Farm Girl Read Free

started school. After school, he’d be alone, buying food for dinner with the money his mother left for him on the table. She worried about him home alone, especially after he fell and broke his arm, and she worried that the city wouldn’t be a good environment for a boy to grow up without a father.
    The summer of 1877, when Anton was eleven, Sofie left for the West, thinking the country would be a better place to bring up her son. She had written to Karen and Jakob Walstad, her former neighbors from Norway, and they invited her and Anton to stay with them out in Nebraska. She and Anton rode the train out with a girl she knew from Chicago. When they reached Hastings, they had to ride the rest of the way with the mail carrier, in the mail wagon.
    The mail carrier told her, “Wherever you see smoke coming through the bank is where people live in a dugout.”
    Hans Walstad lived right across the draw from Jakob and Karen, and now here was the girl he had loved in Norway so many years earlier living at the log house with his parents. They began to keep company again and soon were married.
    Hans still lived in his dugout, a cave-like home that was made by digging out the earth in a hill, a bank or raised area on the prairie. These dugouts could be quite comfortable, with a front door and even glass in the windows. Early settlers usually lived first in a dugout, then would build a sod house, and then a frame house when they were able.
    His new wife didn’t like the dugout, not wanting to live underground like a prairie dog, so she talked Hans into building a sod house. He was so happy to at last have Sofie as his wife, he would do whatever he could to please her. They worked together building the sod house.
    The settlers used sod for their houses as trees were not so plentiful. The land had never been tilled, and the many roots from the prairie grass held the soil together. Homesteaders would cut a slab of sod one foot by three feet, laying three of them down like bricks with one foot on the outside and the other end on the inside. The next layer they’d lay the opposite direction with the three foot end out and the one foot in. This made the walls three feet thick, making them very warm in winter and cool in summer. The window sills were so wide that children could sit on them. Some were cemented on the outside and plastered on the inside, so if you didn’t know it was a sod house, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see the dirt.
    Hans and Sofie raised Anton and had two daughters, Mathilde, the older daughter, and then Julia, born in 1882, who became my mother.
    One day in 1896, when my mother was about fourteen, the family’s sod house was completely destroyed by a tornado. Here’s how it happened. They saw a tornado coming and ran to the storm cave. When it was over, they came out and saw one of their cows upside down on the ground, completely wrapped in twine.
    Hans said to his younger daughter, “Go to the sod house and get me a knife.”
    Julia replied, “There isn’t anything left there.” The tornado had taken the sod house, leaving only part of the walls.
    He said, “Well, then, go get one from the log house.”
    After the tornado destroyed their home, the family had to live with relatives until they could rebuild. By this time the grandparents, Jakob and Karen, had died and the roof of their log house was gone, so the Walstads couldn’t live there.
    Eventually, like most homesteaders, Hans and Sofie were able to build a frame house. Finally they had a permanent home and a farm that did well, after surviving many hard years of drought, hailstorms and grasshopper invasions. Then, a few weeks after the older daughter, Mathilde, was married, Hans died. Sofie continued to live on the farm with Anton long after her husband died and both girls had married and left home.
    Uncle Anton was a gifted musician who played the accordion. If he heard a song once, he could play it. He would play at dances, although his