Memories of a pioneer child - Fred Larson's story - Part 2

As I work with my family history, I am constantly regretting that I didn't ask more questions of my parents and other family members when they were still alive.  And reading some of these stories about what my grandparents went through to come here to set up their home and the town really makes me appreciate them and all the work they did for their family.  Wait 'til you get to the part about the pot of beans left in the cabin and wood chunks for chairs!  What a welcome that would have been for my grandmother!

And I also want to thank my (second/third?) cousin, Del Lorentzson, who sent me this story yesterday.  He really has devoted much of his retirement years to gathering family information and putting all these stories together.  Lately he's been using https://familysearch.org/ as a free site for posting family stories.

Fred & Regina Larson - Port Wing Pioneers

And now, back to Fred Larson, the three-year-old pioneer arriving with his parents and two-year-old twins onto the shores of Lake Superior in Port Wing...which probably wasn't even called Port Wing at that point in time:

All of those Pennsylvania Dutch were nice people. Where they came from, I don't know. They were the first ones to have a sawmill here—it ran night and day; the Calkins.  They had their own electric plant.  Calkin's logging road ran through our land. They made the ice ruts in the fall. That mill burned. Dr. Merrill was the first doctor here.  Maybe Dr. Harder, but I don't know if he was practicing.

There was a passenger boat between Duluth and Ashland. The folks, my folks, took that. Pete[Braff] was with, he had his  family in Duluth. The first house we lived in was on Pete Braff 's—Larvick's—place. They had built a little homestead shanty, you know, right east of Eric Johnson's house. Pete Braff built that. It was his land. That summer, they started a passenger boat—a freight boat—between Duluth and Ashland. They dumped us off in the lake. There was no harbor and no dock. They took us in with rowboats and landed us along the beach. Pete knew that McCardle had a boat up there along Kinney Creek. So he waded across the slough, waist deep in water,  you know.

When he came back it was getting dark on the lake.  Pa stayed with ma and the kids.  A little wind had come up and pa had put up some blankets for shelter.  Then Pete came back.  That was a long trip from up there in Kinney Creek down to the lake.  Then we started to paddle up toward Kinney Creek.  And when we got up there it was nine o'clock. Dark. There was no road. So we hiked through the woods. Dad took me and Pete took Herb;  my mother took my sister. There was a trail through the woods from Kinney Creek up to that shack.  Pa and Pete went ahead and Mother came behind.    

Under windfalls and over windfalls. When Mother came into the shack, she cried. They had made a table of a sort, and there were wood chunks to sit on. Pa had baked a big pan of beans. To save for us. To treat the folks. He had put an old felt hat over the beans.  Ma said that when they lifted that felt hat, the beans were ready to blow up.  They had started to raise—stunk, they had to throw  them out.

Dugie McClain maybe had the mail route after Tummy.  Then Gidloff and Andrew Peterson. Then Eskil Swanson had it later. Jardine and Eric Sehlin had it too.

Ma was afraid to let the kids out alone. There were owls sitting in the trees looking at  them. And there were bobcats too.  One time, Uncle Charlie had bought a horse from Cameron. And he  came down into a cedar swamp—it was wet all over then. Water all over. The horse started to act up something terrible. Finally, he spied two lynx sitting up in a tree.  So he let the horse go. And one of the lynx jumped and landed on the hind end of the horse. Then the horse really went.

We had a black cow that was dumped off in the lake. It didn't want to follow the rowboat in but wanted to go back to the big boat. T. N. said, "The devil is in those black cows.”

And more to come tomorrow!