Uncle Carl and Farming

I have no specific information as to when he became engaged in his threshing activities but my guess is that they peaked between 1915 and 1925. I base this guess on the large Hart-Parr tractors that he used for running the threshing machines. They were of the vintage of about 1910. There were three or four of these large tractors scattered around the barnyard when our family was living on the farm. In the lower garden there was a shed that housed three threshing machines and a corn-sheller. While we were on the farm only one of the threshing machines was used, one made by the Huber company and the largest of the three.

At one time I understand he ran three threshing operations but that had dwindled to one when we were on the farm. That was the run that included the nearby farms. He continued to do corn-shelling at times but that too tapered off the in the 1930s. The last threshing run ceased operation sometime in the mid-1930s and he did not use the equipment even for his own operations. He bought a combine and used that instead. I recall him taking Vincent and me along with him when he made an inspection to see various combines in operation.

He used smaller more modern models of the Hart-Parr tractors in addition to the large ones. They were used for plowing which was a heavier duty than his Farmall could readily handle, particularly with the three bottom plow that he had. On one occasion Jean and I were doing some genealogical research in the files of the Gowrie News. In the course of looking through the old issues of the News, I noticed an ad for Hart-Parr tractors to be had through the local Chevrolet/John Deere dealer listing my uncle as the local agent.

My uncle was in the forefront of new ideas in the field of agriculture. He was early in the use of mechanical corn-pickers and he did custom-picking often letting his own corn stand unpicked until the spring of the next year. He was one of the first to use rubber tires on his Farmall. He planted soybeans as a crop to replace oats early on. He made use of the government programs during the Depression years to grow odd crops and of course his growing of potatoes was unique in the community. He was an avid reader of Wallaces Farmer and he would attend the open houses at Iowa State College to learn of the newest developments on the agricultural front. Often on these trips he would take Vincent and me with him. I wonder if he were trying to interest the two of us in the future of farming as a vocation.

While he was very up-to-date farming wise he was extremely conservative in his religious outlook. I am sure that his views when he was confirmed were the same as when he died. He wanted a simple coffin but he wanted the most expensive copper vault to ensure that his body would be protected until resurrection day. Someday some archaeologist will come upon it and wonder.

More About Uncle Carl

As I believe I have mentioned he was socially inept. I rather resemble him in this regard. This was demonstrated in the one attempt he made that the family knew of. In his typical abrupt style he decided that there was a young woman in the Gowrie congregation that would make a good wife for him. He decided he would knock on her door and ask her to marry him. His brother Laurence told him that that was not the way to go about courting. But he proceeded with his plan. She said no, maybe she was astounded at the suddenness of his proposal, and that was the end of that. He never tried again as I understand.

He was a very strict believer in the Bible, both as a guide to what he did and what he thought. I would not rule out the possibility that he thought that in his mind he had lusted after this young lady and winner grievously and that attempting to seek another mate he was indulging in an adulterous pursuit. This would in my opinion be in accord with the psychological state of things in the Peterson household.

On his return to the farm he was again engaged in the farm work. Indeed in on of the letters my uncle Laurence wrote to him when he was in Des Moines, uncle Laurence expressed the wish that my uncle Carl would come to help with the farm work. By that time I am sure my grandfather was tapering off his actual involvement in the physical labor and his sons were taking over. In his later years my grandfather made it his duty to pump water for the livestock. This was quite a chore — I recall how difficult it was to operate the hand pump for the deep lower well. The barn had stalls for seven horses and there must have been quite a few cattle. That would add up to a considerable amount of water.

Uncle Carl Peterson, Education

The last set of documentation I have regarding the Peterson family I acquired after the death of my mother. After she died and after the funeral we six children went through her house “on the hill” and chose what we each of us wanted to retain for ourselves. I recall I was looking through the drawers of the dresser that was standing at the west end of the sleeping porch that was on the south side of the second floor. It was the floor where the four or five bedrooms and the bathroom were. I came upon a bundle of old letters and some miscellaneous papers that had been collected by my uncle Carl from a time around the turn of the century.

I speculate that he had forgotten about them when he and my aunt Esther left the house to go to the old folks home at Madrid. Maybe he would have destroyed them had he remembered they were there. The sleeping porch was where he slept all the time he lived in that house, winter or summer. With only a couple of blankets over him but, in later years at least, with a knitted cap covering his bald head. The sleeping porch did not have a clothes closet attached to it, that was in the bedroom separated form it by a door, the bedroom in which my uncle George always slept and in which he spent most of his waking hours also.

I took the bundle of papers, not asking my siblings if they wanted them. Later when I examined them they turned out to be largely letters he had received from members of the family when he was taking a business course in Des Moines. A large fraction were from his mother and they were in Swedish so I couldn’t read them. The letters from his brothers and sisters were however mostly in English and they were an enlightening look at the state of the Peterson household at that time. I transcribed the letters thinking that some day I would attempt to translate them, but I realize now that I never will. What I did will remain after I die, perhaps some descendant of mine will come upon them and continue what I started to do.

In addition to giving a snapshot of the Petersons in about 1900, the papers indicate that my namesake uncle had a troubled time of it in his early adult years. He took this business course from some school down in Des Moines and he was quite unhappy being away from the parental home. I wonder what possessed him to take this course, which contained amongst other things instruction in shorthand. It would have been far more useful to him to have gone to Tobin College as my father did.

One interesting sidelight is that he did make a contact with the college at Ames regarding enrollment there. That is where he should have gone. Probably he did not have a mentor to steer him in that directions. Sometime he went to Gustavus [Adolphus] for a term or two. Perhaps on the basis of that he took the test to be able to teach in one of the country schools that dotted the countryside.

My mother related the incident involving the two of them when he was the teacher and she was a student. On one occasion an agent for a book company came during school hours and my uncle spent time taking to him. My mother was distracted from her assigned work, my uncle noticed this, and when the agent left called on my mother to recite. It was obvious that her attention had not been on her assignment. This was typical of my uncle, he kept an eagle eye on what was going on.

As nearly as I can make out he never did much with the business training he received. He did function in some clerical capacity in connection with the rural school system and with the creamery in Gowrie but that was all. He apparently had some correspondence with an acquaintance from the school in Des Moines but that soon tapered off. The friend tried to get him to find employment in Chicago but I don’t think he ever reached out in that direction. After his forays to Des Moines and St. Peter he returned to the parental home and after that he never really left it.

Grandmother Emma Sophia Peterson

My grandmother Peterson as I remember her was a small stooped person, much afflicted with osteoporosis. Earlier in her life she had been of moderate height and erect even regal carriage. I think in that respect as I recall the family picture that was taken when aunt Laurine was a babe. My grandmother sat next to her husband and she was clearly a physically attractive woman.



Jonas and Emma Sophia Peterson and children, circa 1905
Back, from left: Laurence, Naomi, Serenus, George, Esther, Carl
Front, from left: Ruth, Jonas, Lillian, Emma and Laurine (on lap), Milton


The impression I have of my grandmother as she lived in the house “on the hill” was this old lady who spent a lot of her time in the kitchen, cooking, baking, doing the dishes. Although aunt Esther, and aunt Ruth were present she always kept to herself the task of washing the dishes. Maybe this was a holdover from the days on the farm when her children were young and she did most of the kitchen chores herself. She always used a very minimum of water either in the dishpan or in the very small pan in which she rinsed the dishes after they were washed. This careful use of water was surely the habit that she had on the farm when transporting the water for the household chores was often the major part of a particular task. I recall her commenting that on the weekly wash day she thought the job was half done when she had carried the needed water from the lower well. A distance of maybe 100 yards.

The cookies she made during most of the year (as differentiated from Christmas time when she made Bakalsar and one other holiday cookie) were always chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting on them. She would keep a store of them in a drawer in the kitchen from which she would dole them out to us children as when we happened to be in the kitchen with her.

I have a most vivid memory of an encounter with my grandmother in that kitchen. The two of us were there just the two of us. Outside there was developing an Iowa thunderstorm of the kind that can come up in the summer time. She turned to me and said quite seriously “That is Thor riding in his chariot.” I was astounded at this bit of Norse lore coming out of this very pious Lutheran woman. It was completely out of character. She must have learned it during her childhood in Sweden. Was it only a story from her childhood or did she still give some credence to this fable? I sometimes wonder.

For she was a very convinced Lutheran to whom the Bible was the very immutable key to the world around her. She was of course well versed in the Swedish language from her childhood and she read the Bible in that language. She did have some quite brief schooling in English after arriving in this country but though she could converse in English I don’t think she could write it. Her strong, almost fundamentalistic Christian belief was a dominating factor, indeed I might say the dominant factor, in the upbringing of her family. None of her children strayed far from the orthodox Lutheran belief, maybe I should say not very fat at all. Three of her sons entered the ministry of the Lutheran church and one of her daughters married a Lutheran minister. I shall discuss them later as I run through the members of the family.

Because of this strong emphasis on adherence to the Lutheran faith and because my grandmother was so disliking of the sexual experience, the ambience in the Peterson household was fertile ground for repressed psychosis and it took the form of half of my grandmother’s children never marrying. The rest were psychological misfits in one way or another. Of the five who did marry, my opinion is that only two — my mother and my uncle Milton — led really normal lives. I have often thought that the history of the Petersons would be an excellent basis for a psychological novel.

One of my cousins, the eldest son of my uncle Milton, got his doctorate in English and was a professor in that field at the University of South Dakota. He wrote several short books that I am sure were based in whole or in part on his observations of the members of the family. When he tried to elicit come information about my uncle George, a particularly likely psychological study, my aunt Laurine clamped down on giving him any information that the family was privy to him. My sister Vivian was aware of this information but she too refused to disclose it and when she died the information was lost forever.

I had at one time several of these books by my cousin, may still have them somewhere. The stories in them are sort of weird. My uncle Milton was married to the youngest of the C.O. Swanson daughters and my friend Howard Nelson’s mother was another of the daughters and it was through him that I was aware of and got these books. Howard and I are not cousins of course but we did have this mutual cousin and it was a tie that helped to tie our lives together. I shall delve further into my thoughts about George when I get to him.

Suffice it to say that my opinion of the Peterson household was like a little community dominated by a rather extreme attachment to the Lutheran interpretation of Christianity, isolated from the world of ideas and information in the universe outside of its tight little boundaries and very distrustful of what these ideas would do to their deeply ingrained convictions. The person who caused this was my grandmother — a sweet and agreeable individual of very appealing and seemingly humble demeanor on the outside but hard as steel on the inside. Although it was my grandfather who managed the economic matters of the household it was my grandmother that set the tenor of the environment.

Grandfather Peterson

My grandfather must have been a prodigious worker in his prime. He was responsible for all the labor on the farm until the older children were capable of helping him. He must have been an individual of strong sexual drive to sire the 11 children he did. My sister Vivian recollects that my grandmother did not enjoy sex — probably the succession of childbirths were one cause of this dislike. I believe she was about 40 years old when aunt Laurine, the youngest of the children was born.

In 1915 my grandfather died and the family moved from the farm to the house in town. So the last half of her life was spent in comparative ease, enjoying the company of her children. The travail of childbearing in the first half of her married life results in this pleasant experience in the last half of her life. My sister related the graphic scene of my grandfather chasing my grandmother around the room after their marriage with his erect organ terrifying my grandmother.

When we were living on the farm Vivian would ride in with uncle Carl in the evening for a music lesson with my aunt Ruth. Vivian would share a bed with my grandmother overnight and my grandmother would talk to her about events of her past. Among these was the subject of my uncle George which Vivian carried with her to her grave. I will discuss this subject later.

My grandfather did not like doctors. I think this stemmed or was exacerbated at the time my uncle Serenus was born. It was a difficult birth and my grandfather drove to the nearby town of Callender to get a doctor. He would not come. It is not clear to me the immediate cause of my grandfather’s death. The family attributed it to cancer. Of the stomach? He in life had the habit of ingesting fruit pits, maybe this habit contributed. Anyway his last year was spent in considerable [pain] but he refused any contact or help from a doctor.

I look at my two grandfathers and I think that I am more like them than my own father. They were acquisitive of possessions (land) like I have been (though in my case land played only a part). I speculate that my maternal grandfather was a rather pro forma adherent of Christianity. I have similarly viewed the religion with a jaundiced eye and at this point in my life essentially rejected all of its theology. I have the mechanical aptitude of my grandfather Strand which my father lacked. And I share with them the capacity for work which of course was also present in the makeup of my father.

Farmland

I got the impression from my grandfather’s papers that he must have been a rather astute businessman. The letters that survived showed him to have dealings with landowners beyond the simple purchase of the land he bought. There is also a scrap of paper indicating that at one time he was sued in a Justice of the Peace court in the small neighboring town of Callender. He made one mistake. When he bought the south forty he could have had (as I understand it) the whole quarter section for the same price. It was low ground so much of it was of little potential value until tiling came in. Perhaps he just didn’t want to pay taxes on land that he couldn’t use.

Also included in the papers was his holographic will. It stipulated that the farm not be sold as long as my grandmother was alive. The family adhered to this stipulation and it was not until 1960 that the estate was finally divided. My uncle Carl handled the sale of the farm which was bought by neighboring farmers. The “home” 80 acres were for $450 per acre, an almost unheard of price for the time, the rest for lesser amounts. I would have liked to buy it but I didn’t have the funds for it. I later found out in a discussion with my department head at Shell that I might have been able to tap into my savings in the Provident Fund (which was supposed to be a no-no). Instead we bought the old Joe Johnson place near my father’s farm.

Later on I received part of my father’s farm when his estate was settled after the death of my mother and we bought more so that we had an additional 75 acres to go with the 125 acres of the Johnson farm. The east forty acres of the Peterson farm was bought by the neighboring brothers Vernon and Martin Telleen. Vernon told me later on that my uncle Carl wanted them to purchase the whole 200 acres but they were afraid to incur that much debt. He added that they should have gone ahead and bought the whole thing the way the future developed.

Elysian Fields, Texas

I have visited Elysian Fields on two occasions. The first was when we were living in Houston and Jean and I drove up to Iowa by way of the town and coming back along the Mississippi on the east side (seeing the old riverfront mansions along the way). Elysian Fields is located in the piney woods country of northeast Texas and it is beautiful country with lots of wooded areas and open land interspersed.

The second time was in 1975 when I spent a good part of a year as an “consultant” on the design of a plant for a potential licensee (whether it was ever built I don’t know — it was a complicated design and would have cost a bundle of money so I rather doubt it). Palma spent part of the summer there also, starting out as a “temp” and ending up full-time at Pennzoil. When we left at the end of the summer we drove north to Iowa passing through Elysian Fields. The town doesn’t exist as such any more, it is just a crossroads point. There is a cemetery which we explored on both trips but we could not locate any graves that could have been relatives. The cemetery was rather uncared for as I recall.

Someone with a background in Greek and Roman history must have been in the area early on. In addition to Elysian Fields there is a Carthage.

Grandfather Peterson, Farmer/Miner

One time I was spending an overnight stay in my grandmother Peterson’s house (after my uncle Carl and aunt Esther had moved to the home at Madrid and they had deeded the house to my mother in appreciation for what she had done for them in their declining years) and I chanced across an old packet in the dresser of the room I was occupying which contained various documents that had belonged to my grandfather Peterson. As I was always interested in anything related to the doings of my forebears, I asked my mother if I could have them. She replied that she would have to ask her surviving brothers if they wanted them. They didn’t and I subsequently acquired them.

I would think that my mother’s brothers would have been interested in the packet, after all it belonged to their father, as contrasted to me who knew of my grandfather only secondhand (he had dies about five years before I was born). Indeed my grandfather Peterson never saw any of his grandchildren. Perhaps it was that our family grew up on Gowrie and had close contact with my grandmother and the members of the family who lived with her or came to visit her but I have always sensed that I have had a greater interest in the family than did any of my Peterson cousins. And of course we lived on the Peterson farmstead during the Depression years. Those were my teenage years and I think a very impressionable time in my life and I imbibed without thinking of it a feel for what life on the farm had been like during the time my mother was growing up there.

From the papers in the packet I was able to determine when the various parts of the farm were acquired by my grandfather. There were also some papers relating to the time he was working a a miner in Montana. There was also a little notebook in which were recorded the purchase of a number of items of food. I surmise that my grandfather was “batching” it while a miner, perhaps alone of in the company of other miners. There is a curious comment in my mother’s account of my grandmother’s history to the effect that once my grandmother was ill and my grandfather did the cooking. My mother commented that the pancakes he made were quite thick. I wonder, was this the way he made them in Montana?

There were also receipts for registered mail addressed to his brother Henry Peterson in Elysian Fields, Texas. Was he sending money to his brother? I know that after his marriage he tried to collect on some funds he had provided to relatives (without apparently too much success). Was he loaning money to his brother? The letters were sent from the post office in Phillipsburg, Montana. I have been in Phillipsburg twice. On one visit I tried to see if my grandfather had had a claim for mining gold (he had the nickname “Gold” Peterson in the Gowrie Swedish community). I could find no record of such a claim and I have concluded that he was working just as a hard rock miner for one of the mining companies in the area at the time.

The topography around Phillipsburg is a mixture of forest and open land. I speculate that [it] is like Sweden in that way and that was why my grandfather wanted to return to it after his marriage. But my grandmother would have none of that. I guess she was fed up with being plunked down in a completely alien milieu. My grandfather did return to Montana during the first year of his marriage to work as a miner. Was he in need of funds to start his life as a farmer? In one of the letters he wrote back to Sweden he comments that he guessed that he would spend the rest of his life as a farmer. Do I detect a sense that [he] felt tied down to a life of oil in an occupation that he really didn’t like?