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 23, 2026
Audrey (Helstad) Jensen, whose pioneer grandparents lived in Pinecreek and Roseau, grew up in and around Roseau and Salol and married Harry Jensen. The past two weeks, my stories were her biographies of her grandparents, Helstads and Dokkens. Today’s story will also be by Audrey, and it describes pioneer life.
Lifestyle in those days was quite different from what it is today. They learned to do without or improvise because there wasn’t much to be purchased locally. Wheat was hauled to Stephen, Minnesota, to be ground into flour. The coffee was green and had to be roasted and ground before it could be used. When they ran short of kerosene, they used wicks burning tallow for their lamps. This would smoke badly and the lamp chimneys would get very sooty.
Cleaning supplies were homemade. Floors were swept with a bunch of long stiff grass dried and bound to a wooden stick. The unpainted wood floors were scrubbed with a wad of stiff, dry grass and homemade soap made from all kinds of leftover or rancid fat and homemade lye. This lye was made by pouring water through the ashes from burned tamarack wood. This soap was also used for washing clothes. Some lye was also put in the laundry water for extra cleaning power. This must have been very hard on the hands since clothes were all rubbed clean on a washboard. White clothes were boiled on a wood stove before rinsing to help keep them white. Wet clothes were hung on a clothesline or wire fence or whatever to dry in the sun in the summer. In the winter, most clothes were dried on lines in the house. Wrinkles were smoothed out with heavy irons that had been heated on the kitchen stove. Hot work in the summer!
Food consisted of whatever the farm and garden could produce. Vegetables like peas, beans and corn were dried on a blanket in the sun for winter use. Potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, etc., were stored in a dirt cellar under the house, accessible through a trap door in the floor in most homes. Wild berries were picked and canned into sauce and jellies. Wild high bush and low bush cranberries, chokeberries, juneberries, raspberries and strawberries were usually plentiful. Every home had its own rhubarb patch too.
They butchered animals for beef and pork late in the fall when it could be frozen to prevent spoilage. Wild animals like rabbits, deer, and moose were always available but were killed only during the winter. Some beef was brined and dried and called “spika kjot”. We know this as jerky. Lutefisk was purchased dry too and had to be soaked for days before use. Very little meat was available in the summer time. Can you imagine a summer without hamburgers cooked on the grill?
Eggs were a good meat substitute during the summer and only in the summer. Egg production was almost nil in the winter because people didn’t know what a chicken needed to produce eggs then. A few dozen were saved up in the fall and stored in a solution called waterglass. They were used only for baking because of the scarcity and also because the taste left much to be desired.
Supper was usually some kind of mush. One kind was potato mush made by boiling potatoes, then beating them and the potato water and thickening it with flour. They always had milk so they would thicken that with flour or dark flour to make a mush. They called mush “grōt”. Oatmeal was a luxury.
Most of the clothes were homemade – with the exception of men’s pants and coats. Grownups had shoes, but Grandpa made moccasins for the children. Grandma carded and spun the yarn and knit long socks for
her family. She also used pieces from worn-out overalls to make a kind of sock to pull over the moccasins as overshoes. Mittens and caps were all hand-knit too. Quite the job!
Grandpa smoked a pipe with “True Smoke” tobacco all his life. Perhaps this is what brought on the cancer of the throat that caused his death in 1932. The farm was then sold.
I remember well how I hated the auction sale selling my grandparents’ property. I went upstairs for the last time and lifted the trap door in the east room to look at all the pretty cards stored between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floor. I was always fascinated by them and by the pretty china figurines that were kept around the west window in the big room.
After the sale, Grandma went to live with her children who lived around Roseau. A few weeks with one and then to another. I remember her saying once that it wasn’t good to live out of a suitcase. She died peacefully from a heart attack on December 30, 1946. Both she and Grandpa are buried at the Moe-Rose cemetery on the ridge three miles west of Roseau, Minnesota.
Grandpa and Grandma Helstad are also buried on the Moe-Rose cemetery. My dad is buried on their lot and so will my mother. Harry and I will also be buried on this cemetery because that right goes with our membership in the Rose Church. Our graves will not be in the same area, though, because that area is filled.
Thanks to Audrey Jensen for taking the time to write down so much history on her family and memories of the early days. Audrey died in 2006 at her daughter’s home in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Harry had died before her in 2000. They had one son, Rick, and two daughters, Charlotte and Marjory. I’m sure they all appreciated the details Audrey wrote down for the next generations. We should all do the same.
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.