REMINISCENCE
By Dr. Gleysteen
I do not remember my
grandmother kissing me nor hearing her remark that I would never reach Sioux
County alive. I was an infant in arms weak and ready to die. But it was the old
story. In a few years as a healthy robust lad I accompanied my mother back to
Pella to attend the funeral of my grandmother.
We came to Sioux County in March. The rivers were
swollen and both we and our furniture were hauled from LeMars to the Old
Homestead by wagon. As we approached the farm the bridge over the Floyd which
was a temporary structure broke and my father tumbled into the water. All the
money he had was in his vest pocket and this was lost in his endeavor to safe
himself and the furniture. Of our early experience on the farm I remember
little. We had no well and our stock was watered in the river from which we also
got all our drinking and washing water. One day my sisters and brothers took me
along in a clothes basket and set me upon a narrow plank bridge while they
filled the barrels. My movements dislodged the basket which fell into the water
and I floated down the stream to where John Schuller was fishing. Thinking me
another Moses he acted the part of Pharaoh's daughter and fished me out. After a
couple of years on the farm we moved to town-then called East Orange. It
consisted of our house, the depot and depot cottage, Kilburg's store and De
Kraay's hotel and all the rest was prairie. These buildings except the depot,
are still standing. My sisters and I and a few other children spent our time in
snaring gophers and hunting flowers. There were no dandelions in Sioux County in
those days but plenty of roses, sweet williams, violets, wind flowers, prairie
lilies and bluebells. These last three have almost disappeared. One in a while a
band of Indians would come and then we scampered to our mothers or as we grew
older we would let them shoot at pennies with their arrows-letting them have
those they hit. In the early days there was neither church nor school house in
the town and school was taught in a room above Kilburg's saloon-now Mike Allen's
restaurant. The people went to church in Orange City. It was in Orange City too
that our holidays were spent-Christmas and Fourth of July. The celebrations
generally consisted of a service in the church, after which the children were
given a bag of nuts and candy. For many years there was neither minister nor
doctor nor lawyer in the community. Rev. S. Bolks combined these three
professions in one person and when cases were mild or in emergencies he was
never failing help. For many years before Alton had a church-and occasionally
for many years after-the old gentleman would come and preach for us. I can see
him yet, the venerable patriarch, as he stood in the pulpit tall and erect and
all dressed in black, his long hair and beard a snowy white. When he began to
speck his face would flush and he always reminded me of a picture I once saw of
Moses transfigured on the mountain. An how he preached-without notes and without
time-hammering the bible until the leaves flew out over the audience-thundering
away until the sun went down. But all was rapt attention and no one ever
attempted to leave. To my youthful mind it was mostly a jargon of words in which
hell and sin and eternal fire stood out prominent. He was not a leader like Van
Raalbe nor a scholar like Scholten of the parent colony but the old Domine did
what he could and will be remembered kindly by a generation of men now fast
disappearing. When there were cases of serious sickness a doctor was summoned
from LeMars. Often too we depended upon home remedies. I remember when some six
of our family had whooping cough. An old lady visited my mother and advised her
to take a horse radish and hollow it our and fill that with sugar water. After
standing twenty-four hours we were to take a tablespoon full. My mother never
succeeded in giving us more that that first dose,
For a few years things went fairly well and then came
the grasshoppers. To one who did not experience that scourge a description must
always remain inadequate. My first person experience with this pest was when one
day near noon I lay down in the garden and fell asleep beneath the vines. I was
awakened by a voice calling me to dinner, but it was with difficulty that I
arose. The grasshoppers had settled on my body three or four layers thick. After
dinner there was not a vestage of green left in the garden. For a number of
years in succession they came and destroyed nearly everything. Many of the
settlers left and those who remained did so because they could not get away.
Many experiments were tried. Rollers were made to crush them and tar boxes to
ensnare them, but to no avail. They finally disappeared and the people of Sioux
County again came to their own. Even when the grasshoppers left, conditions did
not immediately improve. The farmers were hopelessly in debt and the business
men carried thousands of dollars on their books on which they could not realize.
Money was borrowed from the banks at LeMars at twenty-four per cent interest,
paid in advance, and them on the best security. A half section farm today will
carry a greater loan at five per cent than could be carried then on a whole
township at the interest mentioned above. This generation of farmers will never
know what their fathers owed to those few study business men whose labors and
honestly kept the community from starvation and upheld the credit of the county.
It is needless to say that mail order houses did not exploit the farmers of that
day.
This was the home of the prairie chicken and I remember
how we hunted the eggs and watched the chickens as they flew against the
telegraph wires and broke their necks. When we first came here we did not have
to leave our yard to shoot all the chickens we needed for the table. As the land
was taken up the hatching ground disappeared and the chickens and snipe were
doomed. There was also some deer in the country when we came. Once four large
stags were caught in a snow drift and clubbed to death by the farmers. One
afternoon as we children were playing in the school yard a fawn flew past us
pursued by some dogs and two hunters. We all joined in the chase. The animal was
brought to bay on my father's farm and shot by Henry Goebel. That night the
whole town ate venison. Wolves were quite common and though I never heard of any
damage done by them they were soon exterminated.
Early in the seventies the Sioux City and St. Paul
railroad was opened and East Orange became the distributing point for the east
end of the county. Orange City and all the farmers had to get their flour and
groceries and lumber and coal here and here they marketed all their grain and
farm products. There were no elevators and the grain was unloaded into a hopper
holding some 250 pounds-this being weighed and carried into the car. To load a
car meant hard work and lame backs. Flour was generally hauled from LeMars
though there was an old fashioned Dutch windmill at Orange City where wheat was
ground. This quaint structure stood just east of what are now the Academy
grounds. If I am not mistaken the materials were brought from the Netherlands.
Nearly every schoolboy has seen a picture of the famous windmill at Potsdam
where the German Emperor has his winter residence. Well the old Orange City
Grist and Flour mill was externally, at least, the exact counterpart of that
famous structure. It was afterwards dismantled but deserved a better fate. It
should have been preserved as the one landmark typically national of the early
settlers and a park laid out around it where Old Settler's picnics and other
commemorative celebrations could have been held. When in 1881 the Northwestern
road was built it was our-the small boy's-regret that the raisins and prunes and
cookies and candles shipped to Orange City no longer came here for it had long
been our privilege to help ourselves to stuff going to Orange City so long as we
did not take anything belonging to our home people. Before 1881 our railroad
service was poor enough in summer and irregular in winter. I remember how there
was only one train a day and it remained long enough so the crew could get our
and play base ball with the town people. In winter there would often be no train
service for a week or longer. I remember the winter of 1881 when it began to
snow on the fifteenth of October and the snow banks were piled so high that
instead of making paths, I made two tunnels, one to the barn and the other to my
brother-in-law's house. There was a snow bank extending from the Dutch Church
across the railroad track. One night when there had been no train for several
days the town people were awakened by a whistle and as many people as could went
down the line to near Seney where a freight was trying to plough through the
snowdrifts. The following day I watched them for several hours as they worked in
the cut just north of the river. It took more than twenty-four hours to go from
Seney to Hospers-A distance of twenty miles. Fuel was scarce that winter and
many people burned corn and even hay. One day when a train was temporarily
stalled in the yards here the farmers came and unloaded a car of coal destined
for some other town. They had it weighed and paid for it, but no doubt some
other village along the line wondered what had become of its fuel. I was about
eight years old before hard coal was brought into this part of the county.
Before that time soft coal and corn and cobs and hay had been our fuel. To the
present generation it may seem strange that the people burned hay and many will
wonder how a stove fire could be kept burning with such light combustible stuff.
Long slough grass was taken, which by means of a hook and wheel was twisted into
bundles the size of stove wood and I have seen some that were almost solid.
Early in 1881 the people desired to incorporate the
village and change its name to something simpler than East Orange. Alexander
Beach headed the petition asking it to be changed to Wilfred, the name of his
son, the first child born in the town. John Meyer had another petition asking
that the name be changed to Delft. A meeting was finally held in the postoffice
when Dr. Owens looking over a postal guide, remarked that there was no Alton in
Iowa. This name was agreed to by both factions and the newly incorporated town
was so called.
In the fall of 1882 some Dutch ministers and a few
business men came together and founded the Northwestern Academy. As originally
planned it was to be built on some site midway between Orange City and Alton.
The following year Henry Hospers donated a piece of ground on the outskirts of
Orange City and that has remained the location of the academy to the present day
save a temporary removal to the Orange City skating rink. Alton's delegation to
the academy that first year consisted of five boys-Sjoerd Mening, Gerrit Ruisch,
Thomas Kooreman, William Warnshuis and the writer. Of these but one finished the
course. We walked up every morning and back every noon. Our number during those
four years gradually became less-so that for more than a year in wet weather and
dry, hot and cold-often ploughing through snow up to my waist I walked the weary
way alone-developing a pair of calves out of all proportion to my intellect. In
1887 I left Sioux County to go off to college-the first Alton boy to seek a
higher education away from home. Since then many boys and girls from Alton and
the surrounding country have gone to the academy and then off to different
schools. And the academy, too has prospered both in number of students and
financially until now it is, perhaps, the most cherished heritage of the
Hollanders of Sioux County.
Fourteen years later I returned to Alton. What a
change! The entire county was under cultivation. Land values had risen from ten
to seventy-five dollars an acre. Beautiful homes and churches had been built in
the village and spacious barns and substantial houses on the farms. Groves of
trees had sprung up where in the early days there was one vast stretch of
prairie. There had been a change as by the touch of Aladdin's lamp-transforming
the whole into the Garden of the Lord.
Often as I ride through the country and behold this
fertile valley of the Floyd, whose hillsides are covered with grain and whose
bottoms thousands of cattle browse, my memory reverts to when I was a boy and
again I play out on the open prairie and hunt the wild bird nests or pick the
modest bluebells or carry the lunch to haymakers and it is only by an effort
that I realize that these changes have come about during the short span of my
life-for I am still a young man, being several years younger than my father was
when he-a young man-came as one of the first pioneers to this part of Sioux
County.
CHARLES BARNETTE WOLF,
PUBLISHER
The Alton Democrat
has been published at Alton, Iowa for over a quarter of a century. It is
democratic in politics, but, despite the fact that Sioux County is largely
republican, the Democrat has for years had the largest bona fide subscription
list of any paper in the county. It has been declared official county paper by
the board of supervisors year after year without a break. It is all home print,
and is issued every Friday afternoon under date of Saturday.
CHARLES BARNETTE WOLF, Publisher
Fifteen thousand people read the Alton
Democrat fifty-two times a year. As an advertising medium it has no peer.
Advertising and subscription rates and sample copies will be sent on request. In
connection with the Democrat publishing plant is one of the finest commercial
printing establishments in the west, where job work of all kinds is done
promptly and artistically.
ST. MARY'S CONGREGATION
Very Rev. F. J. Brune
Born December 9, 1856, in Neuenkirchen,
Oldenburg, Germany; came to Iowa april 12, 1870; ordained priest July 14, 1884,
at Dubuque, Iowa; pastor of St. Mary's since October 4, 1894.
VERY REV. F. J. BRUNE
The beginning of the now flourishing St.
Mary's congregation dates back to the year 1870. Early in that year eighteen
"prairie schooners" left Jackson County, Iowa, to cross the plains and
sloughs of the Hawkeye state and establish new homes in the "wild
west." May 20th Sioux County was reached. Among…..
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