These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 9:00 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.
August 2, 2026
Mr and Mrs Emery Austin were pictured in the June 24, 1976 edition of the Roseau Times-Region as they celebrated 50 years of marriage along with the following story:
When Mr. and Mrs. Emery Austin were hosted at a surprise party at Greenbush Sunday, they celebrated 50 years of life together, which stretched over a lot of interesting times of Roseau County history. They were a part of that history, as were their families before them.
Emery was born at Roseau, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Atlantis Austin, the first elected sheriff in Roseau County. Mrs. Austin was born in Wannaska, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Kjallberg. All were pioneers here.
His two sisters and his future wife-to-be went to high school together in Roseau, and they met at parties and other gatherings, “so I guess that’s how we got together,” he chuckled.
She well remembers the first time he took her home from a party. “He had a horse and buggy and the old horse came to a puddle and decided he wasn’t going to go through it. He lunged into the ditch, and I fell into the mud. If it hadn’t been so dark I would have walked home I was so mad,” she explained. Her party dress was muddy and ruined. “I couldn’t even help her into the buggy because I had to hold the horse,” Emery remembered. “She was mad, I’ll tell you!”
She went to high school for a year in Roseau and then graduated from the AC in Crookston. “In those days you could take a test and if you passed, you could get a teaching certificate, so I did,” she revealed. She taught for a while at the Edberg School, and that was when the romance started, she said.
They were married in Roseau by Rev. C. Carlson on June 19, 1926, and when they left for their honeymoon, it was so muddy that we had to stay for three days in Baudette.” They had been on the way to International Falls where he planned to work in the paper mill. I remember that I drove part way to the Falls on plank roads,” Emery remembered. “Part of the road had washed out, and it was a bad spring so there were mosquitos all over.”
Emery worked in the paper mill for 45 cents an hour and decided it wasn’t for him, so they moved back and operated his mother’s farm for two years, and “then we decided to get rich by going into business so we bought the Hartz Store at Pinecreek.”
There had been a lot of Canadian trade there but “they cut if off… put a tax on it so that wasn’t so good then,” he said. It was a lot of fun there though, and they both remember with good humor the time the men in the community there played a hockey game against the men in Roseau with the losers to serve a moose dinner. “No one of us could play hockey and it was quite a game. People laughed about it for years,” Emery said. The men from Pinecreek won the game against such Roseau businessmen as Dr. R. V. Harris and Clarence Dokken. Roseau farmer John Elton was one of the Pinecreek players and “when that big guy and Dokken came together on the ice it was like an earthquake,” he recalled. Roseau served the moose meat dinner, buying the moose from the game warden.
Emery’s brother-in-law, Herman Spjut, then sold them the store at Strathcona and they combined the stock of the two stores. They were there for eight years during the depression, years neither will forget. “It was the making of us both though,” Mrs. Austin recalled. “We learned that it wasn’t all a bed of roses.” Emery sold
cordwood and pulp, “anything I could sell.” They extended a lot of credit, and people appreciated it. “Some of them told us they would have starved to death if we hadn’t trusted them,” Mrs. Austin said. “There wasn’t any need to try to run a cash store then, “ Emery added.
They decided to quit the business “as we didn’t see how we could educate the children, so we moved back to the farm,” she recalled. They started with 360 acres on the site southeast of Greenbush and have lived there since.
“We had cows and chickens, pigs and all the rest,” Emery said. “We had to in order to make ends meet.” They both said it wasn’t easy, but they raised three children there. “They were real good … they never grumbled,” Emery recalls the depression years very well and remembers that some people sold sheep and got a bill for freight which they couldn’t pay. “But we were lucky I sold wood for three bucks a cord and we always had something to eat.”
Their children are Jean (Mrs. Douglas Walker), Los Gatos, California; Duane, Crookston, and Carol (Mrs. Walter Pederson), Roseau. They also have ten grandchildren, two of whom are the 9th generation of the Cook family who came over on the Mayflower, they report.
While in Strathcona, Emery was village treasurer and Mrs. Austin was on the school board. The one-room school was crowded, and she wrote to ask Superintendent of Schools Charles Christianson if they couldn’t have a bigger school under the WPA program. “He said yes and that’s how we got it…there were a lot of people who were happy to get the work,” she said. Today that school house is a church.
Emery used to play a lot of ball and has always loved to hunt. He still farms, having put in 90 acres of wheat this spring. He also likes to fix things. “I don’t claim to be a mechanic but everything I have goes.”
Mrs. Austin taught school before she was married and five-and-a-half terms after they were on the farm. She was president of the ladies aid when at Poplar Grove Church, and now they go to the United Church in Greenbush, where she is a member of the WMF. She likes to read both autobiographies and Christian literature and does some embroidery.
They report that the area around their farm has changed; a lot of the old timers are gone, but the neighbors are still good ones. They plan to continue to live on the farm as long as they can. “It’s home,” they say, “and this is where our friends are and that’s half of life.”
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.