Year 1929 and after

In 1929 prior to the drought years, Trempealeau County had the second highest butter production in the state of Wisconsin, coming just a bit behind Green County. Already by 1930, that production had fallen 400,000 pounds to 7,200,800 due to a lack of rainfall. By 1931, it was down to 6,500,000. The same year, funds were being raised by individuals and organizations to assist families with relief from the drought.

The year 1934

By April, 434 farmers had received livestock feed in the amount of $14,700.49, signing highway work agreements at 45 cents an hour to pay off their debt. By June, Trempealeau County was added to the drought list by the farmers administration, and farmers could borrow up to $250 from the Production Credit Corporation for seed and feed. According to county agent R. V. Larson, the drought was “becoming alarming” and many farmers had to re-seed failed fields with corn, Sudan grass or soybeans. From Whitehall, two carloads (train) of millet and soybeans had been distributed for drought relief and 12 carloads of soybeans had been ordered.

By July, the federal government was preparing to buy up cattle as part of drought relief. Veterinarians would do the appraising, with $12-20 offered for animals 2 years and up, $10-15 for 1-2 year olds, and $4-8 for under 1 year. The county cut corn acreage by 1,200 and the hog crop by 25%, while permission was given to raise forage crops on this land (to feed animals).

By October, reports indicated 1,065 of the 2,997 farms in Trempealeau County received (cattle) feed relief. In the northern part of the county, it was 184 of 460 farms. At the year’s end, the county reported $100,000 in drought relief, of which $74,200 had been worked off doing highway work like shaling roads and building bridges. Farmers in Trempealeau and Buffalo Counties had been paid $750,000 for cutting production of corn, hogs, wheat and tobacco, plus the buy-out of cattle.

One dramatic illustration of the drought effect was that 1934 hay production was but 52,163 tons compared to 121,720 tons in 1929. Perhaps these were the years my father Garven said they bought hay that had been cut from the roadsides in the Dakotas, hay that didn’t deserve the name because it was filled with weeds, wood pieces, and rocks.

 Years 1935-1936

The newspaper articles indicated prices rebounded a bit in 1935, but the drought slammed farmers hard again in 1936. Trempealeau County was one of 37 on Wisconsin’s drought list. The marshes even dried up, and canary grass was tried as a roughage. From April to August the price of hay shot up from $50 to $220 a ton! One news article indicated the 1936 drought brought the greatest crop loss in Wisconsin history, with the best countries (Trempealeau included) achieving just 50% of expectations for corn, barley, oats, hay, pasture, and milk production.

Amazingly, these were exciting years in other ways. In 1936, an REA survey was being conducted for the setting of poles that was beginning electrification of rural areas. Critical strides were taken in animal health, such as T.B. tests for all cattle in 1936, and progress made eliminating Bang’s disease.

For the Emil and Gina Borreson family, these were the same years that Odell and Sidney were still in school, and Bennie, Ednar, and Garven were beginning their own way in farming.

I have been unsuccessful, however, at finding a record of Bernt’s death. He doesn’t show up in the 1905 Wisconsin Census with his wife and daughters, in which census Clara is indicated to be a widow. I searched years of records of Trinity Lutheran Church on the north side of La Crosse where the couple’s daughters had been baptized in the early 1890s, but I found no record there of Bernt’s death. I really expected I would.

For a while I thought: Maybe Aunt Clara was right after all, that Bernt “went west and all contact was lost.” The status of Bernt’s wife Clara as a widow in the 1905 census, however, makes that seem an impossibility. She re-married in December of the same year, 1905, so perhaps Bernt had died a few year earlier. In any case, the answer still eludes me as I continue to ask, “Where in the world is Bernt?”

Referring to a book of emigration records from Biri, Norway, Carson located the 1875 emigration of our great-grandmother Maria Thorson’s brother, Torger Thorson (or Thoresen or Thoreson). If my minimal translating skills are close, Torger, a married husmann, left Biri the 15th of October on the ship Hero bound for Whitehall, Wisconsin. (In Norwegian, “39 ar, gift, husmann, [sonn av Thord Thorsen og Oline Olsdtr. Sigstadeiet], reiste med Hero 15/10 til Whitehall, Wis.”)

It was my good fortune to then locate on the Norway Heritage website documentation that indeed the Hero had departed Norway on 15 Oct 1875. Almost certainly Torger took the Hero from Christiania or Christiansand to Hull, England, before boarding another ship for America. Aunt Clara wrote that Torger’s family and his sister Maria joined him in America after he had worked for Peder Ekern a year.

Here’s an artist’s rendering of the Hero, thanks to the Norway Heritage site, plus more about it.

In the 1800s, Hull, England was important in the shipbuilding industry, and the Hero was constructed at C. & W. Earle’s Shipbuilding in 1866 and launched the same year for the Wilson line. She was iron construction powered both by sails and a 180 hp engine. Beginning in the mid-1870s, the Hero began a regular route between Christiania and Christiansand, Norway and Hull, England.  

According to the Norway Heritage site: “On October 15, 1875, the S/S Hero could not make the call at Christiansand because of rough seas and a severe storm. Some passengers had embarked at Christiania for Christiansand, but had to follow the ship all the way to Hull.” We are left wondering how this may have affected Torger.

The same source indicates that Norwegians would have arrived at Hull for administrative purposes before going on to Liverpool to depart for North America aboard another vessel. 

In the latter 19th and early 20th century, the Wilson line had 100 ships sailing to all parts of the world. The company was then purchased by another Hull-born entrepeneur, Sir John Ellerman, who was the richest man in Great Britain at the time. Today the east coast English city of Hull, Kingston upon Hull actually, numbers about a quarter million people and double that in the greater metropolitan area.

In the decades like the 1870s and 80s when the USA was trying to attract immigrants, railroads even offered special reduced fares to the folks who set foot in places like New York or Philadelphia. Elias and Kari Borresen may have traveled by train to Chicago or Milwaukee in 1869, and from there to La Crosse, Wisconsin, which had a line after 1858.

Four years later, Elias and Kari bought land in Fitch Coulee from the West Wisconsin Railway Company. Clara has details on page 28 of Homestead. I have since learned that this railway company was first incorporated as the Tomah and Lake St. Croix Railroad Company in 1863, the name was changed in 1867, and it was acquired in 1878 by the Chicago, St. Paul and Minneapolis Railway Company. This last one was consolidated with the North Wisconsin Railway Company in 1880 to form the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway Company. (I assume you got all that straight!)

By the mid-1870s when both the Borresons and Estensons were settled in Fitch Coulee, the railroad had come to Trempealeau County and provided a more efficient way for farmers and others to move produce. For our ancestors and the Pigeon Falls community, the depot at Whitehall must have been the contact point with the Green Bay and Minnesota Railroad that had laid tracks generally following the Trempealeau River on toward the Mississippi.

Only recently did I discover that Elias’ brother Bernt had settled in La Crosse and, according to a La Crosse City Directory, in 1895 he was an employee of the C B & N Railway Company, that is, the Chicago, Burlington & Northern. This key part of the Burlington system was on the route northwest to St. Paul and was also called the “Upper Mississippi Scenic Line.” In 1899, the year Emil and Gina were married, the C B & N was purchased by the larger Chicago, Burlington and Quincy.

That’s all I have, but I find it noteworthy that Bernt departed from the occupational pattern by working for the railroad in a generation when other relatives engaged in farming.

The information was a gold strike! On October 25, 1883, Bernt Borresen married Clara Agnete Hansen of Leon in Monroe County, Wisconsin. This Bernt was born in Norway, listed as the son of Borre and Maria Anderson, so he must be the right person, the brother to our great-grandfather Elias. The couple was married by E. Jensen of Coon Valley in a ceremony of the Norwegian Lutheran church.

At the time of his marriage and 11 years after serving as godfather to our grandfather Emil, Bernt was a workman living in La Crosse, Wisconsin (acc. to the marriage information). Apparently, he didn’t go west as the family had thought, or if he did, he had returned.

Now I am more certain of other information about his life too. I think he and Clara continued to live in La Crosse where they had three daughters: Bernice (b. 1889), Florence (b. 1892), and Cora (b. 1895).

In the 1895 and 1897 La Crosse City Directories, Bernt was listed as an employee of C B & N Railway, which was the Chicago, Burlington & Northern. He lived at 2132 Wood – as, I presume, so did his family. (By the way, the C B & N was incorporated in 1885, and 14 years later was sold to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. The C B & N became part of the Burlington route northwest to St. Paul, Minnesota.)

In the 1905 Wisconsin census, Clara (“Clarrie”) appeared as a widow along with her three daughters, meaning that Bernt had died prior to June 1st of that year but I don’t know any specifics. At his death he would have been younger than 50 years.

Six years later, both Clara and her middle daughter Florence were listed at separate addresses in the 1911 La Crosse City Directory and were serving as “domestics.” In 1913 Florence was a domestic at 928 King, La Crosse, generally a neighborhood of big old mansions. (I’ll have to check out the actual address.)

There is someone with family tree information on Florence on Ancestry.com indicating that she married a John Albert Landis in Minot, ND in 1920, so perhaps that source may yield more on Bernt’s descendants. We’ll see.

Born January 10, 1857, Bernt Borresen was in the La Crosse/Onalaska area in October 1872 after which, according to Aunt Clara, he “went west” and all contact was lost. (A similar mystery exists for Berthe Borresen, another of Emil’s godparents.)

Using searches on Ancestry.com, I found Bernt Borresons in Superior, Wisconsin, and Fargo, North Dakota, but neither was our relative. Then I located a Bernt in nearby Jackson County. It turns out he was about 15 years younger and part of a large unrelated Borreson family in that county’s Irving Township. One of the family actually was buried in 1946 in the same South Beaver Creek (rural Ettrick) cemetery where Andreas Borreson and others of his family were laid to rest.

The hottest trail I’m on at the moment assumes that Bernt actually never went west but was residing in the wider La Crosse area.

In the Sharon Dallman family tree on Ancestry.com, there is a Bernt Borreson who married a Clara Hanson and had three daughters: Bernice (b. 1889), Florence (1892-1975), and Cora (b. 1895). The family lived in La Crosse and I located Clara and her daughters in the 1905 census. Bernt, however, was not with them, which most likely means he had died before 1905. In addition I have found an online marriage record for Bernt Borreson and Clara Hanson who were married October 25, 1883, in the adjacent county of Monroe. Supposedly Clara was from Leon in Monroe County. Maybe that county has more helpful information on this marriage.

The last bit of information I have is a Bernt Borreson listed in the 1895 La Crosse City Directory. He resided at 2132 Wood and worked for C B & N Railway (about which I haven’t found more info). Is this “our” Bernt? Possibly. Is this the Bernt married to Clara? Possibly. But there were other Borresons in La Crosse. In the decades of interest, I have found at least five or ten Borresons not related to us. So far I have not found anything to eliminate this Bernt from consideration.

There a second family tree on Ancestry. com – J P Mogren – that claims Bernt and Clara’s daughter Florence in their lineage. Maybe I can get this family or the earlier mentioned one to respond to my questions.

Another surprise to me was the significant connection this family came to have with the city of Winona, Minnesota. In 1900 all of Andreas’ family was residing in South Beaver Creek, as best I can tell, but two or three decades later, several were calling Winona their home, at least temporarily. I wonder why this took place.

In 1914, Amelia - the only child of Andreas and Maria to have children – married James Bryant of Minnesota. They had twins in 1915 and were residing in Winona no later than 1916. How they met I have no idea, but it appears this marriage may have initiated the Winona connection. By the 1930 census, however, Amelia was divorced and had gone back to the surname Mitchel. Residing with her were her 14-year-old twin son and daughter – and her sister Anna Borreson who was a cook.

In the meantime, Adolph Borreson – Amelia’s son born in 1899 by Harry Mitchel – married a Herbertine (surname unknown) by 1920. After renting land in South Beaver Creek for a couple years or so - maybe his grandfather’s farm – Adolph and Herbertine were residing in Winona in 1922. In fact, I found a residence listing for an Adolph Borreson several times between then and 1934 – unless there’s another Adolph B.  In July 1924, there was a court case “Herbertina Borreson vs. Adolph Borreson” so I suspect they were divorced. The same question about the correct Adolph re-appears as he is listed as a “grader” in the 1921 City Directory, a helper at the J. R. Watkins Co, in 1924, and a helper at Foot, Schulte & Co. in 1927. His name was also on a newspaper listing of “Trappers Licenses” in October 1922. In 1934 he was a laborer at Interstate Pkg co. Again all this is in Winona.

Anna Borreson – who appeared in the 1930 census with her sister Amelia in Winona – showed up other times as well. In 1927 she and Adolph were residing at the same address, where she had been in 1923 also. In 1934, a Winona City Directory still had her as a cook in the city. Sometime between then and 1940, she returned to South Beaver Creek to farm with her sister Josephine. I’m guessing this may have happened after Josie’s husband Ole Anderson died in late 1937.

A third child of Andreas ended up in Winona too. Ole Borreson farmed with his father until Andreas died in 1907. He may have continued on for some years, but by 1929, he too was in Winona. In 1934 he was working as a laborer, and in 1937 an Ole ”Borson” received $24 in Old Age Assistance from Winona County. (The right Ole?) I didn’t know about his death (nor did Aunt Clara in Homestead) until I inadvertently came across a 1950 Winona news item. The sound of a dripping faucet in a renter’s flat had led a neighbor to call the police to investigate. In that room Ole was found, dead of natural causes for several days. I find it sad to think that he died alone and in the same room that had been his home still at least 1934.

With Ole’s death the family connection to Winona, Minnesota, appears to have come to an end. Leaving South Beaver Creek, three of Andreas and Marie Borreson’s four children had found their way to this river town for a time. Only Josephine remained in South Beaver Creek. These four would have been our grandfather Emil’s first cousins.

Our grandfather Emil Borreson was a farmer, and so were his father
Elias and father-in-law Bertinus. In the next generation back, so far as I can determine, the results were the same: living on a farm, tenant farmer, etc. Some of them would have been called cotters in Norway.

As I examined the family line further back in Aunt Clara’s Homestead, I found very few exceptions. One was Anders Pedersen (born 1757), the father to Borre Anderson, who was  tailor. A second was Anders’ grandfather Jens Jensen Abilgaard (born 1696) who was a minister in Loten. And a third was Jen’s father Jens Pedersen Abilgaard who a “Captaine,” as high officer in the army. (This Jens, by the way, was born not in Norway, but in Jylland, Denmark.)

Of course, sometimes farmers had secondary occupations to fall back on, and one of the most common was carpentry or woodworking. Emil himself did this kind of work, as did Gina’s grandfather, Thor Taasensen (born 1797), back in Norway. Emil also worked as a cook in a lumber camp, a place of winter employment for some immigrants. Among the women, a not-unusual supplement to their housekeeping was the vocation of Gina’s mother Maria Thorson: service as a mid-wife.

It appears to me that real variety in occupations came to our family only in the generation of our parents beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks to Clara’s family history we have a snapshot of earlier generations.

When searching for other information lately, I came across exactly the kind of news item that I wanted. In the front page of the March 6, 1919 issue of The Whitehall Times-Banner, T. J. Thorson had purchsed two Dual Purpose Shorthorn cattle, “quite the best ever shipped to this town.” From B. W. Little in Janesville, Wisconsin, “one of the oldest and best American breeders of Dual Purpose Shorthorn cattle,” Theodore purchased a yearling bull and heifer of superior pedigree. (Here’s a photo of Shorthorns today.)

While not wanting to bore you with the article’s cattle breeding details, I am compelled to mention that the bull was “by the 17th Duke of Wapsie, one of the best Bates bulls living.” Don’t you love that name?! The Bates name also must have been important in Shorthorn breeding circles because it was mentioned a couple more times.

Think about this: The purchase of these two animals made page 1 headlines in the Whitehall paper. Was it because of a slow news day? Probably not. More likely, the rural nature of the community and the farming leadership Theodore was demonstrating by his leading-edge – and probably costly – purchase.

When he died just five and a half years later (October 26, 1924) at the age of 44, not only must there have been sadness due to his unexpected passing but also because of the demise of his good work. That “work of a lifetime” Clara describes, was more likely a brief time of about ten years or so from 1913 when he had returned home at his father’s request “to save the old homestead” (Homestead, 9).

His 1919 purchase would not have been looked upon with admiring eyes by certain leaders in the dairy business. W. D. Hoard, for example, Wisconsin’s premier dairying promoter and one-time governor, was not a fan of dual purpose cows, saying something to the effect, that “as long as we have dual purpose notions, we will have no purpose cows!” I expect Theodore Thorson would have disagreed with him.

I find it interesting that the Ekerns readily made the transition to become a politically-involved family in their new country. Peter not only was a key citizen in the community of Pigeon Falls with the businesses he began (mill and store, for example), but he was elected to a term in the Wisconsin State Assembly where, as I read in one source, he was a sponsor legislation to limit the power and abuses of the railroads, a major issue in the latter half of the 19th century.

I’m including the above portion of a 1914 plat map of Pigeon Township, because I discovered that our grandfather Emil’s farm was just three properties north of land owned by another Ekern, Herman, son of Even and nephew of Peter. If you look closely on the bottom right portion of the map, you’ll see the names of H. A. Anderson and H. L. Ekern on 160 acres. That would be Hans Anderson, a Pigeon lawyer, Trempealeau County judge, and law partner with the other – Herman Ekern, Han’s son-in-law, also a lawyer and eventually an influential Progressive leader in Wisconsin.

Herman came back to Pigeon after earning his law degree from the UW in 1894. He entered law practice with Hans and married his daughter a few years later. In 1899 Herman was elected district attorney for the county, and then from 1903 to 1908, served three terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, the last one as Speaker. In 1907 he became the key writer of legislation for reforming the state’s life insurance business. Later, he would become one of the founders of Lutheran Brotherhood, which today has become part of Thrivent Financial for Lutherans.

There’s more. These were the years that Progressivism made great progress in the state, and Herman Ekern became a close friend and advisor to its dynamic leader, Robert M. La Follette, Jr. In 1926 while serving as Wisconsin’s attorney general (1923-1927), Herman was the choice of La Follette and his team for the Republican candidacy for governor but was defeated in the primary by Fred Zimmerman (who went on to become governor).  However, in 1938-1939, he served as the state’s lieutenant governor when Governor Philip La Follette appointed him to finish the term of Harry Gunderson who had resigned.

I guess that’s enough…. I just had to do this post when I observed the names in that 1914 platbook. One final comment: Herman Ekern was born in 1872, the same year as our grandfather, Emil Borreson, but how different the paths of their lives.