- Upper Fall River Memories,
Highlightsofaninterview done by Tom Isern with Gilbert Peterson in 1982 at his home on upper Fall River. “My father was Peter Peterson and he was born in Norway. He died when he was 76 and that was in 1927. He came to the United States in 1852 at the age of one. They lived in Wisconsin and had a tobacco farm there. My great-grandfather had died of cholera and my great-grandmother remarried. Her name was Mary Evenson when she came to Kansas and settled in Greenwood County. They settled on the west side of the river, about ¾ of a mile from where we are now. My father whose first name was Peter added “son” to it and that was how they did it in the old days. My grandmother died in Norway and my mother did not come to the United States until she was 20 years old. My grandfather died just before my mother came to the United States. She came to the United States because she had two brothers and a sister living here. She worked at Madison in a hotel when she first came here and then worked for some neighbors who live about two miles south of this place. She and my father belonged to the same church before they married. The church was the Fall River Lutheran Church and it was in a school building about 1/2 mile north of where the church is now. It stood there until 1917 when a tornado destroyed it and they rebuilt it where it is now. I was baptized and confirmed in the old church and married in the new church. I think the schoolhouse where the church was first, was at Hover School. Mr. Hover lived on a farm across the road from the stone schoolhouse.
“My father came to Kansas when he was 17. He worked for Ole Ladd, who was his uncle and he would be my great-uncle. His mother was a sister of Ole Ladd. He fed cattle for Ladd, who was a big cattleman. He also helped with the wheat harvest. He told about cutting the wheat with a scythe and then tying the bundles with two hands full of straw. This was before they had twine. He did two men’s work and Ole paid him 3 dollars a day. My dad bought 80 acres and built a stone house on it. I think the land was school land and he later bought some land down in the timber that was also school land. Someone had bought the 80 acres between his land and the timber and he later bought that land for $5 an acre. Part of the original 80 was grassland and part cropland. He built it up himself. There was a neighbor who wanted to buy some land next to my dad and asked dad to buy 20 acres of that land and he did and that gave him 100 acres. Later he bought 240 acres 3 miles north of here. He grew mostly corn and some kafir corn. He grew some good corn when it was new but now it is worn down and will not grow corn. The only reason they grew corn was to feed the cattle. That’s how I got started in the cattle business. I picked the best heifers out of his herd and kept them. He had shorthorns and then got into raising Herford’s about 1912. He brought in a Herford bull to start his herd going. When dad married, they lived in that stone house and when my older brother was born, they built a wood addition on to it. The stone house was built by Torban Hanson, that is a Norwegian name. He lived about a mile north and a mile west of Dad’s house on a poor farm and the only way he could make it was doing other jobs off the farm.
“There were very few fences for a long time up here where we lived. There was another stone building about 3 miles north that Mr. Rupe bought, but I do not know who built it. It is still standing and it is in good shape. He redid the inside of the house and lowered the basement and put native oak stairways in it. My father-in-law who lives up by Hamilton was a stonemason also. He built the foundation on both ends of my house and the foundation of my barn after he was 80 years old. His name was Helman Foster. He showed me a lot about building with stone. I had a man from Oklahoma, my son-in-law’s dad who built that garage for me and he did not know how to break limestone, he had worked with sandstone and I had to show him how to break it. If you have a square stone that you want to break in the middle you do not hit it in the middle. You hit it on one end and it will break right on through. I have the tools to work stone, they belonged to my father-in-law. I have a rock ax and chisels. He had a full layout of tools to work with. I kept them because I thought it was something to have tools that were used back in the 1800s. He was also a butcher and worked in a butcher shop in Eureka. He also helped build the Citizen’s National Bank in Eureka. He helped tear down the old bank and build the new one on Third Street and Main. He also hauled rock from up in the Flint Hills down to build a sidewalk for the old courthouse. Those rocks were four or five feet wide and six feet long. They would haul them under the running gear of wagons.
“We were up in Wisconsin about three years ago where my dad was raised. We saw all kinds of things the people had made, like beds and clocks made out of native lumber. They have a festival and a big parade every year. We were there to see the whole thing and it was quite interesting.
“Ole Ladd came from Wisconsin, around the Dells, he came down here and started ranching and bought thousands of acres of land. He would ship cattle to market in England, as there was not much of a market here in the early times. He would ship a whole shipload at a time. One of his boys told me about going one time. Harry Ladd, who was Ole’s boy, got to be a big cattleman. He had thousands of cattle. He wanted me to come live with him. I was up in Kansas City one time and he was up there. He was talking about buying that big hotel where he stayed and he took me up to his room. He asked me to visit with him for a while and showed me how he intended to rebuild the whole hotel. He bought the Grimmet Hotel in Eureka and turned it over to his wife. He was a big speculator. It could be cattle, racehorses or stock. He had bought some stock and made money on it in two or three days and his wife said to sell it and he wanted to wait to make a little bit more on it.
“Ole Ladd got his money to start in the cattle business by going to California with some other people and found gold. These fellows all went together so they would not get robbed if they found gold. That was how he was able to buy the land here. Early settlers who were Norwegian and came here were members of the Fall River Church. I will start in the south end and name them. Erickson, Ole Bronson, Ole Ladd, Andrew Amundsen, John B. Johnson, Ole Hover, Totland, Knut Holverson, Erick Asmunson, Steiner Hendrickson and then Anderson and Hanson and he lived up in the hills. Ole Olson was another and he lived in the stone house. They called him “shoemaker,” as he did shoes. That’s all the old settlers that I know of that belonged to the church. All the Norwegians went to church. There would be a string of wagons and horses along the road by the church. There were occasionally non-Norwegians who went to the church there but they were not members and did not join even when we ask them to join the church. They would donate money to the church at times to keep it going. There was one service in English and one in Norwegian when I was a boy. One service was in the morning and one about three in the afternoon. They did not have song books so you had to learn the songs by listening to them. The English service was usually in the evening so they had three services a day sometimes.
“There was another Norwegian whose first name was Isaac and he lived in a stone house over the hill. He later built a frame house. One Sunday he went out to call the cattle in and he dropped dead in the field. There was also a Lady’s Aid organization in the church. They would make quilts and put dates on the back of them back in the 1800s. There was no men’s organization back then.
