Chapter Three: The Family Grows

When Carl was 18 months old, Esther Adelia was born. Help was not easy to get but this time old Mrs. Hendrickson had come to help Mother. Then the baby did not come at the expected time and after several weeks, Mrs. Hendrickson had to leave as her own family needed her. So when Esther was born Mother had no help after all.

The family kept on increasing. Esther was not quite two when George was born. As a baby he had several spells of convulsions, and no doubt this was the reason that he never was strong and well like the rest of us children. Then followed a really difficult time for the little family. After a miscarriage it seemed that Mother could not regain her strength and for months was unable to work at all. Help then as now was hard to get, though her cousin Emma Seashore was there for awhile. At times Father would be alone to care for the three little ones as best he could. Carl and Esther say they well remember the very thick pancakes he used to bake for them on top of the cast iron heating stove. Neighbors were helpful and kind, and came often to wash, clean up the house and bake.

Original Peterson farmhouse and granary, circa 1883. From left to right: Carl, Jonas, George, Emma, Esther. Note the small spruce trees surrounded by wood-post enclosures.

Though Carl must have been only about six years old, he has recalled of how on Christmas Eve, three forlorn little folks were sitting in the dusk, on a shawl spread on the floor for warmth, when Theodore Hultquist, a cousin of Father, who was working for Mr. Lennarson, came over and brought them some little gifts and Christmas cheer.

It took much urging and encouragement from her cousin Emma and her neighbor, Mrs. Woodard, to get Mother to try to walk again. Almost as when a child, she had to learn to take those first steps. But gradually she regained her strength and was able to care for her family, who so much needed a mother’s care.

Sorrow came to the home when their next baby, lovely little blue-eyed Elvera, died at the age of nine months, but before long there was a new baby. Lawrence was born on March 20, 1888.

It is difficult for us of this generation to grasp the monotonous trend of the life of those days. Seldom were they able to go to church, and Mother grieved over this. For some time before Lawrence was born, her Uncle Carl Gustaf came to help with some building. He was the uncle who was also a lay preacher, and Mother has told of what a season of refreshing this was to her starved sould, as he read and explained the Bible and sang to them.

It was quite an event when in 1890, just before I, her sixth child, was born, Mother got her first washing machine. Until then all washing had been done on a wash board. On the 3rd of July, after 10-year-old Carl came home from the last day of school, he and Mother did a big washing. The machine was operated by a push and pull handle on the lid of the machine, and standing over the hot steam was not an easy task, even for an older person, but this was Carl’s task from then on.

That evening as Mother realized her baby would soon be born, she had Father bring the children in to Auntie Callerstrom’s “for a visit,” while Auntie came back to assist at the child birth. The next day there was a Sunday School picnic out at the Isaacson farm. Dinner was served pot luck style, but at tables, the older folks were eating first. Esther relates how they then let the little folks eat on the dirty dishes to save washing! In those days children always waited till all the older folks were served. Folks were not so afraid of germs then as now! How well I remember us thirsty children crowding around th water bucket and all drinking from the same dipper.

But germs there were in those days too. We had the usual childhood diseases in turn. After Serenus was born the whole family had the whooping cough, even the baby. There was no known relief in those days and it had to run its course. Imagine six children sick with the whooping cough at the same time!

Except for Carl, who was born in Illinois, Auntie Callerstrom had served as mid-wife for all of us children until Serenus was born. She had learned much from experience, and when she was called out on November 14, 1892, she saw that this time Mother needed a doctor. With his slow team of horses Father set out for Gowrie. There he found old Doctor Evans unwilling to come with him, so he had to continue on to Callender and Dr. Fox came with him to the aid of poor Mother who had waited in pain all that long time. It maybe was a blessing that rough old Dr. Evans refused to come after all, for the younger, more skillful doctor was able to change the position of the baby so all went well.

The first small house had a sort of attic or loft, not plastered, which had to be used as an extra bedroom, even in winter. With the many cracks and crevices in the rudely constructed homes of pioneer days many folks were pestered with bed bugs. To make matters worse, these bed bugs would be carried in clothing and so spread from one house to another. One fall Mother’s step-brother, Gottfried, who had recently come from Sweden, came to stay with them after working for sometime for other families. He and Carl shared this attic room, and Mother let them take care of the room as at that time walking stairs was difficult for her. Imagine her dismay when one day she did go up to clean and found the bed literally crawling with bed bugs. The only thing to do was to empty and burn the corn husk filling of the mattress, wash all the bed clothes and then souse every crack and corner with kerosene. As I grew older and helped with the house-cleaning, I remember how as a precaution against bed bugs, Mother would use a feather and soak every crack in the wooden bed steads with kerosene each spring and fall.

Every fall we would go out into the fields and gather sacks full of the inner corn husks to replenish our mattresses. The ticks were washed and kept from year to year, but the husks would get matted and dusty. It took skill in those days to make up a bed so that it was smooth and even. One had to reach in through the opening at the top of the mattress and kind of level off the hollows and bumps made by our bodies, a far cry from the inner-spring mattresses of our day. Of course, there were no springs at all until many, many years later.

As the family increased so the work increased for Mother, and it was only be each one doing his or her share to help, that all the work could be done. The spring that Ruth was born in 1895, Esther stayed home from school to help. Then the next year she went back to school for review before taking the county eighth grade examinations. Likewise, when Esther began to teach school in the spring of 1903, I stayed home, as Mother was not well that year. So, though not quite 13 years of age, that spring I baked large batches of bread, (12 loaves at a backing) scrubbed the floors and did the heavier house work. At that time a 50 pound sack of flour lasted only one week. One time I recall Father bought 20 sacks of flour at one time.

It was quite a thrill for me that later that spring I could pass the eighth grade examinations and rank first in the whole county, even though I had not been attending school. I was awarded one year’s free tuition at Tobin College, but could not avail myself of it, as I was needed at home.

When Milton was born on September 4, 1897, it was just at threshing time. Esther, only 16 years old then, was responsible for the threshers. At this time the Jacobsons lived on the Woodards’ farm. Mrs. Jacobson came up to help Esther but her little three months old Leonard was a “colicky” baby, and cried all the time so it wasn’t too much help. Cooking for the threshers was no easy task under any circumstances. Esther will never forget how as the men went out after dinner one of them clumsily tipped over a large can of water brought in for preparing the next meals and though it flooded the kitchen, he only laughed; while she had extra work of cleaning up that mess before getting supper on to cook. The crew with the threshing rig were often rough and unmannerly. These men also stayed nights wherever they were working. The good old days? — not for the farm women.

Though I was only seven years old, I so well remember when Jonas Milton was baptized at home; how Rev. Landell looked at the slip on which the baby’s name was written, showed it to someone and smiled as if her were amused. Of course Milton translated the Jonas to John as he got older. He and Leonard Jacobson were inseparable playmates as they grew old enough to be left alone together. In those days there were no clean sand piles for children to play in so their favorite play spot was the accumulated pile of ashes. They enjoyed this ash pile, but the mother had to wash some very dirty little boys.

When Lillian was born January 27, 1900, I was ten years old. This time our good neighbor, Mrs. Knock, came to take care of Mother and baby for the first week, and I spent a wonderful week visiting with the Knock girls. This is really one of the outstanding events of my childhood. Their older sister, Emma, took good care of us all there.

Though there was the same difference in the ages of Milton and Lillian as between the rest of us, it has seemed as if there was a closer bond between those two — they seemed almost like twins. Perhaps this was because for a while it seemed as if the family had reached its full number so there was not a new baby crowding in on their play. It was not until Lillian was almost five years old, that Laurie was born on September 9, 1904. Mother was then 42 years old, and not at all well. In fact, she herself feared she would not live through this child-birth. But all went well and little Laurine became the pet of us all, but especially of Father.

About this time Father got a bone infection in his little finger. For weeks that infection caused an almost unbearable pain until two thirds of this finger, bone and all, had literally rotted away, leaving only a loose portion of flesh which he himself one day cut off with just an old pair of scissors and then fainted dead away as he tried to walk to a chair. How frightened we all were. But after that it miraculously healed.

After this, though only about sixty years of age, Father withdrew from active farm work, leaving the management up to the boys, who were naturally interested in the newer methods then coming in and also in the tiling of the lower ground, as the county ditch had gone through and provided an outlet for the water. From then on we remember Father sitting in the shade of the big maples in summer, and by the bay window in winter, entertaining Laurine who was left without playmates, since Milton and Lillian were already of school age. Part of each afternoon Father would lie on the bed upstairs by the west window, reading his Swedish newspaper and also a weekly newspaper, “The Chicago Inter-Ocean,” which furnished all the news we ever got from the outside world even up till Father’s death in 1915. How times have changed in these last 40 years.

It was about this time that our Grandfather Sjostrand died, and Mother invested her legacy from Sweden in a piano. After Esther had taken lessons on the organ from Mr. Lagerquist, she in turn gave the rest of us lessons. Father loved organ music but had no taste for what he called the tinny sound of a pianoi, and he would retire upstairs when Ruth and I began taking lessons from Hilma Liljegren and practiced on the new piano. The old organ later was placed in the school by Esther when she taught District #9. I have often wondered what became of it after the consolidation of schools, for there are happy memories of childhood when we would gather around the organ, and sing our favorite hymns. May of these Swedish hymns are indelibly impressed on our youthful memories.

When Esther was 17 years old, she went to a sewing school for three months. Mary Hicks taught may girls of those times what I later years we might call Home Economics. After completing thus course, Esther went out to various homes and did sewing. She earned 50 cents a day and her board, for a ten hour day of sewing — just five cents an hour!

As with her organ lessons, Esther felt she should pass on the sewing skills to me so I took could carry on, which I did do after she left for Omaha. But, maybe I was the black sheep of the family! I did not love fancy work like Mother and Esther did. And I surely hated to sew. I can well remember angrily crying as I saw doing some sewing which Esther thought I should be learning. I loved to read, and read anything and everything I could get hold of. I loved to work out of doors. But how often in life one must learn to do work that is not what we might like to do. That is a lesson I think we all learned in our youth.