Have you ever sat and thought about your dream house? Do you have your dream house?

I remember seeing this big white house with a wrap-around porch by my great-grandparents’ house. I have always wanted my dream house to have a wrap-around porch. I could sit on the east side to watch the sunrise and the west side to catch the sunset. For the longest time, that is the only thing I thought about my house would have. Never did I think about the other items in the home.

Now my husband and I are looking into buying our first home. We moved to his hometown almost two years ago. We have been renting, and I feel it is time to get our own home. I am researching about everything we need to know and do beforehand. There is so much to do. Right now, my husband and I are writing down what we need versus wants in our new home. We need to know how many bedrooms (at least 3) and bathrooms (2). Most things are more wants than needs. I do not want to be too picky. I want out of our apartment.

While thinking about our new home, I have been working on retyping a story my Great Aunt (my dad’s mother’s sister) Eva wrote. I learned some more about my grandma through my great aunt’s experiences. This way, I get a picture of where my grandma grew up. Eva was the youngest of nine children. My grandma, Pauline, was a few years older than Eva, with one brother in between. One time I heard people had large families, mainly to help in the fields or around the house. She had three sisters and five brothers. Here is a tiny section of Eva’s story about their home.

My Story

by Eva Schwarz Haugen Neikirk Edited by Cora Pruim

“We lived on a farm three miles southwest of the small town of Hazen, North Dakota. There were no large towns nearby.

Our farm was unique in that it sat at the foot of a hillside. To the south of the farm, extending for about two miles, was a valley between some rather tall, sloping hills at the beginning of the valley, at the southernmost part, were “springs,” where water oozed out of the ground. The water ran northward, just slightly downward, creating a brook that ran through our farmyard, heading towards the Knife river about two miles to the north…

The cow barn, horse barn, hen house, machine shed, and various other buildings, as well as a “hay fence,” (That was a fenced yard with haystacks in it. We often used the haystacks to slide down on, usually without permission!), were on one side of the brook. On the other side were the house, garages, and a summer kitchen. The summer kitchen was a two-room house used in the summer to cook and serve meals, do canning and laundry to keep the main house cooler. There was also a smokehouse on that side of the brook. We did our butchering, then smoked the hams and sausages in the smokehouse…

There was a large fenced yard at the side and back of the house, later on also in the front with lots of yellow tea roses, as I recall. In the side yard were chokecherry and wild plum trees. At first, we used part of this area for a garden. There was a hedge of gooseberry and currant bushes and lots of rhubarb and mint. Closest to the house, we had ornamental trees such as lilacs and honeysuckle. In the back of the house was a root cellar. We stored root vegetables such as carrots, red beets, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes there.

Our house had five rooms: two bedrooms, one for the “boys” and one for the girls. A large kitchen, a large dining room, and a large “front room,” a cellar was beneath the front room, and an outdoor stairwell reached it. Later on, the basement was as big as the three large rooms. We built an indoor stairwell. At that time, We installed a furnace. An outdoor staircase initially reached an unfinished upstairs over the three large rooms. Later on, we put the stairs indoors. We never finished the “upstairs”; we used it for storage. The bedrooms, which initially were used by my mother and father to live in, could not accommodate an upper floor too well.   

The front room was my mother’s domain. I think she liked houseplants and my father had made a long table which she placed in front of two large south windows. She loaded it with plants, and I remember plants in other rooms perched and hung here and there. There was a lovely table called a “fern table.” It rarely held plants but was always graced with a special lamp with a green shade. It was a kerosene lamp that had a mantle that gave a lot of light. We only used this lamp for company. [Eva’s daughter] became the owner of the fern table. We used our front room for company and overflow sleeping quarters. It had a pump organ, an organ that needed to be pumped with your feet to play it. My oldest brother, Emil, could play it well. He played by ear, which means he heard a melody, then he could play it without music. He could play the harmonica the same way. Pauline later learned to play using musical notes. There was other furniture, but these items I mentioned made the greatest impression on me and the fact that friends enjoyed exchanging “Roots” and “starters” to add to their houseplant collection. We had a most interesting variety at all times.

Our dining room did justice to its name. A long table stood in front of two north windows, overlooking the trees and bushes. The chairs were a varied sort. The envy of today’s Tea Room decorator! Little do they know how much we longed for a matched set. Until I was five years old, eleven people were at this table for each meal- nine siblings and my mother and father. I don’t remember much about so many at the table. What I do remember is our devotion to God. Every morning after breakfast, my father (later my mother) would read a portion of scripture and explain it, then we’d sing a hymn and pray, always ending with the Lord’s prayer. We always said grace before meals, and we gave thanks after meals. My parents instilled in us that only animals ate without doing this. We had a large heater, a coal heater, placed in the dining room in the winter. It had footrests around the side and back…

Before we went to bed, my mother would read bible stories and teach us to pray as we sat around the stove and kept toasty warm. Then we were taught to kneel at our bedside and pray individually. Another piece of furniture that I recall in the dining room was two china cabinets. ([Eva’s nephew and his wife] have one of these which they refinished, and it is beautiful). Then there was my mother’s sewing machine, a Singer. We had a second sewing machine, which Mother housed in the “boys” bedroom. It may have been a Franklin. They were both operated by a foot pedal. The front room and the “boys” bedroom also sported coal heaters, but much smaller than that in the dining room.

The kitchen had a large cook-stove that burned wood and coal. It had four burners, a large oven, two warming ovens, and a reservoir. Warming ovens were attached to the stove, and the reservoir was on the right-hand side of it. As we used the stove, water was kept warm. Everyone used the water for dish-washing and other miscellaneous uses. A large teakettle always sat on a burner with hot water, and it was added to the reservoir water when washing dishes as that needed to be hot. In the front, beside the oven, was a small door that opened up to the ash drawer. Ashes from the wood and coal needed a place to go as they burned. The ashes accumulated and needed a “shaker,” we put inside the door to shake ash off the grate into the ashtray to give air space to help burn more efficiently. A chimney, which was only about two or three feet wide and that deep, was on the reservoir side of the stove. A six-inch stove pipe went into the chimney from the stove. The chimney enclosed under the pipes, and we made the space into a cabinet. The lowest part of the cabinet had a larger area.

We used this space for the “Slop pail,” where we kept scraps of food and used dishwater. We used the slop pail later to feed the pigs. (Ugh! Is this what the prodigal son ate when he ran out of money!) On the left side of the cook-stove, the family kept a large wooden box for wood to burn, and two coal buckets stood nearby as the bucket [Eva’s son and daughter-in-law] have sitting on their hearth. Once a week, the stove burners had to be cleaned with stove black then polished until a white cloth could be wiped over it and stay white. Cleaning the stove often became my job, and hauled out the ashes and hauling in wood, coal, and water.

A large table was in the kitchen, but this was used instead of a countertop, not for meals. There were no built-in cabinets, only a sizeable pantry-like cabinet, and a Hoosier cabinet. That cabinet had a small counter which always held an enameled bucket with our drinking water. A sink built into a stand stood nearby. It contained a basin in which we washed hands, and then we poured the water down the drain into a bucket. This bucket needed to be dumped when it was full; otherwise, a floor washing was in order.    The kitchen and dining floors had to be swept at least once a day, if not after each meal. Every Saturday was a cleaning day. Someone washed the floor in every room, on hands and knees, and everything was dusted. Then there was Spring and Fall house cleaning when we cleaned everything, ceilings, walls, tops of cabinets, and insides of cabinets. Dust was a problem in North Dakota, the soil in this area was sandy, and it was always windy, it seemed. Furthermore, windows and doors were not made as airtight as now…

The bedrooms did not have built-in closets but had wardrobes to hang clothes. They are popular nowadays to use as gun cabinets and bookcases. There were dresses in every room and miscellaneous end tables…

Our outhouse served as the bathroom. At night, and especially in cold weather, we used chamber pots. These were usually an enameled pot like a bucket with a lid on it. In the mornings, it was often my job to dump them and wash them. Homemade soap was made for laundry and other washing.

At this time, there was no electricity in North Dakota in the area where we lived. That didn’t come until the 1940’s when rural electrification became available. For lighting, we used lamps and lanterns with kerosene. We used the lanterns outdoors because they had a handle to carry them, and they were enclosed for safety. One of my chores was filling lamps and lanterns with kerosene, cleaning the chimney, and trimming the wicks. The lamps had a bowl-like reservoir that held the kerosene. On top of this was a simple mechanism with which the wick could be turned up and down. The mechanism had prongs to hole the lamp chimney. If the wick were too high, the chimney would get smoked. If we trimmed the wick properly, it would produce the best flame. Imagine living with computers, microwaves, television, VCR’s and the myriad other things we can enjoy with electricity.¹“

As I read her recollection, I feel greedy for some of the things I want or need. My husband and I are putting a patio/deck on our list for sure. The deck might not be the one that I have always pictured at first. I might have to build one to my liking. I know that I will be happy with whatever we decide on, but I would love to have some land or yard, a garage, a decent sized kitchen, a formal living room, a dishwasher, a patio/deck, a pantry, and a separate laundry room. Eva talked about not having electricity until she was in college! I wouldn’t be able to write this blog for you to read without electricity. There are so many things that we take for granted that people did not have in the 1920s.

You can learn a lot from little stories or letters written by your ancestors. I knew that my dad had broken his leg when he was little. I didn’t know exactly when, just a time frame. There was a few pictures of my dad when he was in the hospital. He could not remember exactly when that was, neither could his sister. I recently came upon a letter my grandma wrote to her sister Eva a year afterward. In this letter, she wrote about the Shrine circus being in town that weekend. My dad wanted to go to the circus since he was in the hospital the year before with a broken leg. Also, she wrote that in two weeks, it would be a year since the accident. She had dated the letter, so that gave me a rough date on when the accident happened.²

If you can ask your grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents to tell you or write down the stories of their childhood, do it! You can learn so much. I’m trying to get my parents to write their stories. My mom has told me many crazy things, like what she and her brothers did to my aunt. They held her down and fed her Tootsie Rolls while telling her it was cat poop. You can find many questions to ask them if that is how you want to go about it. Remember to ask open-ended questions. Here are a few questions you can ask:

• How did the Great Depression affect the family?
• What did you do for recreation?
• How did you feel at the time about the New Deal?
• What do you remember about Grandpa George?
• What were some typical medical practices when you were a young girl?

Have a nice time just listening. Sometimes they love you just listening to them reminisce.

1. Eva Schwarz Haugen Neikirk, Handwritten story to descendants, August 2003. [The original handwritten story is in the possession of Tim Haugen, Gahanna, Ohio. Story used with permission. Eva was living in Gahanna, Ohio when the story was written. She was 77 years old, alert, and physically active.]
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2. Pauline Schwarz Brinkmeyer, Letter to Eva Neikirk, 2 April 1965. {The original handwritten letter is in the possession of Tim Haugen, Gahanna, Ohio. Letter used with permission. Pauline was 44 years old, alert and active.}
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