1814 The DuGstad estate near Voss, Norway
The Dugstad name comes from the Dugstad estate, which has historically comprised several separate farms with a shared hamlet - or small village - of several families. In 1864 there were four families living on the Dugstad farm. Before 1864 the land was divided up piecemeal as had happened historically throughout Norway. Each farmer would have defined patches of land that were good for hay, or barley or turnips (after 1820) potatoes. Milking cows were kept in the village during the summer and fed on hay and barley. The hay that was growing in the adjoining fields would be next winter's fodder for the cattle, sheep or goats. Leaves and bark from trees was also harvested and mixed with the hay. Sheep and lambs or cows and calves would be moved up to the summer pastures. These were spaces on the higher mountain plateaus that would provide grazing from early June until early September. During this period women from the village, with their daughters, would spend 2 or more summer months up in the high hills. The light was 24 hours - at the altitude there were nights long after Midsummer's Eve where night never fell completely. The men stayed down in the village and the women had wooden shelters to sleep in. At the weekend the men and boys would come up for a visit. For married couples the weekly visit was an opportunity to slink off for conjugal pleasures. For the younger ones it was an opportunity to meet, gossip, flirt, show off and enjoy music, dancing and eating. On Sunday the men would head back to the village to tend the milking and farming. The women would exchange post-visit gossip. On their weekly visits the men would shear the sheep and the wool would be carded, spun, dyed and then woven, embroidered or knitted according to centuries-old tradition. The women taught their daughters these skills. The summer pastures were shared with other hamlets, the animals were 'hefted' - they knew the approximate boundaries of their territory and if they strayed their mothers or one of the women would herd them back. The summer pasture of Dugstad was shared with villagers from Lyte and Helleve - so the women would spend a lot of time together, with their flocks and herds in adjoining and sometimes overlapping territory. Nobody cared too much, in the summer the grass and wild flowers grew so rapidly it was hard to keep up. The milk was made into butter and cheeses, to store for the winter months. The goat's milk was made into gjetost, a cooked caramelly cheese not unlike Kraft's Velveeta. The cow's milk curds that were left from the whey were made into an inferior cheese, nothing was wasted. The milk was curdled to make buttermilk and then churned, so the butter had a lactic acid taste and would last longer. There was often also an overgrowth of grass so the men would scythe it on their weekly visits and the women would then turn it from day to day in the sunshine to dry it for winter fodder.
Lars Olavson Dugstad would have gone to the summer pastures from the age of 8 until he went to America at the age of 30. He would have gone with his half brothers Hermund and Knut, who were respectively 2 years and 3 years younger than him. Their father, Jon Vikingson Alland died in 1820 and their mother, Eli Nilsdotter Dugstad, married for a third time. Eli then had four children by that marriage, but the inheritance of her farm was willed to Hermund. Lars and Knut would not get the farm unless Hermund died childless. The boys didn't concern themselves with this. When Jon Vikingson in 1820 died his stepson Lars was 12, his son Hermund was 6 and Knut was 5. The boys grew up together. Eli's children by her third husband, Mattis, were much younger and did not stand to inherit the farm. They would go up to the summer pastures with the men and help with the men's work: shearing, cutting hay, gathering fodder from the woodland - the leaves and bark of the mountain trees made good cattle food and were collected, the boys whittling the branches to remove the edible material.
The Dugstad farmstead included the Dugstadfosse, the rapids where the river fell several feet over a few hundred yards. The water was channeled from just above the falls and provided the power for 2 mills: a flour mill and a saw mill.
The grain that needed grinding was barley, the mill provided barley flour for making flatbreads and barley grits for porridge. Malted barley would also be ground for brewing beer. There was always work at the mills for capable men like Lars, with extra income to be saved. Threshing barley was also hard work, where Lars could earn more cash. His cottage garden served him well, too and there was flatbread, milk, cheese and meat and herrings from Elie to sustain him. He would make his own porridge and his breakfast was a substantial bellyful that would take him through the day.
The sawmill took logs that had been floated down from the forested hills upstream and cut them into boards and timbers for building, flooring, roofing and walls. The logs came from 'anyone's land' - so men from the Dugstad farm could go up in the mountains, cut trees, mark them, stack them and then float them downriver in the spring snowmelt, to be caught at the Dugstadfosse and then put through the sawmill. This was how Lars made money in the winter, often staying in a camp high in the forest for months in March and April, when there was more light to enable him to work at cutting. The shelters were small, but warm, the cracks in the stone and board stuffed with lichen and moss to keep out the cold.
Lars and his younger sister Åsa had lost their father when Lars was 7. “Quick, Elie - there's been an accident on the farm. Ole has been hurt.” 7 year old Lars was busy milking a sheep when he heard the neighbour shout. His father Olav Sveinsen Gjaernes farmed patches of land on the Dugstad estate. This farm had good slightly sloping ground going down to the lakeside, the grass grew profusely so hay for cattle, sheep and goats was luxurious. There was also, importantly, good land for growing barley, the only grain that prospered in the short summers of Voss. This meant there was grain for bread, for porridge and for brewing, (which was done with the best of the barley).
His mother Elie Nilsdottir Dugstad ran down to the field where Olav was planting stubble turnips to find him with his leg broken where it had been cut by the plow he was guiding. As he turned to come down the field in the opposite direction the horse stumbled on a rock and jerked it forward - he jumped ahead to keep up and hold the plow back into the ground when he slipped and the sharpened blade of the plow cut deeply into his leg. "Quick, Elie - take the reins and cut them and give me a strip of leather to tie this off' he shouted. He was bleeding profusely and was weakening, his face pale with fear and loss of blood. Elie took his blade and cut a piece of leather from the reins, which Ole tied tightly around his leg, just below the knee and above the wound. His foot turned pale white, then blue as the blood failed to return to his heart. Then he fainted and lost his grip on the strap. Elie grabbed it and held it as tightly as she could but it soon became clear that he had lost too much blood and that he was not going to survive. Lars watched as the life ebbed out of his father, the breadwinner, the head of the household, a strong 29 year-old man, his mother's hus-band, the man who had bound himself to her household, to protect and support in any way he could. It was 1814.
At the funeral the Lutheran minister was perfunctory, committing Ole to his grave with a few words about the will of God and the importance of hard work. After the funeral the land agent for Viking Hermundsen Alland, the landlord, came up to Elie to mention that Ole's rent was due in two months if she wanted to secure the land that he rented for another year. She had some money, but couldn't work the land herself, so she had to decide whether to give up the tenancy, which also meant giving up the land and the house. Her mother was at the funeral and feared what was to come next. Elie asked her, after the burial, if there was room in her house for her and for young Lars. Her mother responded 'Elie, you are young, strong, beautiful, you keep a good house, you can marry again. You must think about that now and not wait until you are too poor to attract a good husband.’
At the funeral, Viking's son Jon Vikingsen Alland was thinking. "Elie is a fine woman. There are few like her in this area. She is devout, strong and her son Lars is a fine young lad. Her daughter Åsa already helps with looking after the stock. She would make a good mother to my children now that I am coming of an age to take over the farm from father." He approached Elie and said "Dear Elie, your husband was a fine man and a fine Hordalander. He sang, played and danced in the true tradition of our people and with his loss, some of the spirit of our place has been lost. Please understand that I share your feelings of loss and will miss him as a friend and neighbour. Perhaps I may visit you in the next week and see if there is any way I can help you in this difficult time.
Ten days later he called upon Elie, bringing some cheese from the home farm, which Lars devoured with gratitude. It was gjetost, the sweetened lightly cooked goats milk cheese that was typical of the Hordaland region. Lars liked Jon, he was kind to his mother and a generous soul.
Within 3 months Elie and Jon were wed, just a few weeks before Christmas 1814. Socially this was an upward step for Elie. Jon was a landowner in a country where much of the land had been consolidated, where only the eldest son of a landowner could inherit, a strategy to prevent the fragmentation of estates. The Dugstad estate covered nearly 90 acres, a substantial holding. It supported 6 tenant families, living in respectable circumstances and generated enough income for the Dugstad landlords to be pillars of the local rural society. But Lars was an Oleson, named after his father, as most Norwegians were. His grandmother was Guri Svendottir
Jon adopted Lars and the boy enjoyed the comfort of the higher rank in society that came with it, but his future would never include inheriting land on the Dugstad estate. He learned farming, he learned estate management, he could read and write and knew some things of the Bible and the stories in the Good Book, which were about shepherds and farmers in a far place. The Hordalanders were musical and artistic people, recognised throughout Norway as the heart of their Nordic culture. Composers like Grieg were from the region, even today most of Norway's media workers, filmmakers, singers, musicians and actors are disproportionately from the region. At gatherings where people would come together to play music and dance the musicians would, after a bit of akvavit had been drunk, tune their violins. The Lutheran church frowned on what they called the “Devil's chords,” the edgy slightly screechy music that stood the hairs on your neck on end. Only God was supposed to be able to make you feel that good. Much Norwegian music had been rewritten and fiddles retuned to exclude that excitation, which was considered too carnal for decent God-fearing folk. But Lars loved to dance and to watch the young men do the time-honoured steps of traditional dance, echoing the courtship rituals that had their roots in ancient pagan Nordic mating traditions.
His home was a happy one - he had a younger brother who provided childhood companionship. Then came another brother and two sisters before his mother stopped having children. His stepfather had an heir and two spares. Lars’ future was to be a 'cotter.' A 'cott' is a small house or cottage with no land except for a small space to grow some vegetables. His destiny was to perhaps rent some land from his younger brother and live the same poor life that his father had lived before him. His children would grow up with the same prospects, should he be lucky enough to find a wife prepared to live in such circumstances. His fate was sealed. At the age of 30 he had no wife, no land, no capital, no future but to receive small wages for working on other people’s land.
At church one Sunday in 1838 there was a commotion. The minister had received an 'America Letter' and would be reading it out after the service. The attendance at the church was unusually high, with people standing crowded around the sides. Lars got to sit at the front of the church in a reserved family pew, but still he leaned forward to hear the minister read this letter from a strange faraway land
The minister read:
This letter is from Odd Himle, once of Voss and now living in Chicago, a town in America. He writes: "All around us is rich farmland and beyond that farmland more farmland. Beyond that there is more farmland, all rich and black and productive soil. The farmland near to Chicago costs little money - there are many farmers who will sell as they are moving further west. In the north of Chicago there has been terrible fighting with the Indians of the Sioux, Winnebago and Fox tribes. Some white people have been killed and many, many Indians have been killed by American farmers and by the army. The Indians have been promised that, if they go beyond a river in the West called Missouri, they will be able to stay there untroubled by white farmers. Most have agreed and have gone. Some stay, but they are peaceable and will not attack white men again. There is land here, my fellow Hordalanders, land that is rich and productive, with many forests and rivers and lakes, abounding with fish. Much is unexplored, but much is for the taking. A poor cotter can become a farmer with his own land, 80 acres, even more, for almost nothing. They speak many languages here, mostly English but here in Chicago you can go all day and only hear Norwegian in this part of the city. Some Norwegian farmers now come to town with enough money to buy houses that they then rent to the workers who come for jobs in the stockyards, where cattle from the surrounding country come in huge numbers. For cows, for rye, for sheep, for wheat and for the Indian corn that grows tall in the fields, in this land the landless cotter can become a landowning farmer and be his own master."
Lars went home and spoke to Joen: "Joen - I wish to go to America and become my own master and to escape a future as a cotter who may not even have a wife and family. But I need the money for my fare to Chicago. Then I will work and I will find land and be a farmer and I will send you American dollars to repay you.
Joen pondered. Lars was a strong, healthy young man of good temperament. He was ambitious. He was 30 and had no wife. He would never be happy working as a tenant to his younger brother, however much they loved one another now. Things would get worse when their mother died as it was their shared love for her that kept them at peace with one another. And when his younger brother took over the farm there would be trouble, for sure. The fare to America was a good amount, but not prohibitive. He decided to make a gesture: 'Lars, you can go to America. I will give you 100 Krone, for your fare and to help you get established when you get there. You have been a good stepson to me. You can repay me if you wish, but never feel that you are in my debt.' Lars’ youngest brother Gunnel, who would also be a cotter unless his eldest 2 brothers died, begged to be allowed to go with him. Joen sent both men off with 100 Krone each.
A week later, in early March of 1839, Lars and Gunnel began the walk to Bergen, where there would be a ship to America. He took with him a pack full of cheese and knackebrot, the dry rye crispbread that would keep fresh and sustain him for months. He had the address of Odd Himle in Chicago. They arrived in Bergen and bought their passage to Chicago.
The voyage was long and rough. The sea was turbulent, but the sails filled with wind and, without too much tacking they arrived in Niagara. By now his name was Lars Olsen Dugstad. Like many Norwegians, he added his place name to his father’s name to preserve his identity when in a faraway place.
In Chicago there was good work for a Norwegian. Lars and Gunnel found lodgings in a hostel owned by a Norwegian and set to work as a cleaner and cook straight away. He had a room that he shared with his two companions and they sought out Norwegians who could tell them more about finding a farm in this country. It was summer, very hot in Chicago. They would take walks in the countryside, but it was all farmed and private land and they felt like intruders. In Norway there were ancient rights to traverse the countryside, paths that historically crossed through farms and that had to be kept clear by the landowner in respect of the need for people to take themselves and their animals from one place to another. Here in America the land was fenced and private and the roads were few and dusty or muddy when it rained. Everything was square, roads intersected at right angles, the shape of the land had little influence on the route of roads or tracks. Lars concentrated on making and saving money.
In early spring of 1840, after an exploratory trip led by Odd J. Himle in 1839, Nils Gilderhus and Nils Bolstad were the first Norwegian settlers on the Koshkonong prairie and each settled 40 acres. . They described a land of grassy prairie, timber-rich woodland, lakes and rivers full of fish, writing of a wilderness covered with ‘a luxuriant growth of grass and a great profusion and variety of beautiful flowers, displaying the colors of ten thousand rainbows painted not by the hand of man.’ For a farmer the prospect of woodland, grazing and arable land was irresistible.
The story of their exploration was well known among the Norwegian community in Chicago and Milwaukee. Throughout the remainder of 1839 and early 1840 Lars worked and saved. He would need an axe, some seed, fishhooks, a gun, a plough and other basic tools. He would buy an ox and wagon too.
In 1840, in early spring, Lars and his friend Bjorn Anderson Kvelve, a fellow Hordalander, headed to Koshkonong, with an ox-drawn wagon.
The trail was clear enough after the winter snows and the oxen grazed on the lush spring flush of grasses and flowers along the way. At night they would make camp and eat rye gruel and any fish they could catch or game they could trap or shoot. Eventually they reached Lake Koshkonong. It reminded Lars of Lundarvatnet, the lake that sat alongside the Dugstad farmland. For a moment he felt homesick, but the Norwegian voices of his colleagues and the excitement of imminent landholdings prevailed. The land around Koshkonong was settled but further north, up the Koshkonong Creek, there were some fine properties. Lars and Bjorn marked out their land on adjoining holdings.
Lars took an 80 acre plot with a stream and a bit of raised ground that would be dry even in the winter. His purchase of 80 acres was recorded on June 22 1840 in the name of Lars Olson. Bjorn took 80 acres alongside Lars’ land. There was no time to waste. There was land to be cleared and tilled. He and his fellow farmers got busy, promising to meet and catch up later, though none had their bearings yet in this new land.
More than half the land Lars had chosen was prairie. The grass was thick and obdurate. Ploughing it was not easy, His ox would pull, the plough would dig into the soil and then stick. It was Lars turn to pull, drawing the plough out backwards, then geeing the ox forward again, until it stuck again. It got easier with the second furrow, then even easier as he angled the plough to cut sideways and more shallow. He knew there would be more weeds this way, but the tradeoff between cleared land and weediness favoured more cleared land. The rye would grow tall and crowd out most weeds, he hoped.
There was a small bit of raised ground that would make an ideal cave. He dug out a small crevice to sleep in and every day he dug deeper until he had a very comfortable hollowed out space. The opening faced southeast, for maximum protection from the winter winds. He had bought 24 candles in Chicago and allocated himself one per week, only using them during the weeks from late October to the end of March. It wasn't safe to light a fire in his cave, but he had plenty of skins.
The rye harvest was good. The weeds were definitely aggressive, but the tall 6' high rye plants rose above the crowd of native plants and formed good heads of grain. He also had some round cabbages that would store. The rest of his food would come from fishing and trapping. He fashioned a small boat that took him out on the waters of nearby Rice Lake, so called because it was completely covered in wild rice. He would bend the rice plants over the side of the boat and beat them until the long black grains of rice fell into the bottom of his boat. He had a musket, but musket balls and powder cost money and he would only use them as a last resort. Birds such as partridges, ducks, prairie chickens and geese were so abundant that a shot was guaranteed to yield a bird. The Koshkonong Creek that ran alongside his land was alive with perch, pike, catfish and bass. Rabbits and other small animals whose names he had yet to learn were abundant and unsuspicious. Trapping was easy and the skins, sewn together with dried lengths of gut, made good cover for the floor and his bed. Indians were still in the neighborhood and would roam through the area, hunting deer and occasionally coming to his dugout to ask for food.
For 13 years Lars lived like this, visiting his fellow Norwegian bachelor farmers from time to time, never changing his clothes, never washing his hair, digging a hole in the ground near his cave for a toilet, swimming in the river only during a couple of summer months and working, working, working to create some value from his land. Not long after arriving he purchased another 80 acres, increasing his holding to 160 acres. By 1853 most of the farm land was cleared and productive and the woodland provided timber and firewood. He was selling his surplus produce and after purchasing supplies and equipment, had money that he tucked away in a secure and dry hiding place. He decided to go to Chicago. This time he did not walk - he had a horse and he had a simple cart that was sturdy enough to withstand the trip into Chicago. The track was now a proper road, and roughly followed the route of what is now US Highway 54.
He had written to his friend Henrik in Chicago to say he was coming and to seek accommodation and had received a warm and welcoming reply
When he met with Henrik he was delighted to see how Chicago had changed: many more buildings, board sidewalks along the dirt tracks. It was good to talk with people, but he soon tired of conversation. How could people keep up this incessant chatter? On his farm he would go for weeks with nobody to talk to but himself and his horse. When he got together with other Norwegian bachelor farmers they would barely speak to each other. Just the company of another person was enough to satisfy their social needs. After a discussion about crops and weather they would lapse into smoking their pipes and drinking homemade beer and occasionally one would have a thought to share but there was no social embarrassment about the long periods of silence when there was nothing that anybody had to say. Sometimes one would start up a familiar song and the others would all softly join in, remembering their beloved homeland but also remembering the poverty and poor prospects they had left behind.
In the village of Helleve, Ingebjorg Kjellsdotter was born in 1818. She was one of 6 children of Kjel Knutson Grova and Anna Hermundsdotter. Ingebjorg would go to the summer pastures as a girl and by the age of 15 she would have been aware of the men from Kyte and Dugstad including Lars Oleson Dugstad, who was 25 by then. When he went to America she was 21. By the age of 32, in 1850 she was not married and she went to America, to her cousin Henrik who had a guest house in Chicago and was a friend of Lars.
In Chicago Henrik, (a friend of Lars' brother Gunnel) ran a guest house and they went over to visit. Ingebjorg Kjeldsdatter Helleve, was his housekeeper. She and Lars remembered each other from the weekend visits of the men to the summer pastures, that were shared by the Dugstad, Kyte and Helleve farms. Helleve was about the 2 miles from Voss town, as was the Dugstad farm. The walk from either side to the summer pastures was a couple of hours uphill. He was 30 and she was 19, just before he headed to America. Now she was 35 years old. She had come to visit Henrik in Chicago the year before, in 1852. Lars, who was now 46, liked the way she attacked her work with more energy than it required. driven by a desire to get one thing done so she could go on to another. "She would make a good farm wife," he thought. There were no men in Norway with land who would marry her and the men without land could not afford a wife, so she helped on the farm and made money from sewing and weaving and embroidery from the age of 14 until she was 32, when her brother Henrik sent for her to come and work in his guest house.
Lars heard this story and thought what a wonderful land America was, where people who had little or no hope of finding a wife or husband could prosper from their own land. She would make a good wife, he thought. He told her about his life since he'd left Voss and she told him the latest gossip from Voss and her own story of being a single farm girl. He had never talked so much in his life, and to a woman, too! He noticed that she had a good wide set of shoulders and reddish blond hair bunched up at the back. He wondered how long it was when it was freed and couldn't help but imagine what this woman's body would be like. It was hard to contain his passion and he said how pleasant it had been to speak with her but he could see she had work to do and would leave her to get on.
Ingebjorg liked this man of few words. He was kind, hard working and unpretentious, like a Norwegian farmer should be. She wondered if she would see him again.
That afternoon, he was back. She gave him a coffee and they spoke together again. There was not much more to say so Lars blurted out: "Miss Kjeldsdottar, I have a good farm in Wisconsin. I am not so young but I am strong and healthy and can work hard, cutting wood, growing crops. I have some cows, good for milking, and wonderful pasture to graze them on, with plenty of winter hay for their feed. I have ewes that produce good milk and fine wool. I would like to share this with a good wife and I would like to ask you if you would be that woman."
Ingebjorg responded cautiously: "Lars Dugstad, I like you and can see you are a good man. Please think about this a bit more and if you still wish this, then come back and I will give you my answer."
The next day, early in the morning, Lars was at the guest house. Ingebjorg was not there. Henrik had sent Ingebjorg to buy nails and she would not be back for at least an hour. He told Lars she had left and he just grunted and sat on the porch outside. When Ingebjorg returned he simply asked her "Yes...or no?"
She laughed. He had not seen her laugh before and loved the way her face lit up with happiness, her cheekbones pressing up and her eyes narrowing. "Yes, Mr. Lars from Dugstad, you Wisconsin Vossinger, I will be your farm wife."
A Norwegian minister married them in a simple ceremony, with Henrik and his wife as witness.
Two days later she had her belongings and they began the 4 day trek back to Wisconsin.
When they got to the farm she scanned the fields, then the horizon, then the woods, wondering where his house was. As he pulled up the horse she asked: "So where, my husband, is our house?"
"A house I don't have, but I have a large and warm cave with a smokehole so we can keep a fire inside. I will light a candle and show you"
A brief look inside was enough. Though living in holes in the ground was common among Norwegian bachelor farmers and though Norwegians had lived in holes in the ground since ancient times (Santa coming down the smokehole or chimney originated from Norwegian folk stories) Ingebjorg was not charmed by this.
"Lars Dugstad, I will sleep in this hole in the ground with you but I will not have children with you until you have built a house. You have a good woodland, you have an axe, you have a saw, you have a hammer and you can buy some nails." When you have built a house then I will be the mother of your sons and daughters, but until then I will sleep in the same hole with you, but not together."
Lars, driven by this challenge, went to his wood and felled 18 trees in one day. And the next day. And the next. Soon he had enough logs, trimmed and of the right length, to build a cabin. Ingebjor, who had seen the progress he was making, relaxed her conditions and by the time the floor and the frame of the house was up, she was carrying Lars' child. By the start of winter a large log house was built, just one room, but spacious and with small windows and a door facing south. The firstborn son was named Ole, after his father who had died when Lars was 7. Ole was born in August 1854. 2 years later came twins: Charles, (‘Uncle Charlie’) and Ann. Charlie never married and never had land. In Norway he would have been a cotter, at best. Ann married Andrew Alfson and remained in Wisconsin. In 1859 Ingebjor gave birth to Henry Lars. She was 39. 2 years later in 1861, Betsy and finally Lewis. (Betsy died very young. Louis moved to Montana and raised sheep.)
The farm progressed. A barn was built. A horse and two carts: one for farm and one for town.
Ingebjorg was one of many Norwegians who found the Lutheran church too restrictive. There had been a bitter split between the West Koshkonong and the East Koshkonong Lutheran churches and both were too far away from Cambridge, which was a village less than a mile down the Koshkonong Creek from the Dugstad farm. The Methodist Church was more open minded. The first Scandinavian Methodist Church in the world had opened its doors in Cambridge Wisconsin in 1851 – this limestone building still stands there. Ingebjorg was an active member of the congregation. The graveyard contains the remains of Lars Dugstad, Ingebjorg and 2 sisters and a brother. In 1863 Jenny Lind, the 'Swedish Nightingale' was on a singing tour of the USA, Her voice was legendary but, sadly, there was no recording technology at the time to capture it for future generations. She was accompanied by the violinist Ole Bull and they gave a concert in Cambridge that raised $200 for the church. (Jenny Lind returned to Sweden $650,000 better off - her hard renegotiation of her contract with P.T. Barnum bankrupted him)
Ingebjorg was determined to bring the same quiet but traditional cultural values of her homeland to this rough and wild country. She sent her children to be educated at the Albion Academy and eventually established a beautiful home that is listed among the heritage homes of Southern Wisconsin. The Norwegian community was close, this was the highest concentration of Norwegians in the United States and the language and traditions were preserved, largely through food such as lutefisk (cod preserved in lye) and flatbrod (unleavened barley crackers).
In 1864 Lars took Ole to hear Abraham Lincoln speak in Watertown Wisconsin.
When Ole was 11, in 1865, his life took a similar turn to his father’s. Lars now had a team of horses to pull his plough, which meant he could cultivate more land and raise a bigger crop every year. He was putting the harness on the horses before going out to plough in the spring and had not yet hitched the horses to the plough. Something startled the horses and they bolted. Lars, trapped between the two lead horses, was tangled in the traces and dragged along, losing control of the reins. He couldn't run as fast as the horses and fell to the ground, where the stampeding hooves of the horses pummeled him in the head and stomach. Eventually the horses calmed, but Lars was broken and bleeding, and soon died. Ingebjorg heard the commotion and ran out with her daughters to see a tragedy that mirrored the story he had told her of his own father's death while ploughing his turnip field in Norway 50 years earlier. His funeral was in Cambridge Wisconsin, one of the first funerals of the Norwegian pioneers of the Koshkonong Prairie. He was buried in the graveyard of the Swedish Methodist Church.
Ole was the oldest of 6 children and he helped his mother to manage their 160 acre farm. Charlie and the younger kids did what they could and the farm prospered with the help of seasonal hired hands. His adulthood began early as he shouldered the responsibility of being the male head of the family. In the winters, when farm work was limited, he went to work as a logger, earning extra money for the family. As the younger children grew up, all helped make the farm viable.
Like many Vossingers, Ingebjorg found that the mingling of different dialects and the prevalence of English speaking meant that, as she got older, there were fewer opportunities to speak 'Vossamål' the distinct Norwegian language she had learnt at her mother's knee. She shared the feelings of Kristi Nevkvitne, who also lived at Koshkonong, who said when she heard `Vossamål spoken: 'Da ae si gott å høyra da' ('It makes me feel so good to hear that')
In 1881, when Ole reached the age of 27 he married a 19 year old called Oline Frederica Peterson. To a Vossinger like Ole, Oline was almost a foreigner: she came from Skreia, near Lillehammer, on the far side of the mountains that divide Norway. She had come to America at the age of 14 to stay with her aunt Lena Rusted in Cambridge. Her dialect was very different to the musical Hordalander way of speaking. It was, to Ole, strange, even exotic, accent of those Norwegians from the other side of the mountains, north of Oslo. She told him of her mother, Anna Starum, who grew woad and flax. Anna retted flax in the lake near their farm and then wove it into linen fabric that she sold in the Lillehammer market. The indigo blues, paler grey-blues, turquoise and pink colours that she teased out of her woad baths were popular with the town ladies. If they had seen the stinking tubs of fermented urine that she used to extract the woad's array of colours they might have been less enthusiastic. One day, on her way home from the market, a storm broke. Oline had crawled under the thick linen covers on their cart and fell asleep. Her mother drove the horse onwards but when she got home, the cold and wet had penetrated, a fever came and in 3 days she was dead. It was 1867. Oline was 5. Her father, Peter Pedersen Modsboken, remarried and sent Oline off to live with an aunt nearby. Oline's aunt took her in. She was an extra mouth to feed and worked hard to justify her presence in this new household. When she was 14, in 1876, her uncle Christian Starum (Anna’s brother) sent the money for her to come to America. She arrived in Philadelphia on July 4. She went to live with her aunt Lena Rusted in Wisconsin. She worked as a hired girl and also for the Curtis Chair Firm. There Grandma Curtis and Belle, a girl her own age, taught her many American graces and they became lifelong friends. She adapted quickly to the American way of life. Marrying a prosperous farmer like Ole was part of the American Dream for her generation.
The newlyweds set out for Iowa, to strike out on their own. Ole had saved money and was looking for an opportunity. They travelled with their friends, the Gundersons. At Britt, Iowa Ole found work building on a railway bridge. Prairie fires still raged across undeveloped land and Ole found work helping to fight this scourge of the early pioneers. He bought a farm near Ruthven in Iowa and grew a fair crop of wheat, which he took to the water-powered grist mill at Okoboji. Their first son, Lewis Albert, was born in 1882. But Ole was still restless, not ready to settle.
They planned to move further west, sold the farm in 1883, filled their covered wagon with their possessions and headed towards Sioux City. Ole had heard there was good land in Kansas. In Sioux City they stayed at the Martin Hotel, where they supplied milk to the hotel kitchen from their cows. They crossed the Missouri to Covington (South Sioux City) and headed south towards Emerson village. Ole looked out from a hill and decided: “This land I would like to own.” As evening fell they pulled into Emerson and headed for the Lippold Hotel, lit with kerosene lamps and a large porch. On the porch sat several Indian bucks and squaws with shawls over their shoulders and long black braids down their backs.
Emerson was on the 100,000 acre Winnebago Indian Reservation that had been allocated to the Winnebago Sioux tribe by Congress in 1874, 7 years earlier. The Winnebago were on what was officially their own land, but the town of Emerson grew up within the designated reservation space and eventually private ownership replaced the tribal control of this and some other parts of the reservation. This land had been set aside for Indians and although alcohol was prohibited on the reservation, a store owner on the edge of the reservation did sell whisky. On credit. When a Winnebago Sioux had run up a tab at the store the store owner would eventually call in the debt. Unable to pay cash, the hapless Indian could only pay with land. Slowly this storekeeper accumulated land that he could then sell on to farmers who had arrived too late to be able to claim land under the Homestead Act, which allowed a settler 160 acres, a 'quarter section' (1/4 sq mile) as long as they had cultivated 3/4 of it within 7 years. The Indians had not settled into houses and so the land to the east of Emerson was inhabited with tepees and horses grazed on open land. Eventually the Indians concentrated in the town of Winnebago, further east.
In 1883 Ole and Oline found a 160 acre farm for $1120 on the edge of the Winnebago Indian Reservation. The title to Ole's land was clear and legal and they began to farm. Ole helped other farmers to clear land, often encountering rattlesnake nests. A rattlesnake has no sense of hearing and they give birth to live young, so they can be angrily protective when a plough cuts through their nest. On his own land he carved out a cave in an east facing hillside, piled up sods to make a front wall and inserted a door and 2 windows. He dug a well and built a shed for his cows and horses. Their son Henry Ingval was born in 1884 and another son, Herman Fletcher, was born in 1886. Then diptheria struck the area and both Lewis and Henry died.
The two boys were buried in a cemetery at a road junction 2 miles east of Emerson.
With their newborn baby Herman the grief stricken couple headed back to Wisconsin, leaving their farm behind. There Oline gave birth to Lewis Ingval in 1888. A year later, in 1889 they headed back to Nebraska. Oline and Uncle Charlie and took a passenger train and Ole followed on a freight train that carried his horses and cattle.
As they came over the hill that overlooked the farm their neighbour Gus Isenberg shouted: “Look yonder, there come the Duxstads back to their farm.” The farm was stripped of almost everything. No equipment, no fencing, not even any fence posts, remained. The doors and windows of the sod house were gone. In town Ole and Oline noticed that some of their neighbors looked away when they saw them, perhaps embarrassed that they had been participants in the removal of Duxstad property. One neighbor, Mr. Liewer, came by many years later and gave Ole $2 for something that he’d picked up during their absence and had been weighing on his conscience.
Ole built a wooden house, a room on each floor. (He bought it from a company in Wisconsin that sent the entire house components in a boxcar to Nacora, which he then took back to the farm and assembled according to the instructions that came with it). The house was still intact in 2010. The cave was where he kept his home-brewed beer (with the occasional explosion) and where Oline stored her supplies including pickles and preserves. They planted a row of mulberry trees along the ridge to provide shelter for animals and a windbreak for crops. The herd increased in size and they marketed the milk from the cows and beef from the steers. Uncle Charlie stayed with them, a lifelong bachelor, for the rest of his life.
Near the farm was the now extinct town of Nacora, once a busy railroad junction but abandoned when the trains moved on. The town had a general store, a blacksmith and a Deutsches Gasthaus, a popular inn and saloon. The area the Duxstads had settled was known as the German Settlement as most of the farming families there came from the Ditmarschen region of Germany. Conversations in Plattdeutsch (Low German) were more common than conversations in English and there were few Norwegians.
The farm increased to 320 acres and is no longer in the family; the memory of it clings. Aunt Ann remembered huge circles—three of them on three south-facing slopes that were eventually obliterated by the breaking plow. Some said they had been made by buffalo in blizzards as the old, placing their young within it, kept walking themselves to keep from freezing. Or could they have been protecting the young from wolves? Similar circles near Denver are said to be where tepees had stood on the same ground for many years. An Indian ax head was found and one time a meteorite.
Ole was well read; he always had one Daily, the Sioux City Tribune, sometimes an Omaha paper and, of course, The Nebraska Farmer. The Comfort was enjoyed by the feminine side of the house.
Their first girl was born in 1890 and named Isabel Amanda. Another son was born in 1893 and named Henry Albert. Three more daughters were born Anne Elizabeth, Mildred Luella and Ellen Harriet.
Lewis married Agnes Margaret Rohde in 1910, when he was 22. She was 2 years older than him and worked, according to the 1900 census, as a servant. Their first child was a daughter, Ruby. A son, Lloyd, was born in 1913 and died within a year. Floyd was born in 1916 and was followed by Thelma in 1919 and Margaret in 1920.
After their marriage in 1910 Lewis and Agnes farmed Ole and Oline’s farm until they purchased their own land in 1922. Lewis had attended York Business College and applied sound business principles to running his farm. He was also a ‘suitcase farmer’ – he had land near Sidney in western Nebraska, dry land that couldn’t really support a farmer and family but could provide a useful extra source of income. Every spring Lewis would head west and plant a crop of wheat on his land. At harvest time a contract harvester would come along and help harvest the wheat and Lewis would sell it to a local grain elevator and then come back to the farm in Emerson. The Dust Bowl of the 1930 which led to a million refugees abandoning farms in Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, owed a lot to the breakdown of the fragile and dry prairie soils and their turning into clouds of dust that darkened the skies as far east as Washington DC. Lewis was active on the local public power district board and was Chairman of the Fourth War Loan Drive for Emerson and Dakota County. The drive raised $16 billion nationally for the war effort during 1943, an essential contribution to the world’s first mechanised war, where the cost of airplanes, ships and tanks required a huge financial outlay. Floyd was in the Marines in the Pacific, Margaret had married Kenneth Sams in California and was carrying his child (Craig) while Ken was also in the Marines in the Pacific. Ruby and Thelma were at home. Lewis was suffering intense back pain which he relieved by using the readily available painkiller, whisky. This alienated Agnes. Ruby described a scene in February 1944 where she and her sisters were in the kitchen and Agnes was bemoaning the fact that Lewis was a good for nothing who drank too much. Ruby looked toward the kitchen door and saw her Dad, who quietly turned and walked away. She wanted to go and hug him and say “I love you Dad” but was afraid this would make Agnes angry with her. The next morning Lewis was found in the garage, with a hose connected from the exhaust of his car to the nearly closed windows, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Of Duxstad men, only Ole had died a peaceful death, Lars and Lewis had died tragically.
Floyd Doxtad
In 1935, when Floyd graduated from high school. “We didn’t have any crop that year so 4 of us started out in a Model T Ford and got as far as Western Nebraska when we realised the car couldn’t really carry us 4 big high school kids, We heard there was work harvesting wheat in Washington so we decided to hitchhike to Spokane. Eventually we got to Washington. The local sheriff said ‘There’s no room for hoboes here. You can stay till 8 o clock and tomorrow morning you go.” Then he called up 4 farmers and they all needed hands, so the 4 boys all got farm work and made some money. Floyd eventually headed off to San Francisco
Floyd started work in San Francisco cleaning up the last of the debris from the Great Fire of 1906. The city had run out for money for cleaning up, then had the cash in the 20s and paid workers to resume the cleanup
One day, Floyd’s walking down the street when he sees his childhood friend and first cousin, the acrobat and contortionist Donald Doxtad, whose dad Herman (Lewis’ older brother) had died when Donald was really young (3). (Donald came and visited Margaret in Omaha in 1958 and showed off this tricks – his census form describes him as movie actor and entertainer).
Donald asked Floyd to come with him to Alaska. Floyd decided not to go.
“I milked cows in California. You could always get a job in San Francisco if you could milk cows.”
“Then I joined the Marines. I don’t know why I joined the Marines, you had to join something, but I didn’t want to wear them Navy pants (bell bottoms) and I didn’t want to live in a tent (the Army) so I enlisted in the Marines and got that green suit. I did boot camp at Salton Sea, California. I got homesick and rode a boxcar home, I had $90 in my pocket, but I wasn’t going to spend it so I rode the boxcar. I got on one car and knew it was a refrigerator car and I knew he couldn’t get me out of there. The cop tried to hit me with his billy club, but I had the door tied from the inside so he couldn’t get at me. I had a coverall that kept me warm. Then I met another hobo on the boxcar out of Colorado and we got a fire going on the boxcar, on a steel plate. Then a man and a woman got on and all she had was a dress so I took my coverall off and gave it to her to keep warm. When I woke up she was gone and the coverall too.”
Floyd returned from the war and farmed at the home farm. Later he tried dairy farming in South Dakota and then found a farm in Holstein Iowa, where he settled. He was an early proponent of the beef feedlot system and farmers from all around would come to marvel at his mechanised operation. Instead of turning cattle out to graze or shovelling them their grains and hay, Floyd had erected silos that held feed and automatically distributed it to feeding troughs. The cattle stayed in their pens, increasing their weight more rapidly and developing tender meat that commanded a premium at the stockyards. One farmer commented: ‘When Floyd goes out to do his chores, all he does is push a couple of buttons, then goes back inside for another cup of coffee.”
Floyd was a smart operator. He bought his yearling steers and heifers carefully and hedged against commodity price fluctuations to protect his profit. He started to subcontract cattle to neighbours who would fatten the cattle for him at an agreed rate and then Floyd would take the profit on the beef. In 1982 things went wrong, he got caught at the wrong end of the market and was deeply stressed. By this time Daniel, his son, had started to take over on the farm and he progressed with a more conservative approach that, while less ambitious, was less risky.
Floyd never really stopped farming, but entered a sort of semi-retirement where he could watch over Daniel and advise him when necessary, while he and Catherine enjoyed the company of their grandchildren and great grandchildren
He outlived all his sisters and died peacefully at the ripe old age of 95.
