The Decade of the 1930s in Ward County, North Dakota

Ed's Day Wednesday

Dear FOLKS,

This week's stories from my cousin Ed Ostrom, has us look at normal people experiencing life during from 1925 through the 1930s. In this period of time outside influences were impacting the quiet farm life in Ward County, North Dakota, and of our interest, Spring Lake Township. In most of the stories that Ed shares, we do not read of the folks complaining about these influences, but they were there nevertheless and had an impact on people who lived there -- our families.

The first influence to appear was a long term drought. Most of you have read about the dust bowl that occurred in the 1930s in the U.S. central plains and the people within that area. Some would call it the Dirty Thirties because of the dust storms that strong winds would frequently kick up. Most history reports point to the drought affecting the panhandle area of Oklahoma and Texas, along with areas adjacent in New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. In actuality the Northern Great Plains area that includes North Dakota and up into Canada were also affected. While the effects of the drought weren't as severe as found further south, still the prolonged dry periods and the higher than normal temperatures reduced the size of crops during the growing season and the winters remained some of the driest and coldest on record. The years 1929 through 1936 were the worst as far as the climate's impact.[1]

The second influence is known today as the Great Depression, a worldwide economic that took place in the 1930s. It actually began in the autumn of 1929 after a fall in stock prices in the U.S. and became worldwide news with the stock market crash on 29 October 1929, known as "Black Tuesday."[2] The economic disaster would take a few months to impact the inhabitants of rural Ward County, but eventually there would be fewer dollars being paid for the crops that were considerably smaller in yield because of the drought. It was a real conundrum that took a long while to work through and for progress to begin again.  For some, they would have leave the area for opportunities elsewhere. Some sooner than others.

Life would go on with our family learning to cope with situations beyond their control. Oscar Ostrom (1884-1973), whom we have been learning about, was able to grow the number of acres that made up his farm during this time. Through frugal living, hard work and to some degree, being in the right place at the right time, he could buy up parcels of land now and then; until his farm included 640 acres. This figure comes from what his son Edwin "Tom" Ostrom recalls. It is Tom that tells us most about his parents, and life during this time.

Hauling Hay in Winter 1926

Tom told this story of working with his brother, Arvid.

   "One Saturday in winter we had to haul hay about two miles. We made hay stacks in the sloughs in the summer, you know, big stacks. It was storming and Pa was back in Minnesota, I suppose shipping cattle. We had two sleds and I told my brother Arvid, “You’re going to take this one now and drive it." “Yah,” he said. By golly, wind blowing. Oh gosh, you know the wind was blowing, storming and cold. I put on a good load. I said to Arvid, “You go ahead now but you’ve got to ride that sled when you come to that one hill because one of those places you're going to go down and the first thing you know you’re going to lose the load,” I says. So Arvid said, “Don’t worry about it.” He got in there and away he went, way ahead of me. He thought he could make his team trot because he was going to go to town that night, I knew that. By golly, I came up to that one hill and here he was, he’d tipped over. He just unhooked the horses and drove 'em on in. I came along with my load and had to go around the pile. I had a big load of hay on too. When I got home he never even unharnessed his horses. He just jumped in that old car and went into town. Boy, was Pa mad and so was I, but I don't recall that Arvid got into trouble from it."

There was always work to be done.

IMAGE: Tom Ostrom on a balking horse, winter ca 1935.
The horse doesn't appear happy to be out in the cold.Notice
the building way off in the distance to the right of the windmill.
We are able to see a far distance. Diagram from the 
collection of Edwin J. Ostrom

Cutting Ice in Winter 1935

Here is another story told by Tom to his son Ed on 2-29-2002 at Tom’s home in Woodburn, Oregon about a job away from  the farm he took on.

   "I was always trying to make money. One way was to cut ice from Nelson-Carlson Lake and haul it to Fuzzy Heer’s store in Douglas where he had an ice shed. Fuzzy always seemed to be in a hurry to get the ice within a week. He had other crews getting ice too. Fuzzy would cut large blocks of ice into smaller blocks at his store that he’d sell for use in ice boxes. This was before electric refrigerators. Ward County owned the lake, so I didn’t have to pay a fee for cutting ice and no one else cut ice out of that lake so I had it to myself."

   "I did this on Saturdays in late winter, always with two or three other guys. Often the neighbor named Arnold Sjoberg helped. You couldn’t do it alone because the work was too hard. You needed others to switch off hand sawing the ice, usually in five minute shifts. That’s about all you could saw at one stretch. You couldn’t stand around either because you’d freeze to death."

   "I did this when I was 15 or 16. I usually had Arnold Sjoberg along with me or somebody else from school. The best time to get ice was when the temperature was about 30 below. When it was that cold the sun was shining. It was too cold for wind. You bet it was cold out there. You had to wear a lot of clothes with good gloves."

   "You also needed a team of horses usually 8 hitched up. You’d have to watch your team when you’re out on the ice. The worst thing is to have a team of horses take off without you and go home scattering blocks of ice all over the country. I’d borrow a team of horses and a sled from Pa [Oscar]."

   "Fuzzy loaned me the saw and ice hooks. The blocks of ice had to be 3' x 3’ and varied from a minimum of x 2' to 3’ thick. We got the ice from the middle of the lake where it was the thickest and the saw wouldn’t hit the bottom. I used a pick to scratch a 3’ foot square grid on the surface of the ice."

IMAGE: This diagram shows the pattern for ice-block cutting
as defined by Edwin "Tom"Ostrom. Diagram from the collection
of Edwin J. Ostrom.

   "You couldn’t just go cutting willy-nilly. It was important to cut the ice in a pattern of two blocks side by side to eliminate unnecessary sawing and you couldn’t cut too big a hole or you’d risk breaking the ice and falling in. Next I’d saw down to start the saw on the line. After the fourth cut was made the block of ice popped up. Ice is lighter than water. During the trip to Douglas, the hole we just cut would freeze up again to about a foot thick. We’d manhandle, slide and drag the block with ice hooks onto a sloping board ramp up about two feet into the bed of the sled. It was so cold, ice slid around pretty easy. But it was still heavy. We made two rows of four blocks, each side by side on the wagon; and then we tied each block down with rope. A good load was 8 blocks. We tried to figure out how to tie ropes to the horses to drag the blocks onto the sled but that never panned out."

Meat for the Family

   "When we butchered in the fall it was cold of course, Oscar would cut it up and we’d put it in a snow bank and then leave it out there until it cooled down pretty well and then we kids would have to go out and pick up the meat and put it in the cook car. Well, it was one time we come out there and couldn’t find hardly half the meat. Didn’t find it till spring. We had an old dog by the name of Donny he’d go and pick up the meat and go dig it down in the trees someplace and there it would stay. Sometime we didn’t find the meat 'til Ma [Anna Brekke Ostrom] would say, “You got to go out and look now and find some of that meat that Donny dug!” So sure enough we’d find some meat; bring it in and Ma would cut away any marks on it and we’d eat it. So we had to watch it after that. When we had to put our meat out in the snow bank we’d have to pen Donny up in the barn. Of course, that was pretty hard for him because he wasn’t used to being penned up. That was the only way we could keep our meat from being moved. After it was frozen hard in the snow bank, we would put it in the cook car for the winter. That’s what we had for our cooling system. Ma had no place to put it. All the steaks would be laid out on a big platform in the cook car. It was so cold outside that anything in the unheated cook car would stay frozen."

Summer Meat

In one interview Tom asked; "Do you know what I mean when I say cook car?" The "No" response was resulted in this story.

   "Oh! Say like a big trailer, but it was all fixed up like a trailer house. We called it a "cookcar." It was on wheels and when we threshed that’s where they fed all the threshing crew. In the cookcar. There was a long table inside there and then they had benches, and in there we had a kerosene stove to cook on. Alice [Tom's wife, Alice Viola Emerson Ostrom] and Verna [Tom's sister, Verna Idell Ostrom Heer] cooked on one for two years for Pa [Oscar] when he had the threshing machine. And like I say that was the only place we had to put our meat in the winter. Everything was frozen then and it was like having it in a freezer here, I suppose. When it is 25 to 30 degrees below zero it is cold in the cookcar too! And in spring, whatever meat that wasn’t ate up up we’d gather up to get put in jars and canned."

   "Ma would cut all the meat off the bones and put it in jars.  That’s what we’d eat for the summer meat. And then whenever we wanted anything special, say like in threshing time then we’d have to go to Douglas and get fresh meat from the butcher shop. But we couldn’t keep it over a day because it was so hot, you know. One year we had lamb for dinner there with the threshing crew. They all said it was fine so I had to butcher a lamb and I hung it way up in the windmill so it would cool down overnight and it would be all cold and ready to cook and eat the next day. That was my job. I had to butcher the lamb. Catch a lamb and cut it and butcher it. Alice would have to prepare it, cut the steaks or make it all into soup or roast or whatever it was going to be. That was the fresh meat."

   "Other than that, we would go to town and of course we don’t go to town every day, you know. Ted Peterson [his wife was Ida, the sister of Ma, Anna Brekke Ostrom] had the butcher shop. We would call in and tell him we had to have meat for next day and what kind of meat we wanted. So we would drive into Douglas and he would have it ready for us. Seven miles to town, we didn’t want to go in more than we absolutely had to."

"Sometimes we’d go to town. We'd get foolin' around there and not get back in time. That was the trouble."

Thank you again, FOLKS for joining me with this week's edition of Ed's Day Wednesday. I hope you enjoyed the stories that were told. I am so glad you stopped by.

Sources

1. Daryl Richison, The North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network Blog (https://www.ndsu.edu/ndscoblog/?p=626 : accessed 07 March 2016), The Drought of the 1930s.

2. Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia  (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Depression&oldid=708827638 : accessed 08 March 2016. Great Depression.

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