Ole's Blog

By the time Isaac moved to Longview in 1942, Lovell and Walt both had children, and Vernon was engaged to be married. Ivan, fresh out of Sidney High School, stayed with Lovell and Reatha while he attended business college in Longview. Bob, Vernon, and Ivan all served in the armed forces during World War II.

I was born six years later. I believe Isaac had worked in the mills for a few years, but by the time of my earliest memories, he had retired, and was living on a few acres of land just one mile from my parents’ home. As soon as I was old enough, my folks encouraged me to walk or bicycle to Grandpa’s to spend time with him, which I did very frequently through the mid to late 1950′s. He lived in a tiny attic apartment while renting out the rest of the old farm house. There was a single milk cow, a vegetable garden, and about a dozen fruit trees, mostly cherries, from which he sold the produce to supplement the rent and his Social Security income.

Grandpa and I played many games of checkers and cribbage, and walked to a nearby slough to fish for crappie and perch. I regret that it never occurred to me to ask questions about his earlier years. However, other grandchildren who did ask got very little information for their efforts. I was told that cousin Kenny once asked grandpa what his wife had been like. His response was, “Why do you want to know?”

All five of Isaac’s sons eventually had families, some of them quite large. By 1957 there were 16 grandchildren (all pictured below); the final count reached 22.

Also pictured here are the first two great-grandchildren, Rocky and Sandy.

By the late 1960′s, Grandpa had grown quite feeble. He lived with my parents for several years, then moved to a nursing home, where he died at age 85.

He is buried at Sunnyside Cemetery near Skaar, ND, not far from the old homestead. Also buried there are his wife Anna, and my father, Lovell, who died just a few months later.

(Grandpa Larson used the nickname, “Ike,” although I seldom heard it, as he was just “Pa” or “Grandpa” within the immediate family.) After establishing the homestead, Ike returned to Wisconsin to marry Anna Moen on 10 January 1912, and brought her to the new place.

Crops were plentiful, and their family grew rapidly. Their first son, Waldemar, was born in January 1913, followed by Lovell (1914), Vernon (1917), and Robert (1919).

(The names of Lovell and Walt may be reversed.) The fifth boy, Ivan, was born in 1923.

Besides the years of favorable weather, Isaac’s skill with horses probably contributed to his farming success.

In 1926, the Larson farm experienced its first crop failure (see Letter From Anna). By then, Anna’s health was already deteriorating, as also indicated in the letter.  Isaac traveled to Washington State, and located a farm for sale near Seattle. He did not buy that farm, perhaps due to lack of cash, but did make the decision to move west. Upon his return to North Dakota, the family began selling their horses and other possessions, in preparation for the move.

Unfortunately, Anna’s health went downhill rapidly; she died in the summer of 1927, and the move was not accomplished.  Grandpa and the five boys stayed put on the old homestead. You may be familiar with the popular radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.”  Its host, humorist Garrison Keillor, often refers to a favorite stereotype, the “Norwegian bachelor farmer.” Just take that stereotype, multiply by six, and you have my father’s childhood.

Isaac may have continued to entertain the notion of moving to Washington. In the fall of 1929, Waldemar enrolled in Pacific Lutheran Academy,  now known as Pacific Lutheran University, in Parkland, WA (now a part of Tacoma). Parkland is also the location of the farm for sale mentioned in Anna’s letter of three years earlier.

Waldemar left Pacific Lutheran after only one semester, for reasons unknown; possibly related to the Great Depression,  which began with the stock market crash just weeks after he enrolled. Grandpa and the boys remained on the farm through the  1930′s, despite repeated droughts and crop failures which exacerbated the nationwide economic distress. Waldemar and Lovell both married in the mid-30′s and moved to Washington on their own, while Grandpa stayed on the farm until the younger three boys had all graduated high school, the last of them in 1940.

Next: Longview.

“Grandpa Larson,” as I always called him, was born on his father Ole’s dairy farm in Vernon County, Wisconsin. He was the last of six children born to Ole and his first wife, Anne Samuelsdatter. Anne died soon after, and Ole married Helena Olsdatter, who had a daughter the same age as Isaac. Ole and Helena eventually had six more children together (see “Ole’sChildren“). Pictured below are Isaac and two of his elder siblings. The eldest brother, Smith Larson, not pictured,was probably living on his own by this time, while the other two siblings had died in their infancy.

Family lore had it that relations were strained between Isaac and his stepmother and/or his stepsister. Of course Grandpa never mentioned anything like that himself, nor indeed anything at all about his early life. But if true, it might help explain why he never remarried after his own wife died in her 30′s, choosing instead to raise five young sons alone on the farm. That can’t have been easy.

Rewind to the year 1909, when 25-year-old Isaac set out with three of his brothers to claim homesteads on the western edge of North Dakota, about 25 miles southeast of Sidney, Montana. It was very late in the homesteading period, and the available land was marginal at best. Only a long spell of unusually favorable weather enabled any of the homesteaders succeed even briefly. The eldest brother, Smith Larson, “proved up” his claim, but apparently soon sold or ceded the land to the others. Smith was a merchant sailor, and died a bachelor in 1923.

The other three brothers, Axel, Isaac, and Oscar, stayed on to raise their families. In this, they were in the minority. Most of the homesteaders had given up even before the Depression and Dust Bowl years of the 1930′s. Today, nearly all of the area is a National Grassland, owned and administered by the federal government.

The image below is of Oscar, Isaac, and Axel, in front of one of the first dwellings they built on their claims. Imagine spending a North Dakota winter in a shack like this!

If the dwelling appears uninviting, the land around it looks downright forbidding. As early as the Lewis and Clark expedition, explorers remarked on the radical change in the landscape as soon as they crossed the Missouri River, which  separates the eastern and western halves, approximately, of the two Dakotas. On the eastern side, grass was tall and lush, nourished by plentiful rainfall and favorable soils. To the west, the grass was short and sparse, the land much drier, and the prairie interrupted by badlands — arid hills of colorful, wind-eroded soil where nothing at all will grow.

Of all our relatives, one cousin, Ron Whited (grandson of Axel Larson), still lives and ranches in the area, holding parts of the original homesteads, and leasing grazing rights on federal and private lands. Ron and his wife earn a modest living raising high-quality beef cattle on more than 12,000 acres of (mostly leased) land. Compare that to the homesteaders who expected to make a family livelihood on their claims of 160 acres!

Another cousin, Larry Larson, tells of his father Oscar returning home from a day trip to Sidney in the 1940′s  to find that a massive swarm of grasshoppers had not only decimated his crops, but had even eaten the paint from their house! Within days, Oscar moved his family to town and gave up farming for good. By this time, Isaac had moved to Washington, where his two eldest sons had established themselves and were raising families of their own.

Next: Ike and the boys.