Tidbit from the Early Days

from "Sheldon - Remembering Our Past"

 I like reading about our town of Sheldon and its beginnings. The early editions of the local newspaper contain the most readily available information. Following are a few tidbits gleaned from the pages of the Sheldon Enterprise which later became the Sheldon Progress.

1881 - Frank Connelly stated when a lumberyard was started at Buffalo, he hauled the first load of lumber that started the building of Sheldon. - In another article he told of a man who’d come through the area in November and slept under his wagon for shelter. He had long hair and when he woke in the morning it was frozen to the ground which his companions had to cut through with their knives to free him.

1885 - The freight business of the Fargo & Southwestern is rapidly on the increase. Twenty cars of freight passed through west yesterday…. There is a scheme on foot to connect Sheldon and Fargo by telephone… Prairie schooners are passing westward almost every day. Train loads of emigrants and emigrant movables continue to pass west…. City marshal Sanborn has given some of our hilariously inclined farmer citizens a little wholesome advice lately, in consequence of which they crawled into their wagons and made tracks for home.

 

The WPA files contain first person information about the early days. A Mr. Frank Trumble stated during the winters of 1882-83 there were a few buffaloes out in the sand hills, but most of them had been driven farther west around Bismarck. The prairie around here was covered with buffalo bones, and the people would pick them up and sell them or use them for fuel.

There was a traveling chapel on the Northern Pacific Railroad. It was under the auspices of the Episcopalian Church and held an altar and seating and would be sidetracked in small towns and villages. There it would remain for a weekend or a week or two. Services would be held for the people of the community who otherewise never had any sort of public worship. Mr. Underwood recalls seeing this car in Sheldon twice in the summer of ’83.

1886 - The timbers for the new bridge across the Maple River in Highland Township came last week and were unloaded Saturday and Monday. The lumber came some time ago and is already on the ground…. Chauncey Durgin is putting in an ice box in the White Elephant Saloon.