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.
March 31, 2024
In the Roseau Times-Region of March 21, 1974, Edwin Karlstad was written about as he celebrated his
84 th birthday. Here’s the story:
Edwin Karlstad knows the ropes as a homesteader in Roseau County. He has also been a lumberjack,
harvest hand and carpenter. That’s a lot of experience, but as of last Thursday, he’s had 84 years to gain
that experience. Edwin was hosted to a birthday party in his motel room at the Evergreen with two big
cakes and a lot of good wishes.
Born 84 years ago west of Pelican Rapids “on the line … I don’t know for sure which county it was in,”
Edwin came to Roseau County with his parents when he was 21. He and his folks and two brothers got off
the train in Roseau.
“There were mostly oxen here then … only a few horses. I remember the only sidewalks were board
sidewalks and there weren’t many of them,” he recalled. “The only hotel was where the seed house is
now.”
The family took separate homesteads 14 miles south of Salol in company with neighbors from Clay
County. “We each built our houses, helping one another along with the Nordrum boys … there were
three of them and three of us.” The houses were not the usual logs, but were frame houses.
Edwin remembers that the countryside was “All popple and tamarack stumps. The fire had gone through
by then. We grubbed the land by hand … and it was good land when it was cleared too,” he said.
The Karlstads had horses to work with. “Most of the people here then had oxen … but we liked our
horses,” he said. He admitted that in addition to plenty of woods and wilderness there were “plenty of
mosquitos. I thought they were going to chase us out,” he laughed.
Edwin stuck to his homestead, going to the Dakota harvest fields in the fall and working in the woods in
the winter.
“We’d get to Roseau about once a month … we had a good team and a double buggy and it was quite a
trip … 40 miles … but we made it to town and back in one day.”
He raised sheep, cattle and farmed his land, raising mostly grain. “All mixed up,” he chuckled. He lived on
game: deer, rabbit, moose in the earlier days. “There were partridge all over the place then. No trouble
at all to get them,” he remembered.
He lived on the homestead until 1928 when he sold it and bought a farm in Pencer. There he was happy
for a long time, farming in a diversified manner to make the best use of what he had.
He had by then traded his model 1917 “T-model Ford” which had taken him over so many rough roads
for so many years. “I got a 1930 Chevrolet, and it was a good car too. He traded that in 1936 for another
car which was not so hot, and then got his last car in 1939.
His first tractor came in 1936 after he had traded off a team of horses. “It really changed things on the
farm,” he admitted. Another big change he saw was the advent of REA when farms in the area were
electrified. “It was wonderful” he emphasized.
Edwin went to war in World War I, serving for a year-and-a-half in the Army in England, France and
Germany. He is a member of the Roseau American Legion and VFW posts, “and I have been from the
start,” he said.
There aren’t many of his World war I buddies left anymore. “All those who were with me are gone,” he
said, noting that there were only 13 at the past dinner served by the legion for WWI vets.
After he sold the farm in Pencer he worked out for quite a few years after buying a small house in
Roseau. He later went into carpentry with Marvin Nordrum and built houses and granaries. “We did that
for three years,” he said.
Later he retired and lived in Roseau. “Three years ago I broke my hip and that was a bad one,” he told the
Times-Region. “But now I get around well enough so I can walk downtown. A man has to get out of the
house you know.”
He says, “I don’t feel bad at all. After all, you can’t be young forever.”
Now he can look back on the hard homestead years when a ditch came through and taxes went up …
“and Dad had died and we were alone” … with a sense of having come through it all … the hardships as
well as the pleasant periods.
“I’m very comfortable here now,” he concluded.
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