The Stenholms and the Renquists

At this juncture I have sort of completed the travel from the little brown house to my grandmother’s following a route kitty-corner through the park and through the business section of Gowrie. I bypassed the school building as I’ll cover that later on. But I want to mention two other buildings before starting at my grandmother’s house.

The first is a correction of sorts and that is there was a third residence in Gowrie that rivaled Nils Lindquist’s residence and “John” Johnson’s house in construction and relative elegance. That was the Stenholm house which was in the same block as Albert and Molly Rosene’s and faced the park on its west side. It was built of sort of a pink stone or brick and had a porch in front with two-story columns. Stenholm (Pete) had a farm implement dealer (International Harvester) in Gowrie who had died in a swimming accident, either before I was born or when I was too young to remember the occurrence.

Anyway the house looked pretty elegant from the outside — I may have been in it but I have no recollection of the interior. Pete’s widow inhabited the house in sort of solitary splendor during my youth. Mrs. Stenholm was a sister of my aunt Edith (married to my uncle Serenus) and thus an aunt of my cousin Eugene. I recall Eugene staying at the Stenholm house during one or more of his parents’ visits back to Gowrie.

Aunt Edith grew up on a farm about one mile due east of the Peterson farm. Her siblings experienced several traumatic accidents. One brother, Constant, died in the same swimming accident as Pete Stenholm. During the time we were on the farm, Ernest, who was farming the old homestead, dies from an encounter with e Brown Swiss bull he owned. Constant had farmed it until the time of his untimely death. Whereas Ernest was a so-so farmer, Constant was up and coming and at his death left the farmstead with perhaps the best corncrib and barn in the threshing run. Next on the docket for Constant I have heard was a new house but that was never built. Constant died and the old house continued on in use for an indefinite period. It was still in use when I left Iowa for good to begin work in California.

The other house I want to mention, not for the architecture but for the inhabitants, was the Albert Renquist house. Albert was married to Maria (née Callestrom) and if my reading of genealogy is correct, a cousin of my grandmother’s. They lived in a modest structure on the very east end of Gowrie. We always called them uncle Albert and aunt Maria, even though that wasn’t correct, either for us children or for my mother (if I have the genealogy right).

Albert and Maria had one son, Harold, whom I liked very much. He was a rather quiet, bookish person, easy to talk to and tolerant both of ideas and people. He was I suppose 4 or 5 years old than I. It was Harold who introduced me to the Tom Swift, of which he had several.



Harold, Maria, and Albert Renquist, in an undated photo


The Renquists had a radio before we did and I recall hearing it in use during one of our periodic supper visits to the Renquist home. It was one of the small table models and I have the vague impression that on one of these visits the program that Orson Welles put on about the invasion of Martians was discussed. This must be erroneous though as the occasion was well before our move to the farm and I think the Welles program was in the middle 1930s.

Harold was mostly blind in one eye, resulting from an injury in a forceps procedure at his birth. This did not keep him from military service in WWII however, which I think was in some sort of clerical assignment. Later in life he located in the Twin Cities area and I think he married and had a family. He worked for the federal government. I’ve had no contact directly with him since before I went to school at Iowa but I’ve head about him indirectly over the years. Had circumstances been different I’m sure we would have had a continuing congenial association over the years.

Albert worked off and on as a painter and during the time we were on the farm he painted the outside of the farmhouse and I think the shanty. He had painted the other buildings some years earlier, but weather had prevented the painting of the house. I assisted in the painting, being given the tedious task of the windows with all the separations between the panes of glass.

The Renquist family subsisted in part on the income from a farm in southern Minnesota. It was on a trip to attend to farm business that Albert was killed in an automobile accident. Maria was very dependent on Albert psychologically and seeing to her welfare afterward was indeed a burden for Harold. As I have mentioned Maria was a Callestrom, hence a Seashore, and as a consequence was intelligent but somewhat unstable personality-wise (my opinion). Some of the Callestroms were really dithering females in my estimation — they had this sort of slightly mad look in their eyes and face, which Maria certainly had.



The Callestrom sisters. I don’t know which one is Maria. The only one I can identify, because she is identified in a different photo in my dad’s photo album, is the one at lower right, who is Daisy.