These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 10 am on WILD 102’s “Look Back in Time” program. Each week’s radio story will be posted here on our website.
Weekly radio stories are researched, compiled, and read by Sheila Winstead, RCHS Board Member.
April 5, 2026
I’ll read from the January 11, 1989, Roseau Times-Region today, starting with an Editor’s Note:
(We recently received the following article in the mail from Elizabeth Delmore. She was born in Roseau and graduated from Roseau High School in 1939. She has been a sister of St. Joseph Carondelet for 45 years and is currently a chaplain at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul.
Her childhood remembrances of Rocky Point on Lake of the Woods offer a unique insight to the history of the area, along with some beautiful writing. Sister Delmore said she wrote the piece at the request of her sister, Mrs. Daniel Bray, who in turn had been asked to write it for some of the descendants of the pioneers of Rocky Point. Her colorful, interesting narrative follows.)
“Going to the lake” for the J. L. Delmore Sr. family of Roseau meant only one place, Rocky Point on Lake of the Woods. On today’s map of Minnesota, it bears the name, Arneson and rightly so, for it was the Bernhard Arneson family’s homestead land since 1897. By water the resort area was seven miles from Warroad with Muskeg Bay to the south and the beginnings of the Big Traverse (open body of the lake) to the north and Buffalo Point, Man., visible in the west.
The Arnesons built a fishery on a rocky point of their land and did commercial fishing. In the early 1920s, the first family home near the shore burned down with two small daughters, Grace and Clara, losing their lives in the fire. After two of the Arneson sons, Harold and Arthur, drowned in the lake, the family gave up in 1927 and moved to Warroad, leaving the fishery to deteriorate and their second home to be occasionally rented out.
In the subsequent years, the Point of their land near the fishery became a much-beloved spot for Rocky Pointers. Hardly a day passed that someone did not suggest walking up to the Point where there was a spectacular view of the lake and the waves were outsized as they rolled ashore and broke on the rocks.
The land along the shore to the south was sold by Arneson to Roseau’s then Clerk of Court, Peder O. Fryklund, (P.O. to his friends) who in turn sold it off by lot. Paul Wallin, Jacob Snustad and Richard Ellertson were the very early lot owners who built cabins or cottages there. I believe it was P.O. who began using the name, Rocky Point, in an official way rather than Arneson. In that family’s absence, P.O. became the chief promoter of the resort.
My earliest recollections of going to Rocky Point began around 1926. Getting there by car was, to say the least, an ordeal. There were uncertain, dusty, gravel roads from Roseau to Roosevelt and then 14 (now 12-1/2) miles north on rut-filled, or slippery “corduroy” roads in rainy weather. This often meant stopping the car and going into the woods, which flanked either side of the road, for logs to imbed into the gumbo (wet clay) of the roads for better traction. Being mired down in the road meant hiking to the nearest farm for a team of horses to pull out the car.
The road for the last five miles into Rocky Point consisted of two tracks through the woods. In one place called “The Rocks”, it meant mounting the car over a huge rock formation that often resulted in damage to the underside of the car and a lot of blue language inside the car The last mile or so into the lake was on a winding brush trail. Then, as we rounded the last bend and caught our first sight of the blue water of the lake, we children would set up a shout from the back seat, “There’s the lake! We made it!”
In those first years, our family stayed in the P. O. Fryklund cottage called “Dominion View” as it faced Buffalo Point. The name was painted in black letters on a pair of deer antlers nailed to the outer front wall.
There were three rooms in the Fryklund cottage, an airy screened in front room that could be shuttered from the outside only, a small bedroom and a kitchen containing an uncertain iron stove. There were double beds in the front room. How wonderful it was to go to sleep under thick patchwork quilts and listen to the wind roaring through the trees and the waves pounding up on the heavily rock-strewn shore.
Meals in the Fryklund cottage that stand out in my mind were of plenty of fresh walleyed pike, sturgeon (the big treat), venison and game birds – partridge, prairie chicken and pheasant. We bought our milk from Mrs. Arneson until the family moved to Warroad and then we trudged down the road for two miles to the Norlanders, two bachelor brothers who kept a cow.
We children were in our woolen bathing suits and rubber caps by mid-morning. We stood on the beach and strained our eyes towards Warroad where the water tower stood up on the horizon like a black toothpick. The big event of the morning was to catch sight of the big boats leaving Warroad harbor to cross the Big Traverse on their way to Kenora, Ont., located on the northern tip of the lake.
If the boat was chunky and gold colored, it was “The Scout.” If it was long and white it was “The Resolute.” We would watch and watch those boats cross the horizon until they disappeared from view as they headed up the lake towards Garden Island. At night we waited for the channel lights in Warroad to twinkle across the water at us.
A special part of the waterscape at Rocky Point was Gull Rock (its early name was Cormorant Rock), a rocky formation about two miles off shore from the Point. It was a nesting ground for gulls and cormorants. It was sacred to the Chippewas for they came yearly to leave votive offerings there. It was not until our family owned a motor boat, “The Gloria,” that I was able to set foot on Gull Rock. From shore it was a romantically gleaming white rock formation. However, setting foot on it as an intruder of a nesting place was terrifying because of the screaming of the birds. The island also smelled of bird droppings.
Next week I’ll continue reading Elizabeth Delmore’s memories of her growing up summers at Rocky Point.
Thank you to 
for letting us share our county’s history with your listeners by donating air time, studio time, and production staff every week.