Portland Prairie is a region in southeastern Minnesota in Wilmington Township, Houston County near Eitzen, which was not leveled by glaciers and therefore is somewhat hilly. It attracted farmers because there were few trees to cut down. The area was settled in the early- to mid-1850s by families from New England, most notably Rhode Island.
C. L. McNelly, born in 1883, was in his 66th year in 1949, Minnesota’s centennial year of statehood, when he authored remembrances of his life on Portland Prairie. The pines still stood in 1949 where the blackbirds sang in Grandpa Wright’s evergreens. “I am sure the blackbirds still sing there in the springtime.”
As a young lad around 1890, there were brothers and sisters and an assortment of barnyard livestock, including ducks and white rabbits. “The sheep and the ram that butted me over the woodpile came later. There was always a swing in the old maple tree.”
The standing rule of springtime allowed the children to start going barefooted when they could find three butterflies in a flock. There were times when they “ganged up” and caught three butterflies to make their own flock.
It was the boys’ job to watch the cows in the meadow when the pastures dried up in August and to drive them into the yard at night for the milking. He learned to milk before he was seven. On frosty fall mornings, the boys were careful to get the cows up gently so there would be a warm place for their bare feet while they milked.
Every farm boy rode horseback, usually bareback and mostly for the enjoyment but also for errands – to bring in the mail, to get the cows or the doctor. And there were, of course, bareback races.
After the corn was planted, there would be fishing each summer. There were several good fishing holes in Duck Creek. They had most luck with copper wire snares on chubs, shiners and suckers than with a hook and line. On one unsuccessful fishing trip, two boys walked 10 miles to New Galena, fishing the Upper Iowa River for several hours. They returned home “fishless and weary,” just in time for chores.
In autumn, boys became hunters. His father gave him his first rifle when he was age nine, a Flobert .22 caliber. Squirrels, rabbits and partridge (pronounced patridge) beware. Noting that there was no rabbit disease in those early days, McNelly said rabbits and squirrels were usually stewed and served with thin gravy or in pot pies with dumplings.
Striped and pocket gophers were trapped for a bounty. Skunk trapping also provided “good money” with pelts bringing from 25 to 50 cents ($9 to $18 in 2025 purchasing power). “But the girls held their noses when we went to school,” he added. While camping, they once tried fried skunk meat. “It wasn’t bad,” he reported. The boys also constructed box traps for prairie chickens and rabbits but had little success.
Their father told them about early settlers eating wild crabapples sweetened with sorghum for sauce. With wild crabapples available at the edge of the woods, the lads urged their mother to follow that recipe, which became a treasured treat for several years.
Every autumn, they gathered hickory nuts, hazelnuts, butternuts and when available, walnuts. Nuts were cracked for consuming during long winter evenings. He praised his mother’s hickory nut cake.
The boys were given a small plot for their own garden, which yielded watermelons, muskmelons and popcorn. However, the prized melon patch was subject to raids. One time, intending to apprehend the mystery “marauders,” they hid in the popcorn with salt-loaded guns. “Lying there, we dropped off to sleep and awoke later, shivering with cold, only to find the ripe melons gone and the green ones smashed.”
Every farm on the Prairie had small orchards, featuring apples – The Duchess, Wealthy Tetosky or harvest apples, “sheep nose” and Hyslop along with Sweet Briar crabapple. The family had a cider press, and it was for years young McNelly was in charge of making the cider. They drank what they could while it was fresh with the rest designated for vinegar. They mellowed green apples by pushing them into haystacks, hiding them from other kids.
A neighboring farm owned a sorghum mill, and McNelly earned 10 gallons of sorghum molasses for several autumns by helping feed the press. The sap or cane juice went into a vat at one end and over a slow fire came out the other end as finished sorghum. He recalled the boys drank several quarts of hot molasses each day after used to it. That molasses was a prized ingredient of school lunches when combined with corn meal or with bread and butter.
There were yet no movies, but there were “home-made” school programs, which he described as “wholesome even though amateurish.” However, there was a traveling medicine show and an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” show, staged in a tent in Dorchester. Having to walk four miles to Dorchester after chores, he and his brother arrived late and negotiating the 25 cents admission fee, received a 10-cent discount. They were in time to see Eliza cross the ice and Little Eva’s death.
The 10 cents they had saved admitted them to an after-show, where a 50-cent prize was offered to anyone who could ride a biting, kicking donkey for three minutes. Many tried but no one was successful. “It was a riot, and we got our money’s worth here if we didn’t from Uncle Tom.”
McNelly recalled a trip to the “old county fair” at Caledonia, (probably in 1892). There were prizes for the largest apple, biggest pumpkin and so forth. But the big hit was the merry-go-round, the first the children had ever seen.
Anonymous says
Love your stories Lee!