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Christmas in Rock County still means sharing memories, attending church and big family dinner

Lead Summary

Marie C. (Dunn) Schroeder shared this clipping about Christmas 150 years ago with for reprint in the Rock County Star Herald.
 
‘Christmas in Rock County 60 years ago’
From the Rock County Herald dated Friday, December 23, 1932
 
Christmas in the ’70’s (1870s) meant little to the pioneers in Rock county’s sod houses. It brought no romance to those early settlers as they sat around a wood stove fire, waiting for nightfall, when they would go to bed. It was just a day like all the rest, in those times when a man thought it recreation to ride fourteen miles behind oxen after wood, and a woman grieved all day after a dog stole her cherished soup bone, saved to be the main item of the Christmas dinner.
Mr. and Mrs. J. B. Dunn sat in their West Main street home this week and told about those early days. Mr. Dunn came to this county in 1870, homesteading in what is now section 24, Beaver Creek township, about two and a half miles northeast of what is now Beaver Creek village. Mrs. Dunn joined him the next year. They lived there a quarter of a century, but for the first decade Christmas meant nothing to them.
“We were so poor we couldn’t do anything on Christmas,” Mr. Dunn said, and Mrs. Dunn added: “If you’re wanting us to tell you about how we celebrated Christmas, I’m sorry I can’t accommodate you. We didn’t have any entertainments and there were no special efforts to observe the day. I was too busy cooking and taking care of the children in those days. Mostly we just stayed at home and tended to our own business. What did we have for our big Christmas dinner? We didn’t have any; we were thankful just for something to eat.”
That was why, a year or two later, a neighbor’s dog brought grief into the Dunn home. Mr. Dunn had managed to buy a quarter of beef, a few weeks before Christmas, and they were saving the last of it, a soup bone, which was hanging in a wooden lean-to outside the main house. Two days before Christmas a dog sneaked into the shed and left with the soup bone. There was no meat on the Dunn’s dinner table that Christmas.
Poor though they were, the Dunns were among the prosperous settlers in the county. They had some money, at first; some of the pioneer groups had none. Their little money went quickly, of course, and was gone when Mr. Dunn was harvesting his first crop. It bought them a cow, however, and provided a wooden floor for their sod house; their neighbors’ floors were grass or dirt.
Mr. Dunn, like all the other settlers, thought a sod house was necessary. They believed, as they were told, that frame houses would blow away, and that persons would freeze to death in a wooden house. So he built his home with sod from the sloughs, cut into bricks 4x18x36 inches, and molded into walls 36 inches thick.
There was one window, with glass panes as befitted a prosperous citizen. There were two rooms in the house, with 12-foot ceilings.
The roof was built in this manner: Split-rail rafters were laid a foot apart from the walls to a ridge pole; willow brush was laid on the rafters, sod on the willow brush, and about four inches of dirt on the sod. The roof held, and did not leak.
When the house was finished, Mrs. Dunn came to her husband. With her she brought some dried apples, product of her Wisconsin home. These dried apples were made into the only sauce, or dessert, or sweet side dish the family had for a year.
As they sat in their Luverne home this week, Mr. and Mrs. Dunn said, time and again, that Christmas meant nothing to the pioneer families 55 and 60 years ago.
They looked around at the radio and phonograph in the living room, at the rugs on the floor and at flowers and a huge fern in a jar on a handsome pedestal. Mrs. Dunn reached over to touch the big radiator, and with a shrug said: “I know it’s hard to believe, but that first Christmas or two meant nothing. These things” – she looked around the room, and shrugged again – “we had nothing to celebrate Christmas with.”
For instance, Mr. Dunn related, just before that first Christmas the two spent in their new home, he got caught in a blizzard.
“I had a wood lot seven miles from home on the Rock river,” he said. “About the biggest pleasure I had in those days was hauling wood with my oxen. And it took most of my time. I made five trips every week in the winter. Well, this time I got caught in the worst blizzard I have ever seen. Three other men were with me and we couldn’t see the lead ox for the snow. Finally we left the oxen on the ice at the river’s edge and started walking, thinking to get to some house. We got lost and that night wound up at the home of Henry Martin, a settler of ‘69, who lived south of the wood lot. Other lost men came drifting in that night, and the next day, until twelve of us were there. Martin had killed a big hog for Christmas meat. We got there Monday night and stayed until Thursday. When we left, the hog had been eaten up and Martin said, “Well, I won’t have to get any salt for that hog, anyway.”
“And while he was gone,” said Mrs. Dunn, “I was in that house alone, with a small baby. I didn’t know what had happened to Mr. Dunn, and there was not much wood. I was afraid to burn much of it, so I’d keep up a fire about six hours every day and the baby and I would stay in bed the rest of the time to keep warm.”
Mr. and Mrs. Dunn looked around the room again and then both sat quietly for a few minutes, saying nothing. Mrs. Dunn started knitting again. “We didn’t have much Christmas,” she said.
There were no toys and not a doll at Christmas time. There was nothing bought at a store. “I did try to make a few trinkets for the children when they were old enough,” Mrs. Dunn said, “but they didn’t amount to much, and the children always found them before Christmas.”
There were no Christmas issues of magazines, although Mr. Dunn continued to receive a New York publication edited by Henry Ward Beecher. There were no holiday cocktails; they walked through the mud and snow to the well in a slough bottom for their water. Except at times, when gophers got into the well, then the walk had to be three-quarters of a mile.
On these gopher-caused trips for water, Mrs. Dunn went to the home of Aldro Grout, in the southeast quarter of section 24. He and Eli Grout, Aldro’s cousin, were the Dunns’ closest neughbors. Eli Grout lived only half a mile away, in the southwest quarter of section 24. Fred Miercourt lived a mile and a half southwest of the Dunns, in section 36, and Bishop Crossman a trifle farther away in section 36.
There were no decorations and there were no flowers. A little patch of oats just to the right of the one door in the house did look well for a time, but the grasshoppers ate it up. And there were no green things growing anywhere. The Dunns did have some hope for a while about their beans, but the oxen got them one day.
Things got better, of course, with time. Mr. Dunn built a frame house with lumber hauled from Worthington, the rail head then, and they lived in that home, the first of its kind in the county, for a time, although they were not able to finish it inside for a year or two. The county prospered. A Methodist church was built at Beaver Creek, and there, and in Bishop Crossman’s large house near the Dunn home, families sometimes would gather for social times.
Mr. Dunn marketed his crops in Worthington, taking three days for a trip, and passing through Luverne, then growing, where Wold & McKay had erected the first business building some years before. The structure is now known as the Stager apartments and is the last building on the south side of Main street, going east. The Dunns became affluent enough to kill a beef and a few hogs just before Christmas. Times were good.
That was in the 80’s. Luverne was a nice little settlement, and those Christmas times are remembered, too, by Mrs. Beaubien, who was one of the city’s early settlers, and who this week sat in the Dunn living room, listening to them talk.
“Christmas had become the big day of the year here by then,” Mrs. Beaubien said.
“There were services in all the churches, with a long program and a huge tree in every church. Everybody went, mostly in sleighs, and there was a gift, always hung on the tree, for everybody there. Nobody missed it who could go. Too, we always used to get together on Christmas day – four or five families of us – at some home and spend the day talking – oh, we had plenty to talk about then, too – and eating a big Christmas dinner.”
The country was modernized then, with its community gatherings and its organs. It was not the country the Dunns looked at in the ’70’s.
Mr. and Mrs. Dunn cannot recall the details of their first Christmas in the sod house, but they know just about what they did.
Most of the day they sat around the cooking stove, with one of its corners resting on a rock which replaced a broken leg.
For dinner they had a little bacon Mr. Dunn had bought – for his carefully hoarded money had not then given out. They had home-made light bread. They had potatoes gotten from Henry Martin. The potatoes were chilled but that didn’t matter. And they had dried apple sauce.
Mr. Dunn brought in piles of green box elder wood, and went to the slough for water. They took turns petting the baby, and reading the journal from New York. Mrs. Dunn swept the floor of two-foot boards again. It was a fine floor, but it would get black; so much dirt was always dropping from the sod walls.
For supper they ate bacon and chilled potatoes – and dried apple sauce. They put the baby to bed and Mr. Dunn brought in more box elder wood before they settled down to rest a while beside the kerosene lamp, in front of the broken-legged stove. Wind blew from the north, and loose dirt rattled off the roof. The lamp smoked and Mrs. Dunn turned it down a bit. Mr. Dunn put more wood in the stove and closed all the dampers. They blew out the lamp and went to bed.
That was Christmas day in a Rock county pioneer’s sod house in 1871.
 
Though the story referred to the events as happening in 1872, she said sources show the homestead claim was filed in 1871, and the family came from Wisconsin by wagon train in 1872. That would mean this year, 2022, is the 150th year after their first Christmas in Rock County.
She shared that her great-grandmother Laura had a baby soon due - when she was home in a sod house with a toddler, alone during a blizzard, just before that Christmas. Their second child, daughter Olla E. Dunn, arrived January 19, 1873, the first settlers' baby born in Beaver Creek township.

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