Uncle Milton

Next on the list of my grandmother’s offspring is uncle Milton. When I became aware of uncle Milton as a person in my mother’s background was when he was teaching at the Augustana Seminary in Rock Island. This was I think the second step in his career, the first (directly after ordination) having been a pastorate at Anoka, Minnesota.



Milton as a young man

Unlike his two brothers in he ministry he was very capable intellectually and his discourses tended to command attention, though perhaps not agreement. While he was at Augustana Seminary I sense that there had developed some sort of dissension between my uncle and the prevailing powers and/or thinking at the seminary and he moved onto a large city church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The dissension may have had to do with uncle Milton’s somewhat liberal ideas about the character of some part of the Old Testament, which were at odds with the more fundamentalistic attitude of older members of the faculty. This difference in outlook surfaced again subsequently in his last career position which was as a teacher in a seminary of the Norwegian Lutheran church, also in St. Paul.

The evidence I have of this is a copy of a discussion he gave which presented some mildly liberal interpretations of some Old Testament occurrences. As earlier this brought him into some conflict with the old-guard conservative elements of the church. I became aware of this discussion through Howard Nelson who received it from our mutual cousin John Milton. It surfaced apparently during a reunion of the Milton children.

The impression I have of uncle Milton is that his thinking was the first step in the thinking about Judaism and Christianity which if carried to its logical and inevitable end would be a complete demolishing of the traditional tenets of the two religions. In his case the process had hardly more than just begun, impeded doubtless by the still potent influence of the religious outlook of the Peterson household. Initially uncle Milton had selected law as a potential career and had actually spent a year at Yale. But in the end he succumbed to the home influences and ended up in the ministry (in my opinion to his and society’s loss).

As far as actual personal contact I had very little with uncle Milton. As a rule the Milton family would come to Gowrie sometime each summer as a part of their vacation. They would actually stay with aunt Faye’s parents, but there would be some meals and visits to my grandmother’s to which we were also guests. Thus I had contact with my cousins but never developed any real rapport with them. Mostly they seemed to live and play in a world apart from us socially and economically.



Uncle Milton and Aunt Faye, in an undated photo

I recall one brief conversation that I had with uncle Milton on the occasion of one of his periodic visits to Gowrie. We were standing on the front lawn of the farm, beneath the six pine trees that stood in front of the house (I think these pines were planted by my grandfather — in a very early picture of the farmstead in which perhaps three or so of the oldest children appeared along with their parents, the trees can be seen in the foreground, protected by some crude enclosures probably against farm animals).



Peterson farmhouse, circa 1883. From left to right: Carl, Jonas, George, Emma, Esther. Note the five small pine trees in enclosures.

To the south was the pleasant vista either of the alfalfa field, or perhaps flax. Either field in bloom is a particularly attractive farm scene. Uncle Milton mentioned that during the summers when he came back from his schooling he would participate in the farm work such as plowing — which at the time would probably be with horses.

I suppose the last contact I personally had with uncle Milton was the time we came to Gowrie via Minneapolis because of a United Airlines strike. They (he and Aunt Faye) unexpectedly showed up at the airport on our arrival and we stayed overnight with them on the way back to California.