Consuming homegrown food was certain for farm families. It was not as common an occurrence for families living in town – until it was, until it had to be. “I hated it,” wrote Robert E. A. Lee about his boyhood agricultural chores in Spring Grove. “I still remember cutting potatoes and dropping them as seeds into the holes my brother had fashioned with his spade. And there seemed to be endless assignments of weeding the rows of carrots, peas, beans and sweet corn. I had my fill of that work and ever since, I have avoided planting or cultivating a garden.” He gave all credit to his mother’s gumption. “We had food from that garden each year, and we could have not survived without it.”
Young Bob Lee was not quite eight years old when the U. S. Stock Market crashed in late October of 1929, which ushered in approximately 10 years of economic hardship known as the Great Depression, which affected both industrialized and non-industrialized nations all over the world.
Prior to immediate electronic communication, that 1929 stock market crash in New York and worldwide economic woes, at first seemed far away to those residing in middle America – in southeastern Minnesota and Houston County. “Yet, the awful legacy of the crash came even to sleepy small towns in rural America,” wrote Lee, who born in late 1921, experienced that economic travail as a youngster in Spring Grove
“When the weather was good, farmers could still grow grain and raise livestock, and the food business touched everyone at the necessity level,” Lee noted. “But the economics of despair pervaded this enterprise as well. Savings, if any, were mostly eaten up or lost. Prices and sales were skimpy. The ‘Depression Blues’ took over.”
Bob’s father Knute Lee was a prominent Spring Grove businessman, but the family could no longer rely on what had been steady income from sales. Farmer customers still needed Knute’s services and implements, but could no longer pay their bills. They needed to purchase on credit, but IOUs would not pay the Lee family bills.
Bob’s mother, Mathilda Glasrud Lee, told her son, “I know he (Knute Lee) had more than a thousand dollars worth of notes that were no good. And I know he had turned it over to Minnesota Twine and he had to make it good… He had to borrow the money. The notes came back, you see… the people didn’t have any funds…”
“It was a sad and prolonged period and lots of privation,” lamented Bob about his childhood. “We weathered it better than many people.” He credited his mother Mathilda for not allowing her family to suffer. She was “a true stalwart, having the spine of the Qualey and Glasrud pioneer immigrants from Norway. She learned from them that one had to expect hardship in life. After life in a sod hut in dusty Lemmon, South Dakota, this would not overwhelm her or her family.”
His mother’s garden was not a mere plot in the corner of the back yard. His father helped her negotiate the use of a vacant lot near his feed barn, and then he and one of his horses plowed and raked furrows. Mathilda labored long in her garden, but not alone. There were her children, when available, among a household of nine people.
“We survived and we didn’t impair our health, but we cut down to the bare-bones essentials and got enough food, although it was just plain and ordinary kind of stuff, supplemented by canning.” From the big garden came vegetables and fruit, which were canned in “copious quantities,” including plums, cherries, peaches and strawberries for jams, jellies and sauces. There was a large crock for several alternating layers of carrots and sand. The practice was the same for potatoes. Edible carrots and potatoes would thus be available all winter long.
Sometimes, a quarter of a hog or beef would be available to grind for meatballs, which could be canned and kept in the cellar for months into the winter. “So, if you could draw potatoes and carrots and jam and jelly and meatballs and had a sack of flour, you just about had it made. You’d buy some salt, and you didn’t even have to buy butter if you had a cow – you could drink milk and skim the cream and churn butter.”
Bob’s father traded for a milk cow, sometimes two of them, which could be kept in pastures belonging to friends, namely the Claus Nelson farm north of town. Knute Lee, along with his sons and a daughter, would do the milking. “When I was just a kid,” wrote Bob, “I would have to go to some other pasture near town (Our dad made deals when he had to.) and find our cow. I’d take my pails – one with water to wash of the teats and another for the milk. This was my small assignment. It never occurred to me then, as our mother would send me over to a neighbor widow or up to our grandmother with a small pail of milk, that it was also helping others to survive.”
One of those neighbors was Mrs. Severtson, who spoke only Norwegian. When young Bob made a delivery to her house, he memorized in Norwegian, “Would you like some milk?” He wasn’t sure whether or not she understood him, but “the milk spoke for itself.”
Bob’s mother volunteered with the Red Cross, an endeavor that was ”almost therapeutic” for her and the entire family. “It helped mitigate any temptation to self-pity over the austerity forced on us and millions of others by the dire economic straits of that period.”
Mathilda Lee was appointed County Roll Chairman for the 1932 Red Cross membership drive. “I can almost re-live with her the excitement and stimulation of her sudden immersion in a process aimed at helping unemployed and destitute citizens of a new and sudden poverty.” To be continued
Source: “Mathilda’s Journey” by Robert E. A. Lee, published in 2000
Photo courtesy of “Mathilda’s Journey”
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