Welk homestead offers insight to pioneer life

By Michael M. Miller

michael.miller@ndsu.edu

Prairie Public Broadcasting is hosting a documentary world premiere of the “Lawrence Welk: A North Dakota Farm Boy,” on Saturday, May 31, 2 p.m. at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck. The event is free and open to the public.

Also, on May 31 at the Heritage Center, NDSU Press will launch the limited special edition hardcover three-volume set of the new biography, “Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century,” by Dr. Lance Richey, who will be in attendance to autograph the book.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Welk Homestead becoming a State Historic Site. “One of the most unique and culturally rich locations in the state,” wrote BEK Communications. “Once the family farm of America’s favorite champagne music entertainer, Lawrence Welk. Today, the Welk Homestead is more than just a tribute to one man’s musical journey. It’s the only farm the SHSND maintains, giving visitors a firsthand look into the life of early homesteaders and the strong German-Russian heritage that helped to shape the state.”

A fun follow-up event will take place at the Welk Homestead in Strasburg on Sunday, June 1 at 2 p.m. There will be a special music program of Joyful Voices with songs from the Lawrence Welk Show, an accordionist will entertain with “The Strasburg Waltz,” and they will unveil and dedicate a life-size bronze statue of Lawrence Welk. This event is free and open to the public.

The Welk Homestead State Historic Site is open Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, Thursdays to Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

I want to share about the Germans from Russia and Eureka, South Dakota. Harper’s Weekly published this article on July 11, 1896, “A Bit of Europe in Dakota.”

Away out near the border-line of the two Dakotas, lies a stretch of rolling prairie-land where lives a colony of peasants; the most remarkable, in certain ways, to be found in this country. They are self-isolated from the rest of the world, safe as they communicate through the medium of their marketing-place, the little town of Eureka. They have established a small section of Europe in the New World, and they are very, very slow to merge it into the type and texture of the new civilization.

As soon as the news could be communicated to Russia, the hegira from Odessa began. In 1887-88 over nine thousand came; in 1889-90, three thousand; in 1891-1902, four thousand five hundred – all of them settling in the region close about Eureka, and beginning at once the cultivation of wheat on the same careful, methodical plans that they had their ancestors had followed from the old German days down. The target number of them settled in the counties of McPherson and Campbell.

Some families were poor, many of them were comfortable with the circumstances, some of them were rich, as wealth goes among those who till the soil for a living, but all of them were industrious and inheritors of ancestral thrift. But they did not assimilate with American ways and customs – perhaps because there was neither opportunity nor inclination. They were a people by themselves as much as they were when, still German to the core, they toiled in the wheat-fields of Russia. The men assumed early the obligations of American citizenship but, for the most part, they remained distinctively foreign.

They are said to be unusually honest people. The same simple, plain, common life they followed on the plains of Odessa has been followed here. In person, the women are small, given the breadth rather than in height. The men are strong of frame, of average height, and look to be possessed of great endurance.

Low-roofed and broad are the houses of the peasants, veritable homes of earth. They are not the sod shanties of the Western boomer by any means, for these foreigners have a way of building for the future. They construct their homes in curious fashions and build them so substantially they will last half a century if necessary – last until greater prosperity and American influences call for houses of wood or stone. When the farmer has decided upon the location of his house, he plows upon the heavy sod in the swale at the foot of one of the low Coteau Hills and draws it to his house in long strips. This sod is the roof for his house. He has been making bricks for days, huge clay and straw bricks, perhaps twelve inches thick by eighteen inches long. They clay subsoil affords material for a brick that will last for years. After the bricks are sun-dried, they are laid up for his walls with the joints being properly broken.

The home life of these peasants seems to be particularly happy. By far, the greater number of them are church-goers; Lutherans and Presbyterians predominating. They make large, fine loaves of bread in their big ovens. They are innocent of desserts. They raise vegetables — or go without. Some meat finds its way into the larder if they raise animals for food themselves. I do not know if I saw a healthier lot of men, women, and children than those I saw filling the streets of Eureka on a market-day. Their menus may be meager, but their muscles are not.

During the period between the day when the first load of wheat was drawn into Eureka last autumn and the time when the last load of the season was hauled in mid-February, there were unloaded from the wagons of these peasants three million bushels of wheat. In 1888, about 900,000 bushels were marketed. Four years later, this had been increased to two million bushels.

Some of the farmers still cling to the ox-team mode of locomotion and haul their wheat by slow and laborious stages. There are 31 different grain firms and about 40 small elevators and grain warehouses.

While this town of Eureka is at the end of the railroad, and on the very frontier, and while some eight to ten saloons run at full blast even in prohibitioned South Dakota it is a remarkably sober and unquarrelsome lot of people who throng this curious little town to send their wheat into the great arteries of trade.

It will doubtless be many years before these peasants shake off their picturesqueness, if they shall be left to themselves as much as they are today.

Michael Miller is director and bibliographer for NDSU libraries and the Germans from Russia heritage collection (GRHC). For more information about the 24th Journey to the Homeland Tour to Germany and Ukraine (May 2022), donating a family history and/or photographs, or how to financially support the GRHC, contact Michael M. Miller, NDSU Libraries, Dept. 2080, PO Box 6050, Fargo, ND 58108-6050, (Tel: 701-231-8416); or go to library.ndsu.edu/grhc.

IF YOU GO:

“Lawrence Welk: A North Dakota Farm Boy” premiere

Saturday, May 31, 2 p.m.

North Dakota Heritage Center, 612 E. Boulevard Ave. Bismarck

Welk Homestead Program

Sunday, June 1, 2 p.m.

Welk Homestead State Historic Site, 845 88th St. S.E., Strasburg, North Dakota