvers possessed the knowledge and ability to drain wetland so that it could be used for growing crops.  The Cluvers often loaned money to the Prince Bishop of Verden as well as the Prince Archbishop of Bremen. The bishops rewarded the Cluvers with land,  allowed them to live on grand estates that they owned, and used their influence to further the Cluver’s business and political aspirations. Things went well until the Reformation and the 30 Years War, when Sweden invaded and occupied the area and the whole region became Protestant. The Prince Bishops were ousted from power.The Cluvers clung tenaciously to the Church and refused to convert, I believe as much out of greed as from religious conviction. They didn’t want to abandon the cash cow that gave them so much prestige and power. I gather that they were pretty annoying and rebellious toward the occupying Swedes, who retaliated by killing as many male Cluvers they could find. Eventually, the family lost most of their wealth and lands, and became small Lutheran farmers like the majority of their neighbors.

It is hard to describe the feelings I had as I walked in the cathedrals of Bremen and Verden and saw the monuments and tombs of my ancestors.  There is a quite large and elaborate tablet from 1457 on the wall near the north Tower in the cathedral in Bremen in memory of Segebad Cluver. I wonder how he would feel knowing how things turned out. Greed can be pretty destructive. I also saw acres and acres of good farmland, though, so I suppose the family contributed something to the area that lasted.

What is a a gift or opportunity you’ve come to regret?