According to Proverbs 22:13, the sluggard says, “There is a lion in the streets.”
Well, my sluggard credentials are impeccable, and I saw a lion in the streets today. Not a big lion. Not an Aslan. Not even the MGM lion. Kind of a wimpy lion, actually, sort of a Bert Lahr lion. But a nuisance nevertheless.
The lion I mean is that famous simile lion, the one that March goes out like. We got about three inches of snow today, and we expect another couple inches overnight. This wasn’t a raging snowstorm. More of a snow-globe snow, and the temperatures were so warm that it all slushed up on hitting the pavement, so it didn’t even interfere much with the drive home (though the morning drive may be interesting).
But the white carpet covers the grass, and we’re tired of it all.
Today, a historical story from my family history.
No, I tell a lie. It’s not the history of my family, except tangentially. It’s the history of the farm I grew up on.
Ours was a small farm, even by the standards of those days. 160 acres. This wasn’t unusual. A lot of people fed their families on 160 acres back then. But nobody would have called it a big farm.
Much of the information I’ll share in this piece come from an essay that was written by my great-aunt Ordella, who wrote it up for a bicentennial newspaper contest in 1976.
Our farm, in Kenyon township southwest of the town of Kenyon, Minnesota, was homesteaded by some people named Clark. It had been originally granted by the government to a man named Wade Wellman, for Civil War service (I assume that he was no relation to Manly Wade Wellman, the fantasy author, because the geography’s wrong). The original title record is a little confused, but it appears that a man named Pease operated a stagecoach way station on the property, perhaps in partnership with Clark. There was a house and an inn there, on the southwest corner of the property, on a road we always called “the old Sioux Line Road.” My dad’s cousin James wrote a history of his own neighboring farm a few years back, and tried to figure out where that name for the road came from. Nobody who ever knew seemed to be alive anymore. There doesn’t appear to be any connection to the Soo Line Railroad.
In 1916, my great-grandfather bought both these farms and moved his family up from Iowa. Everyone thought he’d been cheated on the land, because much of it (especially on the farm where I grew up) was swamp. But Great Grandpa Walker had learned about drainage tile in Iowa, and he turned it into productive acreage (characteristically he bought “overbaked” tile, essentially factory seconds, at a discount). I know this makes him an environmental criminal, but back then they valued arable land over ducks.
Anyway, Aunt Ordella says that one of the old settlers went to Great Grandpa one day and asked if he’d uncovered any human bones in his digging or plowing.
According to local tradition, he explained, two strangers had arrived at the station one night, on the way east from California. Supposedly one of the strangers disappeared and could not be found when the stage left in the morning. It was rumored that he’d been carrying a large sum of money, and that the other stranger may have murdered him for it and hid the body.
But Great Grandpa never found anything. Neither did my grandfather or my dad.
I’ve also heard a story that Jesse James and his gang stopped there on their way to Northfield to rob the bank, in a raid you’ve seen overdramatized in several movies.
I don’t believe that story. Half the farms in southeast Minnesota think the James boys stopped there.
If I understand Cousin James’ account, it was my Great Grandfather who decided to tear down the house at the old way station (re-using the lumber) and move the station building up to a new farmstead at the northeast corner of the property. This is the farmstead where I grew up, and it looked like this in an aerial photo taken before I was born: Continue reading The stage coach station →
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