By AL FREELAND

Andrew was born in southwestern Norway. What else did a person do in Southwestern Norway but fish or farm – period! He was born in a little town of Bryne – today still a little town of about 500 people. Outside of the town is a little wooden church called Time (pronounce Teem’ a) Lutheran. I was there about 10 years ago and saw the baptismal font he was baptized in, and the pews that he sat in, and the graveyard his ancestors were buried in. The thread of time and history and ancestry is small, but strong. I felt pulled there and could feel the connections the “thread” was pulling. The following is the Time “Crest” or “Coat of Arms”. (click on the head title to read on)

Andrew grew up helping his father plant crops at a very early age. When he was 4 years old, he was not only milking cows, picking eggs from under the mother hens, and broadcasting oats and barley in the fields; he was also planting the vegetable gardens, tending the flower gardens that are prolific in Norway and pruning the fruit trees and vines. You have to understand that his father Andreas was living on the family farm, which he inherited from his father Jon.

This part of Norway was much like Iowa and Minnesota in that it was the only part that had good black soil, flat land, and farmers. Only about 3% of the entire country of Norway has farmable land. The farmers there squeaked the maximum farm land out of the hilly terrain, developing terraced fields to work their way up the mountains as much as humanly possible. Their special farming horses, Fjellhester, we specially bred with short strong legs to traverse the steeped mountain sides. The southern land was the flattest of the entire country, and cultivated a natural liking for Minnesota and Iowa due to the climate and the terrain.

The coastal towns were comprised mainly of fishermen, but a further inland the rule was that you farmed, and that was it. You learned about manure and what you did with it. You learned to drive the teams of Fjellhester (mountain horses) to pull the plow, harrow and gleaners. You learned about hay and barns and seed and trade and animal coops and neighbors. You learned that you worked from sun up to sun down 6 days a week and on Sunday, you rested, except for the required tending of the livestock. You soon learned that God intended Sunday to rest or else you would be so exhausted you would collapse and die young, which is exactly what Andrew’s father did. Andreas died young. So young that he left an 8 year old boy, Andrew, with a lot of wisdom about the earth, seed, and land management, but crying for a Dad that he loved but would never see this side of heaven!

Andrew had no legal right to the land that his father had farmed. It was unfortunately willed back to his uncle when Jon died, due to some bad debt Jon had incurred (rumored that he had bet his small savings and a lean on the farm) on a pony race to make enough to pay off the farm and send his son Andrew to church school – making him the first child in the family to possible go on to school or the seminary, and most importantly to get off the farm. Andreas died and his wife Maria and the rest of the children had to decide what they would do with their lives and do it quickly.

Maria had heard of beautiful, rich farm land that was practically free if you merely tilled the soil and stayed on the land for the proscribed time period in America. She had a brother that had already move to Slater, Iowa, and he had invited her to come over with the kids to the new “land of opportunity” as they were calling America in 1888. She signed what little ownership she had in the farm to her brother, and took the kroner and bought the steamer ticket from Stavanger to Canada, then to Slater, Iowa via train from Ontario to New York and then to Iowa.

The boat trip experience was a rough one for Andrew. He saw over 1/3 the crew die and many more close to death including himself. When he landed in Ontario he literally kissed the ground and decided at that time that he knew exactly why he never want to fish, and ONLY want to till the ground. Eight years has inculcated a love for the smell of the black dirt, the sound of the Peewit’s call, and the feel of plant fronds and chicken feathers into his memory.

The train ride to New York was interesting, but it was only the transition to Iowa that he longed for. They finally arrived in the train station in Polk City in a pouring rain, during which time Maria’s brother Sven picked them up and took them to Slater, Iowa to live.

Andrew loved his new life. His mother worked as a house keeper for a wealthy Norwegian couple in town, and her brother hired the kids out to farmers in the area to help with the crops, and keep the kids in food, clothing, education, and church schooling until they reached the legal age of 14. Andrew stayed with the Aplands near Cambridge, Iowa – only about 10 miles from his mother. They would see each other on the weekends and would stay at each other’s houses to keep in touch.

Andrew learned about the beautiful black soil in Iowa that smelled like “home” back in Norway. He learned to plant corn and beans, rotate crops, use cow, chicken and horse manure to fertilize the crops, select the correct seeds, and drain and terrace the land for optimum use and growth. Keep in mind that the major thrust at that time was to take the homesteaded land and tile the swamps and plant crops, staying on the land long enough to stake a permanent claim to the land for a future homestead or to sell. The stories of hand tiling the swamp land with red clay tile, killing snakes as tall as the young Andrew, and the sweat and toil from early to late every day were the stories I grew up with as a child.

It wasn’t too many years until he had saved up enough money to pay for some homesteaded land from the Aplands, and marry the daughter of the family he was staying with, Anna Apland. The full story of their romance and marriage, the wedding party, and where they stayed initially is up for folklore at this time – no true facts exist as far as I know.

He built a house that was literally from the Sear’s catalog. It came by train, and he hired some local Norwegian craftsmen to come by to erect the building, the barn, and the outbuilding (including a garage that would later be converted into a small house where his future son Elden and his wife Esta would live).

Now we come back to the farming, the flower gardens, the vegetable gardens, the peach trees, the plum trees, the gooseberry and current bushes, the rhubarb, the cherry and shade trees – all of which he planted and grew in abundance around his farmstead. Here is what I remember.

I would go to grandpa’s house as a child would drive into the farmstead with barn, outbuildings, and windmill straight ahead, the small building to the right that building Elden and Esta lived in occasionally, and on the left was the farm house. Early in life I remember when there was no running water in the house, at least no indoor bathroom. I do remember when my Dad installed plumbing and the inside toilet. The 1.5 acres vegetable garden was to the east of the farmhouse. To the south was the cistern where all the gutter water would drain into – buried in the ground was a huge concrete block retaining basin with a cover on top that looked a bit like a manhole. There was a manual pump on it to pump water into a bucket. There was also a pipe running underground with a spigot in the basement so water could be gotten from the cistern in the cold weather as well. There was another hand pump on a cement cap that brought up fresh well water. The windmill in the driveway also pumped water for the house and outbuildings. I remember how much mineral and iron was in the water, so much that the water tasted like blood. Andrew always claimed that his kids teeth were always so strong and cavity free because of all the minerals in the water that they grew up drinking.

On the south side of the homestead was an orchard of fruit trees. The following was the range of vegetation and farming information that I can remember about the landscaping of the farm:

Cherry trees – they sold cherries to raise money

Apple trees – canned and kept cool throughout the year in the basement

Plumbs – wild, purple plumbs there and along the creek were great to eat

Apricots – a few trees but not many

Huge watermelon, muskmelon, and pumpkin gardens were always hidden in the middle of the corn fields so people would not steal the produce – local fun was for kids to steal these and throw them on the town streets at Halloween

The 120 acre farm came with a creek running through the southern part of the farm. Crops in the field at that time were only corn, beans, oats (yielding oats and straw), and alfalfa. After harvesting the oats, the stalk and chaff was baled and kept in the haymow – a summer job for us kids every summer – hot, sticky, and miserable. This together with hoeing stray corn stalks out of the beans and cleaning out the livestock barns (pitching manure) and spreading it on the fields from a tractor pulled manure spreader was a mainstay of money for the summer for all of use kids.

The following was typical garden produce from the farm:

Potatoes – and additional 0.1 acres in Potatoes. Blackberry bushes – to have then propagate you would stick the top ends of the bushes into the ground and they would grow more bushes next year. Raspberry bushes – method of propagating the same as the Blackberry. Peas. Beans. Carrots. Beets. Cabbage. Lettuce.

Most of the vegetables were kept in basement – some kept in well. Grandpa would put some of the vegetables in Red Wind pottery crocks filled with sand. Potatoes would be kept in 50 lb gunny sacks.

Homemade sauerkraut made with sliced cabbage, fermented into big Redwing crocks.

Hundreds of chickens were hatched in incubators, raised for eggs and meat. We would pick the eggs and place them in plastic coated wire baskets. These were dipped in water to clean the eggs and then put in 30 dozen cartons and taken to town and traded for food,

No hatching eggs raised on Andrew’s farm – Kermit Freeland, his son, did that in the old adjoining Apland farmstead next door.

Canned vegetables, canned fruit and some canned beef were a mainstay for the family. No one bought any vegetables and fruit then – you always raised your own, canned or stored in the basement.

The “killing and scalding and plucking and cleaning chicken day” was a real event for the family. Everyone would get together and Dad and I would (at 5am) go gather the chickens from their roosts. Dad would use a hook made out of #9 wire to hook the chickens by the legs and hand them to me. I would hang them upside down and they then quit flopping. Eventually I would hand them to Dad, and he would cut their heads off – flop and bleed. I would gather up the dead carcasses, and we then proceeded to dip them in boiling tubs of water, pluck off feathers, singe off little feathers over a corn cob fire, and then gut and cut them up.

Some ducks were raised as well, but not too many. A funny thing that most people do not realize is that you can used duck feathers for bedding. You grab the ducks, put their head under arm and plucked breast feathers while alive. You then let the ducks go and then they grow more feathers again to be used for feather pillow and mattress

Grandpa had an outside toilet that was used until the house had water plumbed inside as I mentioned earlier. I remember that Andrew planted sunflowers around it to camouflage it from sight. By the toilet were rhubarb, currant bushes, and gooseberry bushes as well.

I nearly forget one of the most important parts of my “landscaping Andrew Freeland”!!! The flowers!!! His life was filled with flower gardens, flower beds, a house filled with Violets. Here is the story in detail:

1. When you pulled into the front drive into the barnyard, you would park by the windmill. You would walk toward the house and go through the front gate that surrounded the house and yard. I am not sure what the purpose of the fence. I could never understand that. I think maybe it was the fact that they originally had sheep or goat in the front yard to eat the grass down and so they would not escape (like at Kermit’s farm)? In any case, you would go through the front gate and immediately to the right was an enormous flower garden. As well as rows of flowers around the inside perimeter of the fence, around the garden and fruit trees. Flowers, flowers everywhere!!! I can not today understand the amount of time in planting, watering, weeding and re-planting that must have been necessary to keep these PERFECTLY manicured gardens in tack. If you were to see these today, you would call the perennial gardens made by a “master gardener”! Back then, it was just Grandpa’s farmyard! The immediate flower garden to the right is my main point at this time. My task in the fall was to go gather all the flowers seed pods and keep them separate and bring them to Grandpa. He would then plant them next spring. What a FANTASTIC panoply of color. I am doing such a poor job of saying how fantastic the beauty of this was!!!!
2. The house and the 100’s of pots of violets throughout the house, plus other potted plants, plus fall plants that were brought in the house for the winter. EVERYWHERE!
3. Grandpa boiling soil on the soil to kill the bugs. The smell of cooked soil is wonderful – how many of you would know that?
4. Flower gardens surrounding the house – snowballs, iris’s, daffodils, petunias, and many, many more.

Andrew went from a rocky land in Norway as young farmer’s helper to a successful farmer in Cambridge, Iowa. What a wonderful transition and opportunity for the Norwegian immigrant. Do keep in mind that this life was not a trouble free, worry free life. Imagine coming to a foreign land at 8 years old, learning a new language, no father, lent out immediate to farmers to work like a grownup on the land, sticking out your neck to homestead and farm, live through some crazy historical times (WWI, the great Depression, WWII, Korean War, etc), starting from nothing, forging a living through the great depression, raise the family to be successful farmers and teachers, and carpenters and just plain salt of the earth!!! Thanks Grandpa for doing that. It has yielded hundreds of people that have ended up continuing the Norwegian legacy of perseverance, Viking courage and fortitude, and a faith in our Lord Jesus.