Note: I was at a Germans from Russia convention last week. While at the convention it became an even stronger belief that we must record our personal family histories. If not, memories of relatives will disappear after a couple of generations, and it will be as though they never lived. We’ve personally accumulated quite a trove of information and wish we had more. If anybody has a good story about your relatives or acquaintances, and they have a stone in the Sheldon cemetery, I’d be willing to see it gets posted here. I won’t be able to continue very long without some input.
… … …
Olde Sheldon
By Lynn Bueling
I wanted to know about the earliest days of Sheldon and discovered that it wasn’t located where you may think it is. My learning of it came when reading about early days in Ransom County and some of the prominent people who established it. One of those people was A. H. Laughlin whose name one can find sprinkled about here and there in county history. He spoke about his difficult arrival at a Sheldon Old Settlers Picnic held 119 years ago, July 27, 1907. We’ll let him talk for awhile with a few light edits and omissions.
“On the 26th day of January, 1882 I first saw North Dakota, arriving in Kindred that morning via Wahpeton, with H. A. Palmer. We unloaded a carload of Van Brunt seeders and started the next morning on foot for Lisbon forty miles away, as there were no teams going through. It was a bright beautiful morning. They told us to take the old government road, and that there were three hotels or places where travelers were kept, French’s, Porter’s, and Manning’s. About 10 o’clock a dark cloud appeared in the northwest and we were soon in the middle of a genuine blizzard.
“At French’s they could not keep us, so we tramped on to Porter’s, facing the blizzard nine miles. Mrs. Porter could not give us even a cup of tea, as they were entirely out of provisions. I asked her if she could spare a little heat from her stove. We rested awhile, when fortunately a four horse sleigh drove up loaded with merchandise for Joseph Goodman’s store at Sheldon. It was driven by Charlie Smart and Richard Jackson; we got permission to hang on to their sleigh. There was only room on one small box of goods for one to sit on, and as Mr. Palmer had been sick I gave him that privilege. A bundle of brooms stood upright in one corner, and by clinging to a broomstick I could keep my head in the shelter of the brooms and stand on the rear end of the runner.
“Once we were lost on the prairie and headed for the sandhills southeast, but Charlie took to the snow ahead of the lead horses and found the trail by intuition. He wore a wolf skin coat and cap, which may have helped him. Arriving in Sheldon about five o’clock the boys stopped in front of the hotel kept by Robert Grieve. It was new and had two blocks of square timber for steps. I got one foot up one step and could not induce the other one to follow, and fell down, unconscious with cold and exhaustion. They carried me in and seated me near a good hard coal fire. Then followed a couple of hours of severe pains, like the toothache in every nerve. The last sensation was one of quiet restful sleep. The storm was so fierce we could not see the lights in the store twenty rods away.
“The next morning the snow was an inch deep all over the bed. Our hands were so badly frozen that the landlord had to assist us in dressing. It was forty-four degrees below zero.”
Laughlin survived and went on to establish residence and business in Lisbon. Luckily he preserved some of the early history in written form. The store run by Goodman and Greene was the destination for the sleigh full of goods. The location of this interested me. One of the Sheldon history books (1981) lists it as the Southeast corner 26 Greene while the history (2006) states Southeast corner 23 Greene. Here I will apply my reasoning to believe the 1981 location is the correct one. Why?
I was raised to adulthood on the Northwest corner of 26 Greene. Deep impressions of wagon tracks had been worn in the prairie and given their direction would have run through our meadow. They point to the Southeast corner of 26 Greene. It makes sense to me that people drove their wagons over that trail to do some trading in that store. As a teenager I liked to pick up an old single shot .22 rifle on a wintry day and go hiking over that ground which we called the Wieg quarter since it was owned by A. C. Wieg. Of course, I never had a clue I had trod over historic ground.
Slight discrepancies appear in dates and locations when they are compared, but the dates Laughlin reported to the Old Settlers satisfy me. The future of the town hinged on the determined route of the railroad and when it reached present day Sheldon, its future was set. No longer would lumber and building supplies depend on freight hauled by ox and horse wagons.
Laughlin’s final resting is not in Sheldon for our Story Under a Stone. He is buried in Lisbon. No photos of him have come to light. Instead, an old fashioned line drawn portrait appears. We can add that his interest and connection to Sheldon continued. A news item published in 1909 reported he and his son motored to town but the car broke down. Forced to stay overnight, he visited at length with the editor and gave him “an addition to his stock of historical knowledge.”
We include here with Laughlin’s stone A. C. Wieg’s stone plus a Greene Township map.While writing this I am missing my old classmates, Susan Mougey and Janet Newton, because I know they both possessed informative memories and materials. We can only do what we can do. The memories start to dim after a couple of generations pass.
