April to August - and now another book

My last post was on April 26th; today is August 23rd.  What has been happening in those months?  Well, summer for one thing, and even though we are a REALLY small town, summer is REALLY busy!  Lots of town events and lots of B&B guests keeping us busy.  This year, though, I added something extra to the summer.

My last post was about the completion of our church cookbook, First Lutheran Favorites. The cookbook was a hit, and we've sold lots of copies at all the summer events.  And, doing that cookbook using the website lulu.com gave me the practice I needed to complete my next book JUST in time for our Larson family reunion last weekend.  And I mean JUST in time.  My 75 copies arrived via FedEx at about 3pm last Friday afternoon!

The person listed as the co-author, Nils Tervell, is my third cousin from Sweden.  I may have mentioned him before, but he located me from an email he sent to our town website last summer - the website for which I am the webmaster.  It was all by chance that I was in a position to get that email, but he's been sending me family history information ever since.  So he provided the content from Sweden and I compiled the story from when they all arrived in America.  It was a big project and I'll probably talk more about it as time goes on.

And it all had to be completed, uploaded, printed and back to me in time for our reunion last Saturday.  Below is a photo of all attendees in front of the bell tower from the old school.  The rain stopped just long enough so we could get some pictures outdoors.

All the yellow reunion shirts have a small pocket design on the front and this picture (below) on the back.  They are the three Larson brothers who were some of the first settlers in Port Wing.  We realized it was 125 years since Fred Larson--my grandfather--was the first to bring a family to this little wilderness that would later become Port Wing.  We had a great time but I'm still recovering!  I'm sure I'll write more about the day.

And finally, here is a photo showing one of our recent beautiful sunsets...since I haven't posted any lately!

Letters, pictures, newspaper articles, books - Putting the pieces together

I've hit a couple milestones tonight. One is that this is my 70th post, so I have posted every day for 70 days.  Did you think I could do it, MaryM?  I didn't, so I'm energized!

My second milestone is that I have completed reading, recording, annotating, scanning and organizing all 253 of the letters my Dad sent home from his three years serving in the Army during World War II.  At least these are the ones that are still around here.  There are some missing moments, but I guess there needs to be some mysteries in life.  It is all contained in one huge Google Docs (I guess it's called Google Drive now) spreadsheet file with all the scans of the letters attached to that.  Yes, I'm possessed but many of you already know that.

Below are some of the treasures I found.  On the bottom below everything else was a commemorative pillow case, of which there are probably thousands in attics and eBay entries around the country.  This one highlights the 34th Infantry Division, or "Red Bull" Division that is well-known now as centered in Minnesota.  They were the first division to get involved in Tunisia in Spring, 1943 and that was about the time my Dad would have been shipped to the front lines after basic training in Ft. McClellan, a lot of waiting around at Camp Butner, NC, and finally put on a ship in late January headed for Africa.

Other items in the pictures - upper right is his Purple Heart for being shot in Italy in a battle somewhere around Leghorn (I think Leghorn, he can never say exactly where he was because censors read, and censored, all letters..."Loose lips sink ships" you know), bottom right was his wallet on which he had drawn the Red Bull symbol, his initials (hidden in the picture), and his name and "outfit" - Co. "C", 168 INF REGT - 34 DIV.  Also middle bottom is his picture from later in his time in service because he has bars for the Purple Heart, battles he was in, and his combat infantry badge.  On the bottom left was a metal, unbreakable mirror of some kind that he would have had for shaving, etc, when he was out and away from any form of civilization...and there were a LOT of references to times like that.  Anyway, that was the place that he recorded all the places he had been from the time he crossed the Atlantic and landed on foreign soil.

At some point the U.S. won what he called the "African War" and then their division headed over to Italy, and I remember him talking about the Anzio Beachhead and lots of Italy stories.  I just found a book on Amazon.com called As You Were that tells about his regiment and division in more detail that I've ever heard.  It should be here any day now.  Because of his leg wound, he was eventually reclassified into a big supply port of call, called 6th Port, in Marseille, France, and that's where he finished out the last 6 months of his three years in the Army.  From there they were discharged based on a point system, and his frustration kind of boiled over when they would change how points were awarded and how many points were needed to go home.  He was luckier than others because he eventually had enough; some of the guys though had to head out to the war in the Pacific after serving time in the European war.  

I hadn't planned on including this, but as I was doing one of the last letters tonight, I read where he said he had had his picture taken by a sidewalk photographer that Sunday as he was walking home.  He said it was windy so it wasn't a good picture.  And I had just found these pictures so one of them was from that day in April, 1945, on the streets of Marseille.  And somehow the idea of a sidewalk photographer back then just kind of strikes me as funny--kind of like the pictures they take of visitors to Disneyland or other theme parks and then sell them to you later.  Nothing new under the sun!

And I need to point out his hat (it's not called a hat but I can't remember what they are called).  My mother would say that he always would wear his hat at a "rakish" angle.  He did it back then and he did it until the day he died.  He wouldn't look the same with his hat any other way.

I feel like I learned more about who my father was as I went through these letters than I ever knew about him in real life.  And, yes, that makes me a little sad, but it just brings up more questions and thoughts about what I can do to find more answers.

So, time well spent!

Making the leap back to July 15, 1944

It's a few days later and I'm still in the midst of my father's letters home from WWII.  It's like a puzzle I'm assembling of stories I've heard through the years, now being filled in with actual stories I'm reading.  And it's like the Swedish I could never be bothered to learn from my Dad, I'm sure he would have said more about his experiences over there if I had only asked more questions.  So the spreadsheet has been started and I think I might be half done with this part of the project of putting together those years and memories.

(Helicopters are overhead again just now!  They just said on the Duluth news that they are testing some new feature on them.  But the ones they show on the news look different than the ones overhead. So I'm still not convinced... )

Included in one letter home was a section of the July 15, 1944 issue of The Stars and Stripes, the newspaper published for military people and any other interested readers.  My Dad sent it because there was an article in it about a battle his unit had recently fought in near Castellina on the Italian front in Northern Italy.  The battle against the Germans was a house-to-house, street-by-street swipe through town to rout out "Jerry."  My Dad wasn't with his unit for that because he was still in the hospital in Naples after being shot on May 29th, my mother's birthday!  And the article is pretty graphic and it's pretty eye-opening and mind-blowing for me to imagine my peaceful father being in on stuff like that.  But, as they say, so is war.

So, give me a newspaper and I'm going to be reading...and I'm finding some more uplifting tidbits to share, so here we go.  Most of these are taken from "Flashes From the Italian Front Lines:"

The key place name to notice in the above article is Pisa which is in Northern Italy.  Zoom in and see...

The article below concerns an artilleryman finding some German Bock beer, once only available in the spring, in a German protective dugout that had been abandoned when they retreated.  Takes me back to the dark beer fests held during Lent down in Bavaria in Southern Germany when we were stationed there.  I've been a "dunkles" fan every since!

And another past time I picked up when I was in the Army was pinball machines, the old school pinball machines, not video ones! Tilt!  This article concerns a "sucker for a pinball machine" who found one in a vacated building, tried playing it, and that's what may have saved his life.  Read and see.  

I also found a Bill Mauldin cartoon and I'm including it here.  (Am I violating copyright, MaryM?) I think he became famous for his "Willie & Joe" cartoons during WWII, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize.  I'm not sure I even "get" this one but I think he's telling the other guy to act tough!

From The Stars and Stripes, July 15, 1944

This below came from the above Wikipedia link, but mentions Monte Cassino, another Italian battle my Dad fought in before he got shot. 

Mauldin's cartoons made him a hero to the common soldier. GIs often credited him with helping them to get through the rigors of the war. His credibility with the common soldier increased in September 1943, when he was wounded in the shoulder by a German mortar while visiting a machine gun crew near Monte Cassino. By the end of the war he also received the Army's Legion of Merit for his cartoons. Mauldin wanted Willie and Joe to be killed on the last day of combat, but Stars and Stripes dissuaded him.

And finally, what's an Army gathering, or USO, or Red Cross without doughnuts?!!

A cloudy day, letters from WWII, and appreciation

I seem to have a knack for coming up with lots of (big) projects to fill my days.  And there are many collections of old family items around here, especially photos--some with names identifying people and, unfortunately, many without.  So I've done some work to figure out who is in those pictures.  More work needs to be done there though!

Another collection I've found is three years' worth of letters that my father sent home from his time in World War II.  He was an infantryman (rifleman) in Company C of the 168th Infantry Regiment which was part of the 34th Infantry Division that was operational in North Africa and Italy.  He was drafted and was inducted into service on 3 September 1942--exactly 33 years before my enlistment day in 1975.  (Weird...) He was shot in the leg "somewhere in Italy" but wasn't hurt badly enough to go home but was awarded a Purple Heart.

Thurston (Charlie) Larson

He finally got out on 2 October 1945, so he spent three years over there in North Africa, Italy and Marseilles towards the end, and pretty much hated every moment of it.  And if I didn't need an explanation before, reading the letters once again reveals his violent (for him) and negative reaction to my announcement one spring day in 1975 that I was joining the Army.  "No daughter of mine, etc. etc."

I've read some of the letters now and in one he says if he is able to get home again, he will never complain about anything again.  And if he gets home again to Port Wing, he's going to stay there until he dies.  Well, with the exception of several years when he had to live elsewhere to support himself, my mom and me, he was eventually able to get back here to live for about 12 years until he died.  He was living his dream!

So here's the box of letters:

Yes, there are a lot of them and these are the ones I HAVEN'T processed yet as I'm trying to figure out a system to catalog them (I AM a librarian after all!).  My solution will no doubt involve creating a spreadsheet since I've often been called the Spreadsheet Queen.   I just want to find out from them what I can learn for myself and the rest of our family, and maybe they can be used as primary sources for someone's research.  I've already contacted the Library of Congress Veteran's History Project and they would be interested in getting them for their archives.  But they only want the original items so I have to get everything out of them for me before I send them away.

So the main thing I've learned so far is appreciation...for people who fought that horrible war, willingly or not, for my two cousins who were captured and put into prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, and for this beautiful place my dad was able to come back home to so we can live here now.

Memories of a pioneer child - Fred Larson's story

And, finally, today I'm posting the last part of my Uncle Fred Larson's story.  He must have started rambling a little, or else the recorder started leaving out parts.  It gets a little sketchy in places.  And I think I am going to leave out a couple parts, especially the part about someone shooting someone else at the blacksmith.  Too many names mentioned!

One of my friends commented that it starts to sound like a Little House on the Prairie story with all the talk of "ma" and "pa," but this all took place very soon after that Laura Ingalls Wilder time period.  And, by the way, my mother was born in Stockholm, Wisconsin, on the Mississippi River right near where the first book, Little House in the Big Woods took place. I'm surrounded by pioneers ancestors!

Taken in 1938 at my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary - Fred is the tall man in the back.  When I'm going through pictures and trying to figure out who people are, I can always start with Fred who is the tallest.  He never married and ran the farm where we're now living until the late 1960's.  My father, who is the youngest, is on the far right.  Carl Larson, the first non-native child born here, is to his left.

So here's the last of the story - any comments I make will be in [brackets].

Pat Hines had a swell dock over in Orienta [the township to the west of Port Wing]. He was logging over there. There was a railroad track ran down to the dock. He had a stone quarry where the power plant is.  Everyone was supposed to clear up a little bit around their homestead and seed in rye or wheat. The cows would be brought into the Orienta dock on a stone scow. (The people were happy in those days although they didn't have a  dollar. The first winter  we were here, we had the cow under the bed—canned milk, that is. And navy beans. And we ran out of flour. All we had was venison and rabbit. Couldn't make pancakes.)

(WE SHOULD ALSO  ASK FRED  TO DRAW A MAP SHOWING THE LOCATION  OF THE  VARIOUS LUMBER CAMPS.)

Charlie Franson used to have oxen.

The first schoolhouse was up by the Twin Falls [now a park in town]. Then the school moved into next to the creamery. That later became the town hall. I started school there. The first passenger boat I remember was the Barker; then there was the America and the Ploughboy.

The fishing industry. There were the Booth fisheries. Tugs mostly. No engines. Some fellows from Two Harbors used to come over with sailboats. There was a little short Norwegian captain, called Pickanute. Real name was Peterson. Pickanute—he'd say that, meaning pick them—the  fish—out of the nets. Chaffee, DeVrie, and Peterson, in that order, used to be in charge of the dock. Orienta was quite a place once. Four saloons, sidewalks on both sides of the river, stores, hotel, church, school. Now, she's dead. Two hundred fifty men on the payroll.

     (WE SHOULD ASK SOMEONE TO DRAW A MAP OF ORIENTA AS IT USED TO BE.)

In the early logging days, they wouldn’t look at a spruce or a balsam—just white pine.

The lumber company had the first hardware store.

Eric Johnson had the first radio, and possibly the first car.

The farmers used to send out cedar fenceposts; they paved the streets in Duluth with posts in those days. They lasted a long time. [And that's why they used to refer to some roads as "cordoroy" roads - they would be ribbed and bumpy like cordoroy.  Port Wing had log/cordoroy roads down in the slough/swampy low areas before you get to Lake Superior.]

There used to be a lot of fire in the slashings [places that had been logged off] around here. The first few years, that's all we did was try to save our buildings. Summer after summer that's all we did—try to save our homes. There were no screens on the smokestacks of the logging trains; they were setting fires all the time in the slashings.

We used to wear buckskin clothes all the time. There were Indians used to come down here from Red Cliff [over by Bayfield] every summer. The menfolks would pick blueberries. They'd dry them on racks. Then the menfolks would go up the river where there was a natural salt-lick above Harry Andersons. They had scaffolds up there in the trees. They'd sit up there and shoot deer and then run them down in canoes down to the point where the women would take care of them. The menfolk would then tan the deerhides. We used to bring hides down there to the Indians and they would tan them. Mother would then make our clothes by hand.  Moccasins, pants, jaokets everything.  You couldn't wear them out.    And when they got a little wet they got so cracked. Tough. Mother used to wash for one of the logging camps.

So that's the end.  If you got this far, thanks for persevering!  

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!

Memories of a pioneer child - Fred Larson's story

A few years ago I received an email from someone I didn't know who was asking questions about my paternal grandmother's family.  Her name was Regina Charlotta Peterson and then she married my grandfather, Fred Larson.  As it turned out, the person sending me the email was a cousin on my grandmother's side of the family, and I think he got my name from something I had posted on Ancestry.com.  He was from north of Duluth and we had a meet-up here in Port Wing 3-4 years ago with him and his wife, some friends of theirs who also do a lot with genealogy, and some of my Larson cousins from here.  He showed us all of the work he had done up until then and we all were really amazed, finding out things we never knew.  And we've been in touch from time to time ever since.

Yesterday I received an email from him asking me questions about the Fred Larson side of the family, and he mentioned about something that was written by Fred Larson.  I was confused and part of the confusion comes because my grandfather was Fred Larson, one of the original settlers here, and his oldest son was Fred Larson.  Well, this story was something the son, my Uncle Fred, had related to someone back in 1955.  After I saw it I realized I had seen it before, but I thought it was interesting enough to include here.

One more note of clarification - Fred, along with his sibling twins, was one of the first three children who came with his mother and father (my grandparents) to live here in Port Wing.  This was originally one long paragraph, but I'm going to break it up so it's more readable.  Now here's his story:

FRED LARSON

     My dad was one of the original settlers here. Of course McCardle was here but he hadn't brought his family yet. He built over by the Twin Falls.  My dad homesteaded here about 1890. He brought us kids and mother over here in 1891. He came from Duluth and he was a carpenter by trade. (Uncle) Charlie came in 1892. I was born in 1889.     

Fred Larson (back), twins Herbert & Hedvig (or vice versa?) photo from spring/summer 1891

Andrew Peterson and Samuelson came in 1891 because Braff and Dad helped them unload at the stone quarry and then they dragged it along the beach. Peterson brought a team of horses because he was draying in Duluth. Pete Braff and Dad came at the same time. The purpose was to file a homestead claim. The intention was to prove up and go back again, but they stayed here. 

My Dad had a ten room house in Duluth. He sold that then but he didn't get much for it. I was two going on three when I came. I was 66 the 6th of May.  T. N. Okerstrom was not here then. The land office for this territory was in Ashland.  T.N. Okerstrom came from Duluth where he stayed with my folks.  Then he boarded at Pete Braff's boarding house. 

T.N. was single then. Then he met Mary Okerstrom. She worked for Nilsenius in Ashland.  He met her there. Okerstrom had the first logging camp. That was up on Ed Danielson's place.  Julia McCardle had a homestead here, down in the draw between Rudolph's and Morrison's and Signe's place.  Julia was single.  Grandpa McCardle had a homestead over by the stone quarry.  But which stone quarry it was, I don't know. There was a stone quarry over by the Fred Sehlin place. That was the first stone quarry. Old man McCardle died over there and they buried him over there. But I suppose they moved him afterwards; I don't know where he is now.  I never saw the old man, but I seen the McCardle that was at Twin Falls and Mrs. McCardle. 

Grandma McCardle took care of Mother when Carl was born.  He was born in January, 1893. He was the first white child born here in Port Wing.  Alaena Okerstrom would have been the first one, but she was born in the hospital in Ashland. Esther Peterson—Mrs. Helsing—she was the first girl born. The first one to die here was Charlie Larson's boy, Rueben.  He was buried on Aaronson's homestead, where Christiansen (?) lives. I was at the funeral. Dan Daly's house used to be a blacksmith shop. The Iron River road went in back of the Catholic church, directly south. John Tummy drove, I remember that. He  was  a little  fellow—wore  a big black hat. (WE SHOULD ASK FRED LARSON TO DRAW A MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE OF THE  FIRST ROAD TO  IRON RIVER.) 

[That last line was a comment from someone back then who had heard his story.]

Stay tuned because there is more to come!

Cloudy days bring forth treasures

Today the view out of my window looked like this:

That's not out of focus - that's blowing snow, including at times little snow tornadoes blowing around and as usual, really cold.

So it seemed like a good day to do something about the top of my desk that looked like this:

That shows too many projects going on at once and always being distracted from one project to another.  So I cleared it all off and in a little while it started looking pretty good.  So good in fact that I moved on to a bookshelf next to the desk where even more piles of papers and projects are kept.  I started on the top shelf and found several fun things, including a bumper sticker someone had given us for the 2016 presidential campaign (I know, don't you just shudder thinking about that coming up again?), but the bumper sticker says "Clinton - Warren 2016."  Hmmm....

But underneath everything was something we had found in the old house here a few years back and somehow it ended up on this shelf.  The date is 1896 so it was probably done by my grandmother, Regina Larson.  It's tiny little cross-stitch stitches in black thread on a piece of heavy paper with little holes in it.  It says Joh.2 (Johannes) so I thought it was from the book of John, second chapter.  But it wasn't.  So I did the Google Translate thing again and eventually realized it came from Revelation 2:10 with the complete name of the book being The Revelation to John.  But maybe she just thought it came from John.  Anyway, in English it says: "Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life."

"Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life."

And from much of what I've learned about the Larsons who lived here before me, relying on their faith in good times and bad was how they lived their lives.

And by the time I finished cleaning things up a bit around my desk, the skies opened up and the sun shone...well, at least for a little while.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And congratulations to my cousin, Ingabritt, whose blog, Aktuellt i Grekland, came in third place in the travel blog competition! She inspires me!

A pioneer's story comes to life

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on translating a family history for my father's family who all came to America, most came here to Port Wing, all from Sweden.  It was written by Ingabritt's (cousin from yesterday's post) father, John, and consists of many pages of typed text interspersed with pictures, followed by a family tree that begins in the early 1800's and goes to about 1980 when he finished writing it.  But it's in Swedish.  So this is where my discovery of Google Translate, Bing Translate, multiple online Swedish dictionaries, use of cognates from my knowledge of German, and sheer curiosity about what it says, all came together to me producing a translation of this document.  And, boy, have I learned a lot! All of a sudden those tenant farmers mentioned from time to time in Downton Abbey all make sense!  I can see why possible opportunities in America looked a whole lot better than their reality in Sweden, at least for their own family.  But more about that in future posts.

Lämås, where my grandfather lived with his parents and 7 siblings before coming to America.
That's my dad in the picture.

This afternoon I translated the part about my grandfather coming to America in 1881.  He came through the port of Gothenburg (Göteborg) and his destination on the shipping logs was listed as Ortonville (MN).  There must have been some other relatives or friends living there because I've heard of other mentions of Ortonville through the years.

He eventually got to Minneapolis and somehow ended up in Canada working on constructing the Canadian Pacific Railroad system.  There he learned English from his Irish co-workers!  And then I got to where he moved to Duluth and here I'm going to include the full text as I translated it...so it might not flow very smoothly, but you'll get the idea.

After a few years Fredrik lived in Duluth, Minnesota, and supported himself with carpentry. In 1889 he married  Regina Charlotta Petersson from Dädesjö in Småland (a state in Sweden). She had come to America in 1884, one of seven siblings who all emigrated, and eventually their mother also came. 

In the early 1890s, there were bad times in Duluth and Fredrik considered acquiring a farm. When there was an opportunity to buy land in Wisconsin along the great Lake Superior, Frederick, along with Smålander Peter Braf, made a reconnaissance trip to the area. Both families decided to take on the adventure of becoming settlers, and in 1891 Frederick sold the house in Duluth (which had 11 rooms), and his family, consisting now of mother and father, son Frederick and the twins Herbert and Hedwig, stepped on a steamer which brought them level with the countryside they had decided to conquer.  There, they got into a rowboat and came ashore with the small amount of household goods they could bring.

A simple log house became their first home. In the forests Indians still roamed but there was never any hostility between them and the Swedish settlers. On the contrary, says the descendants of Frederick and Regina, that it was the Indians' good advice, especially when it came to using deer skins to make moccasins and clothing, which helped the settlers over hard times in the new, difficult conditions.

And that's just another Passage that I feel blessed to be able to tell, and then think about as I sit up here in Port Wing, with snow blowing in the cold winds outside, and I'm in my warm, cozy house.

Wow!