- Upper Fall River Memories,
Highlights of an interview done by Tom Isern with Gilbert Peterson in 1982 (Continued From Last Week)
“I can still speak Norwegian. If I went to Norway, I could get along ok. My folks started to mix up their talk in Norwegian and English. My folks spoke Norwegian in the house. My oldest brother learned English when he started school. He could not speak English until then. The Mabel Nelson’s who live in town still speak Norwegian. My cousin, her name is Breech, she and I are the only Norwegians left in the whole community. The others have left or died. We had a special feast on New Year’s Day. We had a real thin, like pie dough bread (called lefse) and put butter on it and then put fish on it. I brought fish back from Wisconsin when I visited my daughter because I could not find the fish here. We also made cream pudding. I remember when the old ladies got sick, they would make some for them. My wife here is Irish and she has made the pudding. Our church used to have dinners and serve Norwegian food and people would come and pay to eat it. Mother use to make a cheese out of fresh milk. She would cook it down and it had a different flavor while the milk was fresh. We also had a dish where we mixed cottage cheese and butter together. The old Norwegians liked that dish.
“Everybody had an orchard. My dad had one about two acres in size. He had apples and pears. We made our own cider and put it in a big barrel and let it ferment and it would turn to vinegar. We made some of it this fall for ourselves. I got seven trees here and a neighbor takes care of them for me now. He said they sold $88 dollars’ worth and we gave the neighbors some apples also. We preserved by drying the fruit, canning it and burying the apples also. We have a vineyard here. Hendrickson’s up here had a vineyard in an old rock pile. Most of the grapes were concord grapes. They would make butters out of them, jellies, pies and grape juice and can it. We have quite a bit of it in our basement now. Some make wine. Old man Holverson and Totland got a barrel of vinegar and were going to roll this barrel home and put alcohol in it to make wine. They got part way home and it got dark and they could not get home. So, they left it and went home. Someone saw them and went up there and took the vinegar and put water back in the barrel. They came back the next day and took the barrel on home and put alcohol in it, not knowing there was only water in it. We also made peach brandy and elderberry wine. My family never did make wine.
“They grow apples in Norway, but I do not know if they grow grapes there. It is a lot colder in Norway than here in Kansas. There was a boy from here that went to live in Norway for a few years and he wrote me a postcard and said he was picking apples and he dropped the bucket and the apples fell right in the ocean. The orchard was right on the hillside.
“There were a few Norwegians down around Otter Creek. A few Germans down there also joined the Lutheran Church in Eureka. The Lutherans baptize with a fountain, as they do not believe in immersion. There were also godparents involved and they could be family, but not always. They tried to find someone not real old, so if the parents die, they could raise the child. I was confirmed in 1915 when I was 17 years old. We had a parochial school at the Fall River Church and my parents furnished the wagon to haul the children to Holverson schoolhouse, which is a mile north of here. They also had a Hawthorne School that the children down further were hauled there. We had two weeks one place, then two weeks in another place so the kids would have a chance to get to one place easier. That’s where I got most my bible training. We had to memorize bible verses and the 10 Commandments. Those schoolhouses were public schools, but they allowed us to use it for bible study. These classes were in the summer. One year they had it at the Dunlap school and there were 80 students.
“We got married in the church and when you got married then, you were expected to stay married. My wife was from Pennsylvania and her dad was Pennsylvania Dutch. I met my wife who was teaching here and boarding at my brother-in-law’s and I worked for my brotherin- law. She was teaching at Holverson. Most of the students were Norwegian and could speak English. My brother Harold’s boy could not speak English when he started school and had some trouble learning English. I spoke a table prayer in Norwegian that my parents taught me. There was a special dinner on the 17th of May, which was like July 4th in America. Sometimes it would be at the church and sometimes it would be in someone’s home. That was the day Norway got its independence.
Norwegian is a combination of the English and German languages. Mr. Hendrickson, old man, use to lead the songs at church and he would sit at home and practice them. We had an organ at church and I can see the old lady who played it at church. She had a big hat with a feather in it. Her name was Josie Johnson. You had to pump the organ with your feet. When the tornado came along, it destroyed the organ. Old man Holverson and Totland were taken to drink. When Holverson was drinking he got mean and wanted to fight. He would go to town with cattle and take a hired man with him. He would get drunk and would not go home for two or three days. His cattle would not have any feed and the neighbors would have to haul feed for two or three days. One time, the hired man left him in town and Holverson came home and fired the hired man for leaving him in town.
“The first people who came up here had good crops and this encouraged more to come into the area. Mrs. Peterson said her father would ride out into the grass on a horse and you could not see him, as the grass was so high. They use to get 10-15 bushels of wheat and now they fertilize the soil and some get 80 bushels per acre. Old man Holverson was one of the first to come in and that was 1859. Jim Teter was another early settler here. My dad worked for him when he was a boy. He said Teter could ride a horse all day long even when he was 80 years old. Then the grasshoppers came here in the 1880s and ate up all our crops. My dad went up north of Emporia for a while where the grasshoppers had not been as bad as here. Catherine, my wife said her father went outside and the grasshoppers were knee deep. People from here would go out to Abilene and buy cattle and drive them back here. There was a 10-mile-wide strip from Wichita to Abilene that you drove cattle along. My dad would buy some of those Texas longhorns from traders. I saw 500 head go by our school when I was a student there. Their horns were as long as your arms stretched out. The people here would buy them and feed them out on the grass. Brangus would put weight on pretty quick. They would go eat for about two hours and then go lay down. My dad would load and unload cattle in Eureka when the Santa Fe was put in and take them to Kansas City to sell. The ranchers out in the hills would load at Sallyards. The old river road use to follow the river until they started putting in fences and they moved it to where it is now. The old road came up the east side and then crossed as some of the fellows lived on the west side of the river.
“My dad went out west of Wichita with a bunch of men and hunted buffalo. He was 14 at the time and they would not let him shoot a gun. One morning he woke up early and saw a bull close by and grabbed a gun and shot him and took the hide back to one of his uncles in Wisconsin. They took the ham and shoulders off the buffalo and threw the rest away. They would go to town and sell meat and have the hides tanned.
“Bill Wiggins, who lived right up here, raised a lot of hogs and drove them into Eureka to sell one time. You got to watch the weather because hogs get hot when moving them. We would take hogs to town in a wagon sometimes. We built boxes to transport them in and left a space for air to circulate. I remember one time we had about a mile of hogs walking and we stopped down by the river or Roby’s about halfway to town where there was a well to cool them down. My dad kept about 80-100 head of cows so he could raise calves.
“Dad owned 240 acres up north of here that was pasture. We did not lease any pasture ground. There was also 160 acres on the old home place that was pasture. We also had 40-acres up on top of the hill that was pasture. We hire day-hands from Missouri in the summer for $15 a month. One time we had a Swede who came over from the old country. He had never done any work by hand. We cut corn back then by sled and my brother and I were kids and we could not handle those sleds. The sled was pulled by one horse and had a knife that cut the corn and we kids would grab the corn and stack it and then run to catch up with the horse again. That Swede nearly worked himself to death. We use to have a lot of fun with him, as he did not know how to do the handwork. One time he was riding a nice mare we had and he had a cockle burr on his pants and he struck that mare and it threw him higher than a kite. The only words he could say in English was “nice mare.” We also had a man who came from Holland and rented some land up on the north place. He lived there. He was no good as he did not know how to manage the place as things were so different here than in Holland.”
