Creating Vesterheim’s Open Air Division An Interview with Darrell Henning
Darrell Henning at work in the MikkelsonSkree Blacksmith Shop. Photo by Al Ettledorf. Vol. 4, No. 1 2006
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Charlie Langton: Maybe you could give some background about when you came, how the idea of Vesterheim’s Open Air Division got started, and how we acquired these buildings. Darrell Henning: Ok. Well, oh goodness, how far back do I go? Should I go back to the 1950s, when I used to play in the museum? That was when it cost a nickel and Inga Norstog was the director. And on the way home from school we would occasionally stop in, pay our nickel, and just marvel at the wondrous things that were in there, and I suppose that’s where I got my interest in museums, in this museum. And then I began here as curator in 1971—I’ll skip over a lot of stuff that isn’t relevant. But I worked out on Long Island, New York, in the beginning stages of what was to be quite an extensive open-air museum called Old Bethpage Village. When I arrived on Long Island in, I think it was, 1965 or 1966, the open-air museum at Old Bethpage Village was in its really formative stages. And when I left five years later, we had moved quite a number of buildings and restored the farmstead and a number of things, so I suppose you could say I was sort of primed for the open-air museum concept when I arrived in Decorah as curator of Vesterheim. C: So with Old Bethpage Village starting in the 1960s, it’s not really correct to claim that Vesterheim pioneered the open-air concept in America? D: Oh, yes, it is. Vesterheim pioneered its open-air section by moving the Egge House in 1913. And then by adding buildings to it. Very often Henry Ford is given credit for the openair museum concept, but his efforts didn’t really begin until the 1920s in this country. So Vesterheim was quite a bit ahead of that, following closely on the heels of the developments at Skansen in Stockholm, Sweden, and Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo, Norway. C: I didn’t mean to interrupt you then; I was just confused. Now we’re back to the 1970s and you came here... D: In the 1970s when I came here, my first assignment, if you will, was to restore and furnish with exhibits the PainterBernatz Stone Mill. I arrived in March 1970—the previous summer Marion Nelson and probably Steve Johnson and some other people had gotten the Decorah Fire Department in the mill to clean it out. They literally hosed it out. I was presented with the challenge of restoring the building and renovating it for exhibits. Marion had secured a generous donation from the Dahl family in La Crosse, Wisconsin. That was my budget. So the process began. I drew the building, all the details, so those are on record—anything I covered up or changed is at least filed away on the drawings. I removed a little brick addition, restored the addition over the mill race, determined a restoration period for the building... C: Which was? D: Right around 1910. That was not long after the Bernatz family had taken over the operation of the mill and had put in the cement raceway right in front of it. Rather than remove that, we decided to incorporate that into the restoration and, 40
Darrell Henning working on the Carl Anton Carlsborg House, “Carl’s Castle,” in the Painter-Bernatz Stone Mill.
of course, it’s still there. So in appearance the building is roughly 1910-1913. There had been a lot of changes throughout the years. I believe the mill was originally built about 1851 and had a different roofline completely and different equipment in it. So it really made no sense to try to restore it back to its original. The idea wasn’t to have a restored grist mill, but to have a building that would house our exhibits of pioneer industry. C: Now it’s the museum’s Pioneer Industries space, and that is what it was initially intended for? D: Yeah. We acquired a number of pieces of machinery for the museum during that time. The binder we acquired. The kubberulle was, of course, in the museum collection and that was moved to the mill. We acquired the corn crib. Mostly, the exhibits were constructed around smaller items that we had. We had the harrow. We had the sled. We actually kept, I think, two things that were in the mill when we acquired it —the scale, and I believe that there is a safe—mainly because I couldn’t get them out of there. They’re right where we found them. Seems to me there were a few other things that had been stored at Luther College. Other things, like backdrop mate-rial, the logs, the frame buildings and whatnot, were acquired for the purpose of exhibition. Then a lot of the smaller tools and hand tools were in the collection. There’s blacksmith shop material on the second floor. The blacksmith tools w ere all in the collection, including the anvil and a bunch of things made by a Lars Slinde, who brought them when he came to America. Can you imagine bringing your
anvil? It took two of us to carry it up the stairs. Also the lathe was a piece that was Vesterheim brought by immigrants and that was already in the collection as well. C: Do you think they brought things like anvils and millstones because they thought they couldn’t get them here in America? D: Yeah, basically. The story about a man who brought his lathe, and I have no reason to doubt this, is that, on the way over here on the sailing ship, the ship floundered and that the passengers were told to fling everything over the side to save the ship and their lives and everything, and he refused to throw his lathe over the side of the ship because he knew if he did that, he would starve in America. He couldn’t make a living without his tools. I think that’s a very telling story. It’s humorous now, but it also explains their concept of America. We heard that a man brought his millstones because he’d been told there were no stones in America. To a Norwegian, my god, you know, a farmer, that would be heaven on earth, but how is he going to grind his grain? So he had to bring his millstones. Actually, I don’t think that story is completely factual, because I think he was here and went back to Norway and got millstones and came back. But people brought everything. When I was researching another exhibit, there was a man who brought a wagon. And we know for a fact that there were more than one or two vehicles brought. People just disassembled them and brought them, because how are you going to get along without them? People brought everything. They brought cast-iron griddles; they brought millstones; they brought their anvils. Just a whole host of stuff, and you wonder how in the world they managed it. Just imagine filling one of those trunks. One or two of those is enough to break your back. C: Just empty. D: Yeah, just empty. ‘Fill them up and let’s go, Olga.’ Once we decided what needed to be done on the mill, one of the first contractors that I hired was Roy Coffeen. I think Roy Coffeen had been involved in actually building or pouring the cement slab that we kept, which was from 1913 or so. It was one of the first jobs he had when he came to Decorah. When I hired him, it was one of the last jobs he did as a contractor. It was kind of fun to deal with that, and dealing with almost first-person history. C: This was all still in 1971? D: No, this was over a period of a year or two following that. It wasn’t all done in 1971. I want to say just a little bit more on the mill, because we had three floors of exhibits and we started with the first floor and moved on to the second floor, which we decided was to be about building, handcrafts, that sort of thing—carpentry. Actually, we moved two build-ings that went into the second floor. One of them was the Hogenson barn, which was just a total wreck of a building. Only one wall was really standing, and that’s the wall we pre-served. It was a first-generation cattle barn, if you could call it that. It was a small barn used for the storage of hay and shelter for cows, and we moved
The Painter-Bernatz Stone Mill: top, first floor during restoration; center, second floor during restoration; bottom, early visitors to the new mill exhibits.
the one wall plus the corners of the other two walls. The rest of it was shot. There was also the hayrack in there—the feeding rack—and we decided to take that building, or what was left of it, because it illustrated again the very early attempts at settling in this country by immi-grants who didn’t really understand their new circumstances. It was built initially for a very low-pitched sod roof, very sturdy. I mean huge oak trees they just notched at the corner—they didn’t even shape them—for the walls and the roof. As they discovered, 41
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obviously, sod roofs don’t work in this country. At some point very soon after that, they had raised the roof, so there was a second roof over the first one. We were able to only save the original structure, but in our interpretation, we talk about the second roof. And there’s a picture showing the building when we acquired it, showing the second roof, which had a steeper pitch built over the initial roof. So it does illustrate immigration, early agriculture, and dealing with a complete new physical environment. Then we moved the Carl Anton Carlsborg house. That is a tiny little one-room house built by an immigrant from Norway, one who had been, I think, more or less asked to leave Norway. The description, depending on whose translation you read, was that Carl Anton Carlsborg was somehow “damaged goods” in Norway. He thumbed his nose at the church. His father was organist and maybe klokker in the church, and Carl Anton wanted nothing to do with that, and married beneath his station. His only recourse, basically, was to come to America. Well, he was far from damaged goods. He became postmaster out in Glenwood Township [in Winneshiek County, Iowa]. Family is still here. But he built this tiny little house, which he called Carlsborg. You know how that translates? Carl’s Castle. It was done in the typical Norwegian fashion, with the grooved notches at the corners and the long groove between the logs. Unlike most of the log buildings built by the immigrants who followed the sort of Yankee customs, if you will, this guy built in true Norwegian fashion. But again, you can see where he was adapting when he got to this country. He got here in August. He started the little house with oak logs, beautifully finished oak logs, tightly joined at the bottom and at the corners, and then as the season wore on, he began to use smaller and lighter logs until he got to the top, and there are poplar logs of about four inches in diameter and not as neatly done. But obviously it was going
to get cold, and he quickly finished up the house and he and his wife moved in there, and as far as I know, the two of them lived in that house until their deaths. The son built a much larger house next to it shortly after that. But they had arrived with grown children, with small children, what have you... C: And they all lived in this one-room house? D: The grown children did not live in that house. They worked out. But the smaller children did. I think there were two or three. It was one room and literally a loft with a ladder up to the loft, very unusual in that respect. But those were two of the major buildings... C: And both of those buildings are still in the mill? D: Oh yeah. C: So which came next, Mikkelson-Skree Blacksmith Shop, or the Valdres House? D: The blacksmith shop was next. Actually, almost during the same time, 1971, Marion Nelson had acquired, or had convinced the Darrell Skree family to donate, the building. It was built by Mikkel Mikkelson Sinnes from Vrådal in Telemark, and we proceeded to document it, dismantle it, and move it to the site next to the mill. By the way, we moved it in my car. C: Including the big bellows? D: Yeah. We strapped it to the rack on my car. Well, this was a do-it-yourself operation at that time. My budget for that one I remember very specifically—Dean and Marilynn Madden gave
Reassembling the Mikkelson-Skree Blacksmith Shop. 42
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us $2,500 to do that job, and we did it with the help of Jim Skree and Brad Linder, and Liz Montgomery, Sue Asheim, and Carl Hansen, all Luther College students in the Museum Studies Program. We went up there, we documented the building, we took it all apart, moved it down here, like I say, literally in pieces—in, or on, my car. Then we did a little archeology up there around the site, not as much as I would have liked to do, but we did some. We were able to determine that, yes, it was a blacksmith shop, and that no, Mikkelson was not a farrier. He didn’t shoe horses—but he made shoes for people, and there were little horseshoe-shaped things that went on the heels of your shoes, along with a lot of other material that was in the shop and that the family supplied us with. I restored the bellows myself. I didn’t know how to do this, but I took it all apart. We discovered that the bellows came from Montreal, Canada. There is a maker’s name on it. The leather was all shot, so I took it all apart, and simply put a rubberized cloth backing on the inside and put the leather back on. Leather really doesn’t do much, but the rubberized cloth does. And it works. We were able to forge, weld, and whatnot in that shop as a demonstration. So it was an interesting project and, as I say, didn’t cost the museum a whole lot of money at that time. C: This was a pretty big introduction to work at Vesterheim. I mean, bing-bang-boom. You just get hired, then... D: I jumped right into it. I didn’t have enough sense to know how much I was getting into and within five or six years of my being here, I’d restored one building, the mill; moved and restored the blacksmith shop, and another however many buildings that we moved from Luther campus, and then the one from Norway. It was something of a record. And my marriage survived it. The car didn’t. C: So then comes the remarkable saga of the Valdres House. How did you come to acquire it? D: Marion Nelson and I had mentioned to Norwegian rosemaler Sigmund Aarseth that it would be really neat if we had a Norwegian stue, or house, a rural house, to compare, since everything else we had was kind of a comparison, and that was the way we were look-ing at the collections, compare the Norwegian to the Norwe-gian American. C: Excuse me, at this time did you know that within a spate of months you were also going to be getting the buildings from Luther College? D: Yeah. That was pretty clear that those would be moved out of there. They wanted the space. C: So then it’s all the more important to get a Norwegian house to compare with those houses... D: That’s right, and we happened to mention it to Sigmund Aarseth, who was over here teaching rosemaling classes. Sigmund went back to Norway and the next thing we knew, he had already acquired a house for us. He said, “I got the house for you and here’s what’s happening.” He already had started fundraising and the house had been given. It happened to be Vol. 4, No. 1 2006
The Valdres House: top, being dismantled in Norway and, bottom, being reassembled at Vesterheim.
the home that his wife had been born in. It was a family home in Valdres, of course. It was, “Here it is, folks. Come and get it now.” I think both Marion and I were a little shocked. C: You did get a beautiful house, though. D: It’s a beautiful house. In many ways, it’s quite typical. To compare to the houses we already had, it was a little fancier. A little upscale, and it was built by and for people who were at least small landowners—meaning small land, not small owners. But compared to the houses that we had, which were all very simple little one-room houses, it looks as though the Norwegians really went downhill when they came to this country, but that wasn’t the case. At any rate, Sigmund had gotten the Valdres Folk Museum involved. Kolbein Dahle was director of that museum at the time and he did some fundraising in Norway throughout the Valdres area, got banks to contribute, and all this sort of thing. The next thing I knew, it was on a boat—or at least half of it was on a boat—coming to Sister Bay, Wisconsin. Sigmund had made the acquaintance of Al Johnson, who ran the Swedish restaurant in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. Al had commissioned a building to be built for the restaurant and there was room enough in this container to throw most of the Valdres House in there, too. 43
From left to right, Decorah’s Lyle Sacquitne, who often served as Norwegian-language interpreter, with Norwegians Knut Steinsrud and Knut Sebuødegård during the reassembling of the Valdres House.
C: So it’s coming into Door County? D: Right. So we went over to Door County. We loaded up that building—the first load of it—along with a lot of other stuff packed in with it. We brought it over and I’m a little hazy on this, but it seems to me that we built the foundation that year and we got the first load of logs in. And then the second year we got more material, including the roof material. This I remember specifically, because we also went to Sister Bay to get this, and I hired Tilman Ellingson to truck it. We rode his truck over there and back. The roof is slate and very heavy. We kind of overloaded his truck and we spent most of the day driving back from Sister Bay on back roads, avoiding scales and whatnot because the truck was way overloaded. At any rate, we got here anyway and unloaded all that slate. And shortly after that, the three guys from Norway, two of whom had taken the house down and packed it away, and another one who had read about the whole process, Ole Ladderud from Hadeland... C: Do you remember the first two guys’ names? D: Yeah. Knut Steinsrud and Knut Sebuødegård. Ole Lad-derud had read about the project. He was a car dealer, I think, in Gjøvik. He volunteered to come over. So these three guys arrive, and they knew about three words of English between them, and learned three more while they were here 44
—one of them was “beer.” They arrived to put the house back up, and they arrived mid-summer. It was hotter than the dickens. There are lots of stories about them. They eventually got the house back together. Let’s see, who worked on that? Mel Martinson was one of the guys, a local volunteer here. Jeff Skeate, myself—seems to me there were two or three other guys. Oh, another thing, Kolbein Dahle had sent me drawings beforehand. When I started to build the foundation, either I mistranslated the instructions, which were all in metric, or he gave us the wrong dimensions. I’ve never gone back to check, because I don’t want to know. But I built the foundation too small, so when these guys arrived and laid out the first logs, they were about a meter short. Thank goodness those guys were here, because they just dug a trench, we got some more stones added to it, so the west end of the foundation is all new. We tried to put it back oriented in a similar direction as it had been in Valdres, Norway. One side high and all of that. It was a real eye-opening experience, not only for us, but I think for those guys, too. Sebuødegård was going to get a trip [to America] out of this, because [in Norway] he took it apart and numbered things in a way that only he would understand. C: I suppose every piece had to be numbered. D: Every piece had to be numbered and the roof boards were individual—the interior roof boards that make a kind of a vaulted ceiling—but they started with the number seven. Vesterheim
C: You get them and you say, “Where are numbers one through six?” D: Yeah, and Sebuødegård just grinned and he took number seven and he started hammering them up. Also, he was a guy who had never been out of Valdres. He was a real country guy. Knut Steinsrud was a little more worldly and explained to me in broken Norwegian and English and with a dictionary, that Sebuødegård had never been out of Valdres. The three of them headed off to the airport and Sebuødegård at the last minute decided to bring his zax, which is a tool used in slating, for a slate roof, which is part hammer, part pick, part knife. And he shoved it in his belt. Well, needless to say, even at that time, the bells went off and the whistles blew and they backed him into a corner and they made him put his zax into his luggage before he came. They arrived with what few tools they had, axes and whatnot. We had to supply them with other axes so they could cut things, and we had to find an electric høvel, which is a kind of electric plane. I learned a lot of Norwegian terms for tools at that time. With the help of Willie Brown, who had some of these tools and whatnot, we managed to get the job done. They had to splice in logs. They had thrown in a couple of gallons of tjære, which is pine tar to put on the logs to preserve them as they were building it. Both of those gallon tins, or probably four-liter tins, had broken in shipment and there was pine tar smell everywhere. I think you can still smell it in the house. They sent some original furniture. But it was a process. After it rained, they decided that the slate roof really wasn’t up to American rain storms and we had to do a bunch of modifying under it with pieces of asbestos shingle and that sort of thing just to keep the water out. It doesn’t rain like that in Norway. Oh, one other thing, this happened at Nordic Fest—they were still building the house during Nordic Fest... C: This was 1976? D: Yeah. Who should show up at Nordic Fest but Erik Bye, probably the biggest name in Norwegian television and radio and a huge popular personality. He wanted to see these three guys who were building the house. We marched him out there and called to them. They looked down and these guys came off the roof like monkeys on a string. Ole Ladderud came down the ladder and it broke. The ladder collapsed under him and he fell to the ground. He tore a big gash in his leg and he got up and, without ever breaking stride, he strode over and shook Erik Bye’s hand and they chatted awhile, and I looked down and there was blood running off his shoe and into the ground. Well, we taped him up and put him back to work. The other thing that was kind of fun about working with those guys was that once in the morning and once in the afternoon, you would hear the tools they were working with drop to the ground—blam, blam, blam—and these guys, no
The Valdres House crew: from left to right, Mel Martinson, Kunt Steinsrud, Ole Ladderud, Knut Sebuødegård, and Jeff Skeate.
matter where the three of them would walk into Bernadine’s [a nearby bar], they were, one on the roof, one inside, one on the founda-tion, wherever they were, they knew—blam—it was time for a beer. One of them would say to the other, “Knut? Beer?” And hands clasped behind their backs, and have a beer, then come back to work. Then in the middle of the afternoon, they’d do the same thing, without ever communicating as near as I could tell, other than the tools hitting the ground. C: So, how long did it take you, from the time of the first shipment, to the opening of the Valdres House? D: I don’t think we opened it that year [1976] because there was a lot of finishing-up work to do. When these guys left, and they had only so much time, they were headed over to Sister Bay to put Al Johnson’s new building together. They left me with a bunch of instructions on what should be done to finish it, including putting the siding on it, and a whole lot of little stuff. So we didn’t open it until the next year. One other story about these guys: They were headed over to Sister Bay, Wisconsin, and I had to take them to La Crosse to get a bus. I got to the bus station and we were kind of hanging around and, as I say, Knut Steinsrud and I would converse a little bit with dictionary help. I found the bus driver who was going to drive them over there and I said, “Watch out for these guys. They don’t speak a word of English. They’re from Norway and they’re headed over there...” “Oh, ekte Norsk?”—the bus driver spoke Norwegian. Only in America. So they got over there in good time and, I’m sure, had their beers with Al John-son and put together his restaurant. C: So, from 1971 to 1976, you’ve been here five years, you’ve restored the mill and the blacksmith shop, you’ve brought a house over from Norway, and now it’s time to bring all these buildings from Luther. So, which was the first to come?
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D: Actually, I contracted to have them all moved by Hans Haefs. Hans Haefs Construction out of La Crescent, Minnesota agreed to move all the buildings for a set fee. So there was the Norsvin Mill, there was the Tasa Drying Shed, there was the Haugan House, the Egge House, and the school. C: Oh, the Tasa Drying Shed was up there? D: Yeah. C: I didn’t realize that. I thought you had gotten that from the... D: No, but that’s another story. That’s later. At any rate, there were those buildings up on the campus and I negotiated with Luther College. I said I’d like to bring these all down, but I’d like to do them in stages. They said no, they all go at once or none of them go. So I had to bring them all down, which meant preparing foundations for them. I had drawn up the site plan earlier as to how I wanted them arranged. We poured slabs for the school, the Egge House, and the Haugan House. We had to build a foundation for the Norsvin Mill. The Tasa Drying Shed always presented a problem because the only part that was original on that, as near as I could tell, were the logs, which were only three logs high sitting on a high stone foundation. So we got the foundations ready and the pads ready. We arranged to have the buildings moved and they loaded them on trailers and dragged them down here, including the Tasa Drying Shed, which was really fun. The guys were pretty rough with it. They punched some holes in the stone foundation. I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not original.” They punched holes in it, put beams through it, drove a truck under it, and drove it off. And then we brought down the stone and just reconstructed it later. But the other buildings we had ready to put down on pad foundations, or a stone foundation in the case of the Norsvin Mill, and it took them probably a week at the most. I think it averaged like $1,500 a building to get them moved down there. They worked cheap, as I recall. This was part of the 1976 celebrations and we did get a little money from the state so we could do that. Then there was tree planting, arranging the site, all of that sort of thing. C: What kind of work did you have to do to get the buildings into a shape where you could interpret them?
Buildings on wheels: top, the Rovang Parochial Schoolhouse; center, the Egge-Koren House; bottom, the Tasa Drying Shed.
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D: Not too much, actually. Other than the drying shed, they were moved pretty carefully. For the drying shed we simply rebuilt the stonework, which wasn’t original anyway, so it didn’t make any difference what it looked like, and it looked like it did at the Luther campus. The buildings were moved intact. They were set down with stone under them and basically, we whitewashed the buildings that had been whitewashed, and opened them up. Now, we did do some log work on the schoolhouse. It had some rotted logs and we did some replacement. Actually, there had been some done before they were moved. I think Steve Johnson as a work/study student had assisted in replacing some of the logs in the schoolhouse,
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which were mostly poplar anyway and had gotten wet and rotted. But the other buildings were in sufficiently good shape that they could be shown relatively soon after they were moved. C: So now Vesterheim had a fairly complete, extensive Open Air Division. You’ve got most of the buildings… D: The Stovewood House came in there, which was its own problem. C: Okay, so the Stovewood House is a very unique thing. D: Well, it turned out... I got a call, or a visit, from Jim Stevens, who had gotten the salvage rights to a house that was being torn down over in west Decorah. And he said, “You ought to take a look at this. This is really different.” So I went over and looked at it and, yes, it was different. Stovewood construction was something I knew very very little about. I think I’d seen a picture or read a paragraph or two about it and I knew it was rare. I knew the house was early because it showed up on the 1856 Decorah plat. So I called the state... C: Where was it originally? D: On Ohio Street, which is part of the story, by the way. So I called the state historic preservation office and they shuttled me to their architectural historian Todd Mozingo. I said, “we’ve got this house up here that’s about to be bulldozed. The bulldozer is literally sitting in the front yard and it’s stovewood.” There was a long pause. Todd’s voice raised about an octave and he said, “Don’t let them bulldoze it.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s the only one in Iowa that we know about.” And so, as they say, the rest is history. Tova Brandt’s grandfather... C: Chuck Istad? D: Chuck Istad owned the property and was going to build condominiums on Ohio Street. But he purchased the land with that house on it, and that house had to go if he was going to build the condominiums. Well, I pleaded with Chuck to give me time to raise some money so that we could get it moved and he agreed, bless his soul. I went about raising money. We went to the Decorah Jaycees. Stella Kirby and my wife and a number of other folks did a little cookbook, the Stovewood House Cookbook. They sold for 50 cents. People were practically dancing girls in the street to throw coins in a box to raise money for that. I don’t remember how long it took us to get enough money just simply to get the house out of Chuck’s way so he could build his condominiums. But we got enough money to move it, mostly due to the Decorah Jaycees. [Donald and Arleen Rima generously donated seed money for the project.] I hired Hans Haefs out of La Crescent again and that was a big deal. We were actually moving a Decorah house and that brought people out. There was a lot of publicity and the whole business. There were school kids Vol. 4, No. 1 2006
and people lined up on the streets when we pulled that thing down the street. The media was here. I think KWWL—they interviewed Hans Haefs. They interviewed him sitting in the cab of his truck as it crept down the street— dink, dink, dink, dink— they were kind of walking along. They asked him, “What kind of a job is this to move such a house, this stovewood house?” And he looked at them with this fishyeyed look and he said, “Now ya got ta handle dis ting like a sick chicken.” The guy with the microphone said, “A sick chicken.” The guy with the microphone said, “A sick chicken? Usually you wring their necks.” At any rate, they got it moved. We had built a foundation. Actually we built it on property that was owned by Roy Carlson and it’s over a sanitary sewer. It was the only spot we had. I thought I was putting it on museum property, but it turns out, it was half on Roy Carlson’s property, which we then had to ask him to give that to us. It was one of those faux pas that you do. I’ve done several of those. C: We didn’t own the property? D: No. We owned half of it. I thought we owned all of that property between the mill and the substation, but we didn’t, come to find out. A little sliver of it was owned by Roy Carlson, who had maintained it after he gave us the mill. You see, he’d given the mill to us. I thought it was all ours. I hadn’t checked when I built the foundation and moved the Stovewood House onto it. But at any rate, then the house sat there for two or three years as we did the research. You’re supposed to do the research ahead of time, but we did the research and we did the plan and we decided to restore it back to its original appearance, or at least furnish it as a pre-Civil War village house—and we found the guy who’d built it. Norris Miller was a carpenter. He’d been to the Gold Rush. It wasn’t until probably ten years later that we found out that stovewood con-struction may have originated in Scandinavia. We’re not sure of this yet, but it’s entirely possible that it did. It was called kabbe fjøs, or kubbe, depending on the dialect you use— little pieces of log. Fjøs would be the place where you keep your animals, an animal byre. There were such buildings in south-ern Norway and Sweden. The latest word I had was that there were apparently one or two houses in old Hamar, Norway, that were built using this technique. So it may have turned out to be a Norwegian thing after all. What we had done is interpret the house as a comparison house. This is the culture of the Americans that the immigrants found when they came here. For that, it was a perfectly legitimate interpretation, because we could furnish it mostly with period pieces of the same time the immigrants were coming from Norway, and we had an absolutely delightful time furnishing the place. I had to go out and buy things, because the museum didn’t have Yankee stuff per se. We had some things. We had the sewing machine and the lamps and that sort of thing. But I had to buy furniture for it and a lot of tinware. There were two or three tin shops in Decorah at that time and so we had to identify what makes up pre-Civil War tinware and try to find that sort of thing. Harry and Josefa Andersen were very good about searching out pieces and actually buying a lot of the things that we put in that house. 47
C: Would Norwegians in America at this time be using different kinds of furnishings than Yankees did? D: Yeah. For one thing the early immigrants often built their furniture. All you have to do is walk through the museum and see the Norwegian-American furniture. It was built in a mix of traditions, if you will. Some of the design was certainly Norwegian, but the walnut material, which apparently they liked a lot, was finished in a natural finish, which wouldn’t have been particularly Norwegian. They adopted some American things; they would buy chairs, but they often built chairs too. Built furniture was in the Norwegian tradition. It makes an interesting comparison. A big cupboard in the living room is one thing. The whole way of living was different. In the Norwegian house, your main room, the stue, was your kitchen, dining room, and bedroom, as you can see in the Valdres House. You go into the Stovewood House, and there’s a kitchen, there’s a bedroom off the one side, there’s a pantry off to another side, and then there’s a formal parlor. Very different way of living. In the Stovewood House there are actually three doors to the outside. In the Norwegian house, there’s one. A whole different pattern of living within a house and with what you lived with. It made a wonderful comparison. C: Of course, we’ve already talked a little about the Tasa Drying Shed. You said there’s a whole other story. D: The Tasa Drying Shed always presented a problem to me because it was called a drying shed. It was supposedly used to dry sprouted barley to make beer. And yet, you looked inside it and there was absolutely nothing that indicated what it was used for. Some people called it a badstue, or a bath house. I suppose it could have been, but it was just a little building. We had a picture of this building when it was presented to Luther College. A guy standing in front of it on its original site, and that was it. One day I was showing the Wickney House to a group of people that had come down from Kenyon, Minnesota. I was showing them the drying shed too, and this pastor from up there who led this group down to the museum, said, “Oh, that came from Kenyon,” and I said, “Yah, it did. We don’t know a whole lot about it.” “Well,” he
said, “the foundation is still up there on Eric Odegaard’s farm." And I said, “Really?” He said, “Oh yeah,” and I got the numbers of the people up there and made an excursion to look at it, talked to the owners. Sure enough, the foundation was sitting there and it was in danger. They were going to terrace the whole farm and the site of the drying shed was going to be right in the middle of a new terrace. And again, I got them to delay that part of the re-terracing of the farm until I could organize an archeological expedition. My brother, who was at Luther College at the time, an archeologist, was involved in this, and we did it on the cheap—free, basically—along with Carol Hasvold and some other folks, and Luther students. We went up and excavated the site. Sure enough, we found the oven, the stone hearth oven that was used to dry the sprouted barley, and to make a long story short, we hired Ted Wilson to go up and take all the stone down. We documented it, we photo-graphed it, brought all the stone down, and we would relocate and rebuild properly the Tasa Drying Shed. This was great. Ted rebuilt the stone hearth. We had lots of stories. We had people up there in Kenyon who came to see what we were doing after they heard about us. One person said that it couldn’t have been a drying shed for making beer, that it was a cream house and there used to be a spring that ran through there. They just couldn’t deal with the fact that these Norwegian immigrants made and drank a lot of beer and built little buildings for it. Actually, I think there’s a little building on the Johnson farm, Steve’s family farm, that was a drying shed as well, for drying sprouted barley. So, yes indeed, it was for drying sprouted bar-ley. My next trip to Norway, I made a special effort to go over to the Valdres area, where the builder of the drying shed had come from, and I actually found a guy who was restoring a drying shed of approximately the same size and shape and ev-erything. He showed me through it and explained everything to us in Norwegian, but I had a translator with me. And he showed me how you lit the oven and what it was used for and how. I also got pictures of the inside, showing the furnishings of the shed and where the barrels and copper pots and whatnot that were used to make the beer would have been stored that were never moved when the building was first acquired. That was a real success story. I am very happy with that one.
Norwegian-American "archeology," excavating the Tasa Drying Shed foundation on the Eric Odegaard farm near Kenyon, Minn. From left to rght, an unidentified local man, Rosemary Henning, Carol Hasvold, Dale Henning, and two Luther college studentt. 48
Vesterheim
Moving in the Erickson Stabbur.
C: So you moved it down to the location where it is now, which left a space open, and you get the stabbur. Where did you get the stabbur? D: From Byron, Minnesota, west of Rochester. The Erickson Stabbur. I don’t even remember how we came by it. I think somebody told us that they had a stabbur. And they called it a stabbur, which is very interesting, because it’s a type of building that was rarely built in America. The stabbur in Norway was a food storage place; you stored food for your family. Mostly what happened in this country was that you had a house and you stored the food in the house, or you had a root cellar, or what have you, but in Norway this was done differently. And here was a real stabbur. The fact that the descendants of the people who built it called it a stabbur, that was, to me, absolutely fascinating. And there it was, instead of on wooden posts, as most are in Norway, it was on stone pillars, and we were able to acquire them. I hired a local guy to move it down here. We went up and we dug out the stones. By the way, that stepping stone that’s in front of the door is a little like an iceberg. You see about ten percent of it. I wanted to preserve all of the writing on the insides of the logs, which was mostly numbers. They were figuring how many bushels of this, that, and the other thing, written in pencil. Many of those logs were practically beyond repair and we did something that isn’t done commonly in this country—it’s done in Norway—and that is to splice the logs with new pieces. We identified the wood, we got new wood to match it, mostly poplar and basswood and that sort of thing, and we literally slit the logs, we removed the rotted part, and we glued and screwed and bolted new pieces onto the outside,
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which are beginning to weather now ‘til they look like they almost belong there. Per Brandsæter was here at that time. His wife was teaching at Luther and Per was looking for something to do, so I hired him. He had taken a course in lafting in Norway and wanted something to do, so we taught him Norwegian-American lafting technique to rebuild the stabbur. That was another little story we had with that one. C: Another one of the really big stories was the Wickney House. D: The Wickney House. Marion was visiting with Ruth Wickney in Northwood, North Dakota, and she was showing him all the stuff that they had saved from the beginning when her grandfather came to this country out of Vickne, Norway, and her house was the third house that was built by the family. She took him out to the second house, which was a big old four-square farmhouse and was showing him all the furniture and stuff, and this piece came from Norway, and this was in the old house, and Marion kept saying, “What’s this old house you’re talking about?” “Oh,” she said, ”that’s the one out back and that was the one that Anders Wickney had had built.” Ei-ther he built it or he had it built when he married and moved up to the Plains to settle on his 160 acres that he had claimed through the Homestead Act. Marion fell in love with the little house and instructed me to go up and check it out. I delayed bringing it down here because I really didn’t know quite what I was going to do with it. Ruth kept pushing, “When are you going to get the house, when are you going to get the house?”and finally she told me that the time 49
had come—move the house, or you can’t have it. [Reidar Bakken, curator of Utvandrermuseet in Hamar, Norway, assisted in the move at the Northwood end. Bruening Rock Products, Decorah, prepared the new site at Vesterheim.] I hired a fellow named Everett Borheavy, a Dutchman, to move the house, and, “Oh by the way, could you move the outhouse and the little building that went over the well?” Yes, he could do that. Again, I think the fee was something under $15,000 to do this. I said, “When you get within striking distance of Decorah, you let me know and I will clear the path.” We didn’t have permits to move this into town. It was too wide, it was too long, it was all this stuff. My friend Al Etteldorf was police chief and I had arranged with him to have an escort into town through the police, and that all would be cool. Everett Borheavy failed to let me know that he was coming to town. He pulled into town, he pulled into Clint Munson’s gas station. Clint had a fit that he was blocking the driveway, destroying his business. He called the police, and they arrested Everett Borheavy. He didn’t have the permits. He didn’t have anything. They actually took him to jail after he’d parked the rig in our backyard back here. It was a bit of to-doing to get him sprung and all of that, but it was pretty funny. It was also interesting the way he moved it. He put very long 2x6s over the roof and tied them down front and back, and he said, “If you go fast enough down the road, when you come to wires, they’ll just ride up that thing and spring off the top [laughs].” I learned a lot about house movers with this one. At any rate, he got the house down here, he got the outhouse down here, and he got the shed down here. We began restoring them. C: You had a lot of documentation on this. D: We had a lot of documentation. We had a lot of the original furnishings. What we didn’t have, Ruth remembered, so Ruth and I went to a lot of antique shops and she would say, yes, there was a chair like that in the old house. We’d buy it. Another piece we couldn’t find, so I made one—the little corner shelf in the living room—I made that because we couldn’t find one to fit. I would send her photographs and she’d say, “Well, do this and do that to it.” We had a lot of fun with it. There’s a dual set of cow horns on the wall to hang your hat, which we referred to as the “horns of a dilemma” because we couldn’t find one up there. We finally found one that fit her description. There are furnishings in that house that were wedding gifts to Anders Wickney and his wife Berthe Hagen. We restored the house to about the 1910 period. At the time when Berthe Wickney had died, Anders Wickney was living in the house with his son, who was Ruth’s father, and we had all kinds of wonderful things from that period. Berthe Wickney had died of cancer. After it had been diagnosed, she had a leg cut off at her brother’s farm next door. She drank
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Preparing to move the Wickney Hosue from its site in Northwood, North Dakota.
whiskey until she passed out, and they amputated her leg. And she lived for another ten years after that before finally succumbing to cancer, but in the meantime, Anders built the room onto the back of the house and put a bed back there for her. The family had saved practically everything, including Berthe’s one shoe, the crutches, one sock... C: And a little portion of interior anatomy. D: Of, well, that was Henry's appendix in a bottle of formaldehyde or something. C: I think they've finally taken that out of the house, but... D: And all the bills. The bill from the doctor for taking out the appendix. It was just the dream restoration, if you could imagine, because we had all fo the material–or so much of the material. I even brought Henry to go through the house when it was still on the site in Northwood. We went through the house and he told me where things were. He told me where the furniture had been when he was a boy of ten years of age and where stuff hung on the wall and this kind of thing. So, we pretty well knew what to do in that house, unlike most restorations where curators make it up. We had it all, including how the curtains were hung in the windows, with spools, thread spools, the whole business. We had the wallpaper on the walls and we could peel it back and do like the second layer of wallpaper. Ruth was kind enough to provide the funds so we could actually create wallpaper that matched. Obviously very cheap original wallpaper. Ugly as sin, but it’s what was there. As I say, including some of the furniture that Hans Olson Hagen had made as wedding gifts, a chest of drawers, chairs, other pieces that were all part of it. The family albums, the whole business. It was a sweetheart of a restoration. It’s probably the best one I’ve ever done. What other building do we have? The church? That’s a good story, too. Vesterheim
The Bethania Lutheran Church move: “The steeple looked like a big ICBM missle going off the truck.”
C: Yes, the Bethania Lutheran Church. D: Gotta go back a ways because people keep asking, “Why that church?” The story goes back some number of years, when Marion was up visiting the Northwood area. He was looking at the church altars that were made and carved by Østen Pladsen. There were at that time four such church altars in the rural Norwegian Lutheran churches around North-wood. One of them at the Bethania Church was offered to the museum at that time. The church was either closed or about to close, and Marion accepted the altar. It’s huge. So it sat for any number of years. I don’t know how long. Apparently the congregation got a hold of him and said, “You had better come and get your altar, because we’re going to sell the church, raise a little money, and the money will go into the cemetery fund, but the church is going to go.” I had returned from about six weeks in Norway and I think the very next day, Marion said, “You need to go up and look at the Bethania Church. We’ve got to get the altar and see if you think that church could be moved to Vesterheim.” So I hired a private plane, a small 175 Cessna, to fly me up the next day. I looked over the prospect and figured yeah, it’s possible. It’s going to be expensive, but you can move anything anywhere if you have enough money. I returned with that information and was told to go back when they had the auction and acquire the church and whatever else we needed for it. Again, I flew up—this time, since it was an auction, we tried to be a little secretive about this—between Ruth Wickney and ourselves here at the museum. I fluttered into the little grass landing strip in Northwood and, as we were parking the airplane, the guy who ran the strip came out and said something to the effect, “How are you going to get the church in that thing?” Vol. 4, No. 1 2006
So much for secrecy. At any rate, I went to the auction and got schnookered but good, I must say. The auctioneer was very clever and I wasn’t. He announced that Vesterheim was there to bid on the church and for the rest of the population he said, “You know, if you want to bid on it, fine, but you’ve got to take it away. So, we’re selling the church. What am I bid?” I thought I’d be very nice and kind to them and offer them $100 for their cemetery fund, which I did, and it sold. We bought the church. “Now,” he said, “We’re going to sell the pews.” You know how auctions work, particularly with things like that. You buy the first one and as many as you want at that price. I had to have them all, so I had to have the first one. By the end of the day, with the pews and some of the other furnishings, less the altar and baptismal font, I spent about $6,000. C: Well, that’s pretty good, though. D: Well, it wasn’t too bad, but it was kind of sneaky. At any rate, there we had it. Now what do we do about it? Well, the first thing was to arrange to take the altar, the baptismal font, and a few other loose things, then the pews, and get those out of there, which we contracted with Carl Arend here in town todo since he was traveling up that way. We met him there and we loaded the pews, we loaded the altar, we loaded stuff into his semi-rig and that was a real trip just getting that altar out the door and into his truck, but we got it. The next course was to contract for moving the church and we searched all over for a contractor. I had assumed that one could do this and I tried all kinds of places up in North Dakota. I tried
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everywhere between Northwood and Decorah that I could think of. I finally contacted the National Association of House Movers and a recent past president was Vicki Harvey’s father. Vicki and Jerry Harvey ran the Hobby Hut here in town. So I contacted him, explained the situation, and he put a bid in on it. Since it was the only bid, he got it, and I sent him off to dismantle and move the church. I understand that it was a fairly exciting dismantling job. They took the building apart in four pieces—four big pieces and a lot of little pieces. So the sanctuary, the chancel, the roof, and the steeple were the main parts. In the meantime, we had acquired property where we could put the church on North Mill Street. We prepared the site, which in-cluded a foundation. I was busily drawing up plans, trying to figure out how to make the best use of this building and how to make it accessible and useful and how to restore it. We had to determine a restoration period. We discovered the base-ment had been a later addition, if you will. C: They dug it under the church and finished it? D: They had dug it under the church. The first church had actually burned. This was the second church. Apparently the insurance from the first church didn’t cover enough money to do a full basement, but the basement is so important to a Norwegian-American church that I did want to include a base-ment. So the restoration period is various. It’s a building that was built in 1901 and we restored it to roughly that period plus the basement and the additions that went with the basement.
And then we also had installed, or made preparations to install, a lift, an elevator, so there was access up into the sanctuary. There were four steps up to the sanctuary and ten or 11 steps down to the basement. We wanted this to be completely accessible. So while they were dismantling the church and preparing to move it, I was busy drawing up plans for how we would use it and getting the foundation built. That was a mistake, but I’ll tell you about that later. At any rate, we had secured partial funding for the church through a number of sources. Gil Schjeldahl was a major contributor to it. Gil really wanted to see the church on the road, so when it got on the road, I contacted the mover and told him to report in periodi-cally as to his progress and when he got to within 100 miles of Decorah or so to certainly let us know; there were people who wanted to see it moved. Movers are a fairly independent lot and he never contacted me, so I went searching for the church days ahead of its arrival. “Where is it?” I’d drive up north and we’d try to get reports of it. I finally found it parked up by Burr Oak, Iowa, one day and let Gil Schjeldahl know that it was on the road and coming into town. Fortunately this mover had all the permits and everything in place and wheeled it into town, I think ,the next day, down Highway 52 and into town on Highway 9. It created quite a stir in the community. This was something really amazing. As the guy said as he pulled into the place where it was to be unloaded and then moved onto the foundation, “By the way, you probably don’t want to have lunch at Hardee’s. They don’t have any electric.” They had knocked the wires down.
Reassembling the Bethania Lutheran Church.
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Vesterheim
C: The steeple looked like a big ICBM missile going off of the truck. That was the most amazing thing to see. D: It was fairly amazing. And then what really amazed me was the fact that they assembled the building in Mill Street. Basi-cally they put it together in Mill Street and then turned it 90 degrees and rolled it back up over the foundation that I built, which we discovered at that point wasn’t exactly the same size as the church, in spite of all my measuring. C: Kind of like the Valdres House. D: A little like the Valdres House. In spite of all my measur-ing, the church was not completely square. It was about four inches off, but I think it’s fairly well hidden by bushes and certainly it fit. The guy did say that usually they move a build-ing and they put it into place and then you build the founda-tion up to it. So, a little bit of information that I don’t need anymore. I don’t plan to be moving any more buildings. C: You never know. D: Then the work began on the church and the restoration work was extensive. We discovered that the building, although it had a lot of the original material covered up and whatnot, and bits and pieces of it—the bell tower was full of pieces that they had stored up there. Windows, partial windows, half windows, all the trim that they had taken off the inside when they covered the inside at one point with a beaverboard material, a sort of insulating material, all of the trim had been stored up in the steeple. Oh, by the way, we did move the outhouse with this one, too. It’s a double outhouse, which we were able to secure and fasten on the back of one of the rigs so that we had that as well. The pulpit had been cut down; about 19 inches of the base had been cut off. We found that in Northwood. There was a guy who had a blacksmith shop who was using it as a base for his anvil. We got that and moved it down and eventually restored the pulpit to its original height, which is rather impressive when you stand in that pulpit. The pulpit stairs had also been cut down, which presented probably the greatest problem of all, because it was all moldings cut at odd angles and whatnot. We took all the beaverboard off the ceiling and filled—it must have been 10,000 holes, little nail holes that had been punched in when they nailed up the beaverboard—and then repainted it to match the old paint, reinstalled the chair rails, cleaned the wood-grained paneling, wainscoting all the way around the building, and repaired and restored the front door, which was kind of fun. When we acquired the church, I asked the folks who had been associated with the church, I said, “Where are the original front doors?” Because what we had, or what it appeared we had, were doors that were replaced in the 1950s. They were solid doors with a diamond-shaped window in them. None of the folks up at the church remembered anything about replacing front doors. We got to looking at them and the doors had not been replaced. They’d simply been covered up with a thin material and new windows cut in so that they resembled Vol. 4, No. 1 2006
Remounting the steeple of the Bethania Lutheran Church.
doors of the 1950s. So the old doors were still there and we were able to restore them to their original appearance. We replaced some windows that had been taken out. We found bits and pieces of them, enough that we could do that. I hired my friend Ron Nelson to come up and advise us on restoration. Rob Hervey and Jim Anderson were involved in it, along with a number of other folks. We simply went about the process of restoring it to roughly the 1903-1920 period. One item that we were unable to find, one major item, was the original organ that had been in the church. But we were able to acquire a pump organ of the same vintage and very nearly the same appearance. We found where kerosene lamps had been attached to the wall like sconce lamps. We found where the large lamp that overhung the altar had been and found a replacement for that. So we did have to acquire a few things, but we had from the auction all the pews. We had the silver from the church. We had the baptismal font. We had various collection plates and I think the song boards and that sort of thing. We were able to fit in modern heating and cooling, which, in the upstairs area, is pretty well hidden so that it isn’t intrusive. Now since I left, work has continued on the church, replacing some of the windows that had been covered over on the bell tower and there’s still one to go. 53
hope. And, if we didn’t do it correctly, at least there’s evidence of what we did use as a basis for our interpretation of how the finish ought to be. So, if it’s determined later that what we did was wrong, at least there’s an example there. C: And the little spots of bare wood, do they indicate things that you had to recreate to patch into things? There’s a little section, if I remember rightly, at the base of the pulpit stairs that I think didn’t get painted because it’s new and you want to indicate that it’s not the original.
The interior of the Bethania Lutheran Church not long after being set on its new foundation.
There was originally a gothic window over the door and you can see on the inside where it was, but the three sides of the bell tower have been covered over at some point. Apparently it had rotted to the point where they covered up several windows, but they saved them. They were up in the bell tower. Another major item that we didn’t get, maybe never will, but then again, never is a long time, and that was the bell that was in that building. The church cemetery folks wanted to keep the bell and build a little platform to put it in the cemetery. The bell was very interesting. Inscribed—not inscribed, embossed—on it, this was a cast brass bell, and cast right into it was an inscription indicating that the youth group had earned the money to have the bell cast and the bell’s still in Northwood. C: Is it in the cemetery? D: It is at the cemetery. Time may determine that it would come here. The folks know we’d like it, yet cemeteries are kind of sacrosanct, so who knows. C: During the restoration period, I learned something that I think maybe visitors to the church would be interested in knowing. When you go into the church, you notice that there are little spots that aren’t painted, or tiny little squares or maybe the base of the pulpit or something, and I remember asking you why you weren’t going to paint them, why don’t you finish painting the darn thing. And it was very interesting to learn why this is done. So why don’t you explain that? D: Well, we did this in the church and in the Stovewood House. When you restore paint or materials of this sort, you try to indicate for future curators and future generations what the basis of your decision was. In other words, here is an example of the original paint. Oftentimes these are covered up; they are in the Stovewood House. You’ll find little pieces of metal, little tin pieces nailed over in obscure spots, and if you would take that off, you would find the original finish, the original paint underneath that. It’s from that that we took our restoration notes, basically, to restore it. So, yes, those you’ll find in the church. It’s kind of proof that we did it correctly, I 54
D: That’s right. And if you will also look above the altar, you will see the sort of shadows, if you will, of two circles in the ceiling in the chancel. We were told Østen Pladsen had been contracted to build the altar for that church, but it wasn’t done when the church was dedicated. No one could remember exactly what was there before that altar, but there obviously had been something. So rather than paint over that bit of evidence, which is still a question mark, we simply painted around it. If you look up there, you’ll see those two circles, as if something had been propped up against the ceiling. At this point, we don’t know what it was, but maybe someday someone will be able to tell us. We did do a lot of interviews with the folks who had been associated with the church. I think there were still seven families involved with the church when it folded and we got a lot of good information from them. When we decorate for Christmas time, it is decorated according to their memory, with the exception that we don’t use real candles on the tree, which is what they did. And of course, fires were a horrible thing. C: The original church burned down. D: The original church was actually hit by lightning, and yes, burned, and one of the other churches that had a Pladsen altar burned, too. So there are only three Plasden altars remaining— two of them are still in North Dakota, and one of them is here.
About the Author Darrell D. Henning grew up in Decorah, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a B.A. in anthropology/archaeology and earned his M.A. in history museum studies at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in New York. Henning worked at the Nassau County Historical Museum (Old Bethpage Village Restorations), Long Island, New York, for five years, before returning to Decorah as curator of Vesterheim. While in New York, Henning received a New York Arts Council grant to study barn and rural architecture on Long Island. At Vesterheim, he received a National Humanities Grant to study rural architecture in Norway. Henning retired from Vesterheim in 2001, after serving as curator, director, and again as curator. He has published articles on Norwegian-American architecture and Vesterheim’s collection and presented papers in both Norway and the United States, notably at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., and the Norsk Institutt for Kulturminneforskning in Oslo, Norway.
Vesterheim