Chapter 1 • Kate Opened the Gate
Come, Harry, let's go for a ride in the Model A, I will take you to our old farm home where I was born to show you where many memories keep coming back to my mind from when I was a child.
This is the gate that Kate opened as a child and here is the barn we played in.
Astrid Nelson Peterson by the barn on the family farm, October 1969. The barn was built in 1895
Our birth house burned down years ago, so there is another house built there. In 1972 the same barn, well house, and granary are being used that my dad built in the early 1900's. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kiehl have lived here for years.
Mr Henry Kiehl and Elsie Johnson by her 1928 Ford. The granary in the background was built by her dad many years ago when he still owned the farm
In the central part of Minnesota, in Becker County, in Richwood Township, on a cold storming night on Jan. 13 1904,
my dad
hitched his faithful team of horses, Dan and Kate, to the sleigh to go get Mrs. Monson, a midwife, who lived two and a half miles away. It took quite a while to go and get her and bring her back, as the road was full of snow and they could not see where to go, so they came through the fields. When they got back, I was already there to greet them. My mother was prepared to take care of me if they did not get back in time. She tied the navel with sterilized cord and scissors, and wrapped me in a blanket. Mrs. Monson finished taking care of me and so my life began. They tell me I was a pretty baby with blonde, curly ringlets. I started to walk at the age of nine months, around a washtub full of ripe tomatoes. When I was eighteen months old, my brother Frank was born, on October 9 1905, and we were real pals. Where one went, the other one went. On September 3 1907, Lawrence was born August 14 1909, Myrtle was born April 16 1911, my brother Andy was born, 16 pounds at birth. My mother nearly died at this time, we had the doctor out for her to deliver the baby, the only time she had a doctor. We were all born on the home farm.
Frank was six years old and I was seven when we started school at District 15, two and one half miles away. We walked this every day to and from school. Rudy, my half brother, went to school with us. In the winter my dad and Rudy made homemade skis. Rudy would ski straight across the hills and fields to school and Frank and I would trail behind in the ski tracks. We were bundled up so, all you could see were our eyes, our scarves were so full of frost we looked like snowmen.
The teacher had a nice hot fire in the old pot-bellied stove with a heat drum on top. We would stand around the stove until it was warm, then we went to our seats.
The Nels Peterson homestead, Richwood Township
There were about eighteen children in school, Moodys, Andersons, Fingalsons, Johnstons, Halversons and Gettmans.
The Gettmans were German people, and we went through their yard on the way to school. Every evening they would fill our lunch pails with sauerkraut and dill pickles. They made big barrels of each and they usually had four or five barrels in the woodshed all winter. We sure loved this German food.
There was one boy my age who was such a tease. He was always throwing mud lumps at us and one day he hit me with a big mud lump. I took after him with my lunch bucket and hit him over the head with the lunch pail. My pail was all bashed in and his head had a bump, but we still walked to school together every day. There were five or six of us that walked together.
They moved away shortly after this and we never heard of them since. One day the county superintendent came to visit our school and I heard her ask the teacher who I was.
In the summer I was six years old my dad and Rudy and the Moodys were west of Callaway putting up hay on the reservation. In August 1910, my mother and sister were home with us smaller children doing milling and other farm chores.
One morning my mother called me to get up as it was about 10 AM. I said I couldn't get out of bed, so she came upstairs to see what was the matter. She carried me down stairs and put me in her bedroom. She realized I was a pretty sick girl, so she sent Annie over to Moody's to call a doctor. I am not sure, but I think Gordon Moody rode a bicycle to Callaway to call Dr. Weeks in Detroit to come to the farm. The doctor came sometime in the afternoon in his high-wheeled car, one of the first cars made. He checked me over and told mother I had Polio, then called infantile paralysis. There were many cases reported that summer. I guess there was not too much to do for it. The doctor gave me some medicine. Then I got paralyzed in my spinal cord and pulled my head backwards. My mother gave up on me two or three times never thinking I would live through it. One day I was a little better, so my mother called Dr. Weeks. He came out again and told them to walk me around the yard in the nude in the hot sun, which they did, and my head started to come back. So once more I was well again, to romp and play like other children.
Making hay west of Callaway in 1910. Nels Peterson standing on the haystack