Haymakers: A Chronicle of Five Farm Families

Tradition and Change

Traditionand Change TRACTOR-POWERED HAYING WITH A HAY BALER Arthur and Douglas Rongen, Norwegian American Fertile, Minnesota, Polk County, 1959 I've liked round barns since the first time I saw one at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. Over a period of years after that, I gathered information about round barns in the Upper Midwest for a short article I eventually published in North Dakota Horizons in 1995.While I was working on the project, I happened to mention it to Cal Lee. Cal was a six-foot-five, blond, Norwegian church-basketball teammate of mine when I was still living and teaching in Minot, North Dakota. He said his family had a round barn on their farm near Fertile , Minnesota, and told me to write to his mother, Marlys Rongen Lee, if I wanted to know more about it. Marlys sent me a few articles about their Centennial Farm with its round barn, and I was intrigued . I liked what I saw about the barn, and I was wanting to include a Norwegian family in this book, so I decided to make a trip out to the Rongen farm. Art Rongen was ninety-two years old when I met him, and it seemed wonderful to me that the grandfather of the family still lived on the homeplace in a trailer just away from the farmhouse . This old-fashioned family seemed like a good example for showing the 14" loose hay to baling hay, but I worried the year they made that changeover-1959T transition from making 1 109 Alt Rongen’sfarm is still listed under thename L.1.(Lars)Rongen in this detail ofaplat of GarfieldTownship,Polk County,1954. Page 109:Standard hay bale. 110 Tradition and Change 111 was a little late, because so many farmers began to use square bales in the early fifties. But something about the Rongens captivated me. Partly, it must have been the stories everyone told me about Art. Marlys said that he was infamous for a prank he pulled in the 1940s.He was trying to surprise a pair of newlywed neighbors with a shivaree welcome. “He used dynamite,” Marlys said, “and blew out all the windows. It was heard all over the neighborhood.”At a Sunday school picnic in the sand hills near Fertile, Art drove the car straight up the steep bank of a bluff with the whole family inside. Even in town, he had such a reputation for speeding and pulling U-turns that he was finally told to stay out. When I interviewed Art, the spark was still there. No sooner had I asked about the old round barn than he was out and climbing right up to the hayloft. Though a man in his nineties, he climbed the ladder without a thought, talking all the way about anything I might need to know about the barn. His father Johannes Rongen, an immigrant from the Old Country, built the round barn in 1894.It was clearly visible from the road, and those who traveled by may well have wondered why a seemingly sensible man would build a strange structure that contradicted the traditional Norwegian rectangular barn. Most immigrants who settled in this area, known as “LittleNorway,” wanted to preserve as much Aft Rongenon the 1918tractor,July 1959. 112 The H A Y M A K E R S of their Norwegian identity as they could.' The earliest Rongens and their neighbors established a culture that was part American but mostly Norwegian, and they clung to their traditional ways of life for at least three generations. Evidence of their religious culture-the Little Norway Lutheran Church-stood just half a mile from the Rongen round barn. The congregation had built the church, with its seventy-five-foot-tall steeple, in I 891. Originally, the men sat in pews on the right side of the aisle, and women and children sat on the left side; the church voted to abolish that policy in I 899, but it took another generation before everyone mingled within the church. Worship services were conducted exclusively in Norwegian until the mid-1930s, and occasionally as late as the 1 9 5 0 ~ . ~ Minutes of church meetings were not written in English until 1934.Change came slowly to the Little Norway Church,just as it did to the families who attended it. Johannes left his birthplace near Bergen, Norway, in 1875. After spending five...