heritage

My mother received this book from one of my aunt's which was published recently and describes the deadliest winter storm ever to hit the Plains, called The Children's Blizzard because it hit around the time school let out and killed so many on their long walks home or left them trapped in schoolhouses. They burned their desks to keep warm. My great-great-grandparents and their brother's families are among five whose stories, in Perfect Storm-like fashion, are told here! It was based on family journals we never knew existed.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

(photos from the land of Tinn)

"Gro Rollag was one of the seven hundred fifty thousand Norwegians who emigrated to America in the nineteenth century. She was twenty-two years old and a bride of several days when she left her family's farm in Tinn in the Telemark region of southern Norway in April 1873. Gro had married a strapping blond boy named Ole, three years her junior, from a neighboring farm. Rollag was his surname as well, since it was the custom in that part of Norway for families to take the names of the farms where they lived. In Tinn there were six Rollag farms scattered through the valley - North Rollag, South Rollag, Center Rollag and so on - all of them small and niggardly in yields of barley, oats, potatoes, hay. Growing seasons were short this far north, crop failures all too common in chilly overcast summers, fields so pinched that only the most primitive tools could be brought in. "Our honeymoon took us to America," Gro Rollag wrote fifty-six years later with her dry humor, as if they might have chosen Paris or Nice instead. While the truth, of course, was that Gro and Ole left Tinn because the fields of the Rollag farms were being divided into smaller and smaller parcels every generation, because they didn't want to leave their children with less than they had, because in Norway only the firstborn sons inherited the arable valley parcels known as bonde gaard, and because Ole was facing five years of compulsory military service.

"But it wasn't in Gro's nature to write this in the memoir she titled 'Recollections From the Old Days'. Nor did she mention how hard it was to leave behind this stunningly beautiful landscape at the beginning of spring - the mountains rising sharply from the shores of a twenty-five-mile-long lake known as the Tinnsjo, the farms clustered on a level shelf of land at the head of the lake, the waterfalls gleaming on the sides of the mountains and feeding streams that merged into the broad Mana River, the red and white farmhouses scattered around the stately white church. Beauty was abundant and free in the countryside of Tinn - but you couldn't eat beauty, and the beautiful farms were yielding less and less while the population steadily grew. But they were comparatively lucky in Tinn. Elsewhere in Telemark the farm fields had become so small from repeated division that farmers had to harvest the hay that grew on the thatch of their roofs and grow vegetables by spreading dirt and manure on top of rocks. It was a sad, haunted country for all its beauty. Men in the prime of their lives built their coffins and stored them inside until they were needed. 'It was not a very pleasant thing to look at before you got used to it' recalled one Norwegian immigrant.

"Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

"Gro and Ole were the first of the family to emigrate, leaving Oslo on April 24, 1873. 'We traveled via England and with the Cunard Line from Liverpool,' Gro wrote in her recollections half a century later, furnishing precious few details. 'We were thirteen days on the Atlantic and landed at Boston. From there we went west in a railroad boxcar. We took a little snack for the journey - a piece of sausage and a few crackers each.' "

Later in the book it describes how the newlyweds spent their first year in Decorah, Iowa, about 20 miles from a town I lived in from 4th to 7th grade. All the land was taken so the next year they moved with a wagon pulled by a team of oxen named Spot and Dick along with a couple cows to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which at the time had a population of 600 (now 135,000) and was considered an up and coming metropolis. It took them three weeks to cover the 260 miles along what must have been a similiar route we used to visit my grandparents every christmas.

Another married couple in my family described in the book arrived a year later. Together the two families started with sod huts and dirt floors like everyone else in their first seven years. They'd tell their children later about "green-eyed wolves" that trailed after them whenever they ventured out after dark, and the snakes that would crawl out of the walls of their sod house to sun themselves on the roof. They worked laying track for the Great Northern Railroad for awhile after grasshoppers wiped out their crops. Those same tracks in 1881 became impassible from January to June because of heavy snow, which also made it impossible to travel by wagon. The stores in town were emptied and my great-great-grandfather writes about making coffee by "scorching kernals of rice and wheat." This same winter is the subject of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. I'll have to check it out. I hear its not syrupy like the TV series.

There's a dramatic description of how the two families struggled to get their animals sheltered when the 1888 blizzard hit, which arrived with sudden hurricane force that knocked over a hay wagon they were loading. The sky grew so dark they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces in the middle of the afternoon!

Without knowing anything about these people except names in a family tree, its so exciting to read these stories. You can type in "Rollag" with the "Search Inside the Book" feature on Amazon to find all the referances. It gives me a tingle to think of my own struggles in the two years I raised sheep and goats here to rescue strays, or how they fought to get their animals in the barn when I know how difficult that can be. I'm the first to farm again in a couple generations and I hadn't appreciated how proud I could feel to understand my ancestors were part of that pioneer history.