Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [20]
Helga, now thirty-two, finally found a place where she believed their children could flourish. She took pride in Ole’s carpentry skills when he built an attractive three-bedroom farmhouse and pine furnishings. Two bedrooms upstairs gave the boys and the girls separate spaces. Clara, Ida, Bertha, and later, baby Lillian, shared one room and the five brothers, Olaf, Johnny, Arthur, William, and Henry shared the other. Ole and Helga finally had a private bedroom and a dining room on the main floor.
It made the constant work of taking care of her family far easier than their days living on the remote Minnesota prairie. A nearby pump provided easy access to natural spring water. Ole added an all-purpose building and furnished it with an old wood cook stove for heating water. Here Helga washed clothes and gave the children summer baths, ground wheat, and dressed chickens and other wild game on a wooden table. Their root cellar stored potatoes and one-gallon crocks that Helga covered with lard in the winter, or filled with cherry and dandelion wine or root beer for the children.
They soon cleared part of the land, planted an orchard and garden, and then built a barn with stalls for horses and small calves, an outbuilding for pigs and cows, and refurbished an old log chicken house that came with the land.10 For a woman who started raising a family in a one-room dirt-floor sod house on the prairie, this home seemed almost luxurious. Even during hard times, the children could always be fed. Plus, with all the responsibilities in developing the farm and caring for the animals, her children were gaining important work habits. Watching William’s and Arthur’s delight as they played with their first litter of squealing piglets or remembering Bertha’s pride in bringing her father a wildflower bouquet brought Helga a quiet pleasure over their choice to have moved once more.
The Estbys enjoyed the wholesome family atmosphere in the small town of Rockford near their Mica Creek farm, like this chilly Fourth of July community celebration at the turn of the century.
Courtesy Frances E. Hurd Collection.
Although Helga wanted the children to concentrate on English when they moved to Spokane Falls (which gradually changed in name to Spokane in the 1890s), she still desired for them to know the friendship of a Scandinavian community. The Mica Creek neighborhood, with its many Norwegians and Swedish immigrants, had a reputation for common decency, neighborliness, and support during difficult times. Even better, these Scandinavians knew how to have fun. In Minnesota, many of the religious Norwegians came from the “Haugian” Lutheran faith background, part of an earlier pietistic revival movement in rural Norway in the 1800s. One outgrowth of this movement included a legalism that deemed certain actions sinful and made some Norwegians fearful of life’s simple pleasures. But in Mica Creek, their neighbors visited for card games, sleigh rides and hayrides, and Ole could drink his daily beer without criticism from the community. “We used to have lots of fun,” recalled daughter Ida.11 Nor did Helga feel the isolation that permeated her days on the prairie in Minnesota.
The local community around Mica Creek, centered in school and family life, offered rich everyday moments. The schoolhouse became the neighborhood gathering place for harvest dances, box socials, a literary club, baseball games, eighth-grade certification days, pie socials, fairs, and the election polling place. The school was right near the Estby’s land, allowing the family convenient access to school-sponsored social events. Helga appreciated that their Mica Creek community placed a high value on education for daughters. At times, more girls attended the Mica Creek schoolhouse than boys because families needed boys at home for clearing land, planting and harvesting crops, cutting wood, or tending livestock.12 When daughters outgrew the eighth-grade local schools, many families encouraged them to attend high school in the city, where they often worked as maids in