Farm Girl (3 page)

Her house smelled stale, like dank coffee, because a pot of coffee sat all day on the stove. Outside was the shed and the old machinery and wagons. Uncle Anton didn’t farm but would work for neighboring farmers. The Walstad land was rented out to other people who farmed it. Mother would talk about how she’d like to restore the old farm with a sod barn and a dugout house like her father had lived in. She wanted to recreate a historic place for people to come see.

For awhile, when Uncle Anton was no longer able to care for her, Grandmother lived with us. She couldn’t speak English. She’d take my hand and say, “Oh my lieten yenta.” She’d show me her finger with a big scar where she’d run a needle through it as a seamstress in Chicago. I was nine when she died. Her casket stayed in our living room, where someone would come and sit all night with it. Neighbors and friends would “sit up with the casket” as a customary service to the family.

She was the only grandmother I knew, because my dad’s parents, John and Annie Marker, died before I was born.

Sophie Walstad in front of their frame house

Side porch of the Walstad home

John Wilson Sr., of Winchester, Virginia

Chapter Two:
The Markers

The Markers and Wilsons came to Nebraska from Winchester, Virginia along with several other families. George Cather was the first, so the area was called Catherton Township and referred to as the New Virginia Community because of the many homesteaders from that state. However, my grandfather Hans Walstad always maintained that he was there before George Cather.

The youngest boy, Albert, got the Wilson migration started. In Virginia he was working for George Cather and one day just disappeared. He was gone several years, no one knew where.

Then one day he reappeared and told his family about homesteading in Nebraska. He had come out with the George Cathers. Now he had his own place and was proving up his claim, and he talked his brothers into coming out there to homestead. So the Wilson brothers and their brother-in-law John Marker decided to go to Nebraska, to that area called New Virginia.

John and Annie Wilson Marker brought three little children with them and then had seven more in Nebraska. Elizabeth was the oldest, then Tisha who died as a young woman of tuberculosis, and a son Joseph, who died at age two. Then came my dad, also named John. After him, there was Dora, Carrie, Bernice, Albert, Leone and Ford.

Uncle Albert was the rebellious one of the Marker children. When he was sixteen, they were living in their sod house and somehow scraping by. Setting on the porch were a couple barrels of molasses to get them through the year for their sugar. One day my grandmother found a dead cat in the molasses, so they had to pour it all out. Years later Uncle Albert admitted that he’d been the one to tip the lid so the cat could fall in. He’d been scolded for something and was mad, so he stormed out of the house past the molasses barrel and tipped the lid, sticking his fingers in for a lick.

He ran off shortly after and no one knew where, but Omaha seemed to be his headquarters. He tramped around the country riding the railroads, spending his winters in Omaha.

One day in the 1930’s, my dad came in and said, “Albert’s home.”

Uncle Albert said he would stay and help Uncle Ford on the farm, but he insisted on sleeping in the barn. After a couple months, he was gone. Another year he showed up and worked for a few months, then disappeared again.

One time an Omaha hospital called to say Albert died. Ford and Bernice buried him in the family plot at the New Virginia cemetery but refused to get a tombstone. Later, after Ford and Bernice had died, my cousin Cecil Johnson bought a tombstone for Uncle Albert when he ordered the ones for Ford and Bernice.

Uncle Ford and Aunt Leone were the youngest Markers. Aunt Leone and her husband went to Missouri during the drought and bought a farm there. Uncle Ford stayed on the family farm to work the land after the father died in 1904.

Except for Albert who ran off, the Markers were a closeknit group and did what they could to help each other. Even though I was an only child, I had a very large extended family on the Marker and Wilson side—many aunts, uncles and cousins who lived nearby—who liked to get together for family reunions and to visit one another. We always celebrated Christmas with Aunt Dora’s family, Uncle Ford and Aunt Bernice.

One summer about 1928, we had a Chevrolet with an open trunk on the back for carrying suitcases. Dad, Mother, Aunt Bernice and I drove that car out to visit Aunt Carrie and Uncle Ed in Greeley, Colorado. They lived on the edge of town, had a big garden and a milk cow. Uncle Ed also raised hogs. He’d go to the lodges in the mountains near Estes Park and get their garbage to feed his hogs. When the hogs got fat, he’d sell them. He bought apples, peaches and cabbage from different farmers and would bring them to Nebraska to sell, usually staying at our place.

Their daughter Gladys, who had Downs Syndrome, was about eight and she kept telling us, “Go back to Nebraska.” We disturbed her routine. She always wanted the kitchen cabinets shut and they were open a lot with visitors in the house. She’d scowl at us and say, “Go back to Nebraska,” then slam the cupboard doors shut.

Their son Clayton had run away and while we were there, he came back home. He’d been gone awhile, Aunt Carrie didn’t know where and oh, how glad she was to see him. She decided to send him to a religious school in Denver that fall. He went there and turned out alright, not like Uncle Albert. He became a metal worker, working with furnaces, and did well in his business, married and raised a family.

On that trip to Greeley, we stayed with Aunt Carrie and Uncle Ed about a week. One day we drove up to the mountains and Clayton and I sat in the trunk of the Chevrolet. Boy, that was fun. He and I had such a good view of the mountains.

As Gladys got older, she lived at home where Aunt Carrie always took care of her. When Carrie died, Uncle Ed had to put Gladys in a home. She was in her twenties when that happened but didn’t live very long after that.

Uncle Ford was our closest neighbor, living on the Marker farm one mile west of us. He never married. When school let out for the summer, Aunt Bernice who also never married, would come back from Lincoln where she taught third grade and stay at Ford’s. After the Marker parents, John and Annie, had left the sod house, they bought land nearby and built a frame house in 1896. That was where Ford lived up until 1949, when Aunt Bernice retired. Then he built a new house on the same property. Those two, brother and sister, lived there and took care of each other until they died, first Ford then Bernice.

Aunt Bernice, like most of the Markers, saved her money and invested carefully. She had almost $100,000 when she died in 1970.

Young John Marker

LUCILLE MARKER
Granddaughter of Homesteaders

The old farm

The new farm

Chapter Three:
The New Farm

As a child, I lived on a new farm in Webster County, Nebraska, near the Kansas border. My parents had lived nearby on a farm with old buildings and a little three-room house, but now that they were expecting a child, my dad built a nice house. He wasn’t a carpenter, he had someone else do the work. It cost about $2000 for the house back in 1916. Sears Roebuck would send out books about their houses with floor plans and descriptions. Mother drew her own floor plan based on what she saw in the Sears Roebuck book.