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Growing up on a farm on the Great Plains during the depression is not an easy thing to do. The tough conditions and harsh economic climate of the time made it very difficult to succeed. I was able to talk with someone who grew up in this atmoshpere. Last Monday I was able to talk to Wynette Strubbe. I met her because she is a friend of my Grandmothers and they both now reside in Pelican Rapids, MN. That is not, however, where she started out. I am going to talk about Mrs. Strubbe's story about growing up on the plains.

First, I will must share a little bit about Mrs. Strubbe's parents and how they came to the plains. Her father and mother were both from Carver county, MN. Her father attended Gustavus Adolphis college and then started teaching back in Carver county. That is when he met his wife and they got married. Mrs. Strubbe's father than stopped teaching and bought a farm in Miner county, SD. According to the book Prairie Tamers of Miner County written by the South Dakota Federal Writers Project, the majority of settlers in this region were Norwegians in the northeast and Germans in the south. Mrs. Strubbe is 100% Swedish, but her parents didn't arrive in Miner county until sometime during the 1910's. Her parents than started their family.

Mrs. Strubbe was born October 13, 1925. She was the eighth child out of ten. She was born in a back bedroom of the farmhouse, and was delivered by a neighbor lady. Mrs. Strubbe was almost three years old when her oldest brother, Gene, died at the age of seventeen. He had developed a case of influenza and was also injured in an accident while working on a neighbors farm. The influenza got worse and the combination of the two were too much for him to overcome. The family soon suffered another accident. Mrs. Stubbe's father took a fall and suffered a serious injury. He was never again able to do the amount of physical labor that he had before the accident. The rest of the family banded together and were able to pick up the work.

The Melberg family (Mrs. Strubbe's maiden name) was what author Michael Johnston Grant called borderline farmers in his book Down and Out on the Family Farm. These are"aspiring farmers on the borderline between poverty and economic security." Grant talks about some of the same things that Mrs. Strubbe did. For example, when she was six years old the bank sold the farm because there was a banker that had been helping them, but he died and another banker wasn't as generous. The family landed on their feet,however, and rented some farmland outside of the city of Alberta, MN.

There were plenty of incidents on the new farm as well. Soon after moving in Mrs. Strubbe's older sister Lorraine got Scarlet Fever. She remembers how they had to fumigate the house to prevent others from getting sick. She does have happy memories of this place as well. She loved when fall came because her family and some of the neighbors would all get together and make sorghum molasses. The process involved pressing the juices from sugar cane and then cooking it over a fire all day until its thick like molasses.

Mrs. Strubbe also asked me about this class and what we were doing for the class. When I was talking I mentioned the Webb book and I thought she would be interested to know what Webb thought of women on the plains. This was not a popular sentiment with her and she told me a story of a female teacher named Mary Doyle that she had in MN. This teacher used to like to put on some old boxing gloves and would actually spar with some of the older boys in the class. According to Mrs. Strubbe she won her fair share of them as well. Mrs. Strubbe did not agree with Webb. After hearing about all the hard work she used to do at a young age on the farm, I would have to agree with her.

Mrs. Strubbe than moved again. This time it was only a few miles away. Her family had a small cattle herd on an area of land that they shared with two other families herds. She remembers always having to separate them out and move them. She recalls the monotonous days of herding cattle. She was always having to chase them around. There was a clover field on the farm and she said that if cows would eat too much of that they would bloat and die. There was a special knife that they could use to release the gas if they caught it in time. They also had trouble with one of their neighbors who once took a couple of their cows that had gotten out of the pasture. He refused to give them back unless he was paid a dollar for each one. Mrs. Strubbe said that this problem ended when her older brother picked up a hammer and scared the man into giving the cows back.

I asked her what animals they had on the farm. She said that they had a few horses, cows, a bull, chickens, turkeys, and several sheep. She also said that since her older brothers did the farming that she and her sisters got the responsibility of taking care of the animals. Mrs. Strubbe explained to me all of the work involved in this and it never seemed to end. She also helped in the fields when the animals were taken care of. She said this included planting, cultivating, swathing, plowing, and making hay.

Mrs. Strubbe's father died when she got older. He died of tuberculosis. She remembers how the family was ostracized by the community because of it. This disease was not entirely uncommon during this time. According to Mathew Broccoli of e-notes.com the mortality rate of tuberculosis around this time was 70 in 100,000. If you work that out, at today's population, it means that in Fargo about 60 people would die of tuberculosis every year if it were during the 1930's. Mrs. Strubbe stayed on the farm until she got married and moved to a nearby farm and started her own family.

I was impressed at how tough it was for Mrs. Strubbe to grow up on the plains at this time. After learning more about the borderline farmers that Grant talked about I saw that this was similar to what was going on throughout the plains. People were struggling to get through the depression and dealing with this stuff every day. Whether it be illness or accidents there was a lot of ways to get hurt on the plains. Mrs. Strubbe put a face to the problems that we read about during the depression. It is different hearing from a person who was actually there and has stories to tell.

Bibliography:

Broccoli, Mathew J. The Great White Plague-Tuberculosis Before the Age of Antibiotics. (Jan. 1995). http://www.e-notes.com/1930-medicine-health-american-decades/great-white-plague-tuberculosis-before-age (accessed Oct. 21, 2008).

Grant, Michael J. Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945. University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

South Dakota Federal Writers Project. Prairie Tamers of Miner County. SD: Carthage Public Library Board, 1939. http://ftp.rootsweb.ancestry.com/pub/usgenweb/sd/miner/prairie.txt(accessed Oct. 21, 2008).

Mitch Tommerdahl