Chapter Four: Home Improvements

After Serenus was born, the family numbered eight and the little old house was just too small for the growing family. Plans were made and the new house was built in 1893. The was quite an undertaking, but finally the last mortgage on the land had been paid, and of course building costs were not then what they are now. The lean to kitchen was torn off and the main part of the old house was turned half way around the forms the back part of the house as it now stands. Thus, the family lived in this part while the new house was being built. 

The Peterson family, 1905. Back, left to right: Lawrence (17), Naomi (15), Serenus (13), George (22), Esther (24), Carl (26). Front, left to right: Ruth (10), Jonas (60), Lillian (5), Emma (43), Laurine (1) (on lap), Milton (8)

When Father was to do anything he wanted to do it up right and the new house was one of the very best in the country round. The rooms were large and airy. There were good floors and nice wood-work. Only in the very large parlor was the floor laid of six inch boards. It was taken for granted there would always be a wall to wall carpet there. This rooms was furnished with a nice woolen ingrain carpet, some beautiful cane seated chairs and a red plush sofa. That’s all I remember about this room, for it was seldom opened up and used only when company was invited. But one day when little Lawrence got his fingers squeezed in the clothes wringer, I so well remember how Mother comforted him by the simple expedient of bringing him in to sit on that wonderful red plush sofa!

There were styles in building then as now. And so, though the wood-work in the bedrooms upstairs was simply varnished and the natural beauty of the wood retained, not so down stairs. Much work was done on a ground coat of paint, then graining a pattern in a darker color to resemble wood grain But was years passed by this wood-work was less attractive and harder to clean, and yet that finish cost much more in the first place.

In the new house there was plenty of room for the growing family and more comforts, though a coal stove furnished the only heat in winter. Stove pipes leading up through two upstairs bedrooms took off some of the chill, but we used to grab out clothes and run down stairs to dress where it was nice and warm. Some houses in later years were heated by hard coal stoves, which gave out a delightful warm glow through the icing-glass [isinglass] body of the stove. We never had one of these, but a soft coal stove with a protective grill work was bought after Serenus as a baby fell on the cast-iron heat and badly burned his face, leaving it badly scarred for months.

Spring and fall house cleaning was really a big job in the new house. Five of the rooms boasted of carpeting; wool ingrain carpets in the spare bedroom and the parlor and the small bedroom downstairs. Two rooms had home woven rag carpets. An old lady in town, Mrs. Stone, wove the carpets for Mother. Under each carpet was put a layer of clean straw, clean at least when first laid down. Then with a mechanical device called a carpet stretcher the carpet was pulled taut and tacks drive in about every three inches. It looked real nice when the job was well done. Then came the time when all these tacks had to be pried up with a screw driver, and the carpet taken out to be beaten clean of dust. This was a big job. The straw, now all filled with dust. was replaced with clean straw and then again the task of laying the carpets. What a lot of dust could be accumulated over one winter, especially from the coal and ashes from the heating stove which added to that tracked in by many feet.

But, on the whole, work was easier in a roomy new house, and there was also room for boarding the school teachers. Both the public school and Swedish school teachers often stayed at our place. When any carpenter or other work was to be done in those days, it was taken for granted that the work men also got room and board for now there was plenty of room at our house.

A few years after Father died, the farm house was modernized (I think it was about 1910). Again the Peterson house became one of the better farm houses around Gowrie. A full basement was put in and a hot water heating system installed. The west wing was added, providing a nice kitchen and pantry downstairs and a bathroom and storeroom upstairs. A large cistern was built and the house well dug, with the pump on a screened-in porch right outside the back door. With plenty of water near at hand, running water was also installed. Truly a marvelous changed from when Mother began her housekeeping in that first little house on the prairie thirty years before. To this day the old farm house provides a comfortable living, as our family experienced when during the depression in 1933, we left our home in town and move there to live in order to make both ends meet after Clarence lost his job at the bank.

The new big barn had been built some years before the last improvements on the house. Uncle Callerstrom and Adolph Blomgren built the house in 1893 — the barn was the last big carpenter job that Uncle did. In the fall of 1914 Carl built the double crib which burned in that awful fire in the fall of 1947, the last fall we Strands lived on the old farm place.