Marianna Farseth (1894–1971) was the youngest of seven children born to Olaus Christensen Farseth (1852–1913) and his wife, Kathrina (1856–1936), immigrants who came with their eldest daughter, Anna, from the near-Arctic island of Vega, Norway, which was inhabited by farmers and fisher folk. Olaus tried his hand at farming in South Dakota and Iowa but wound up studying for the ministry at the Lutheran seminary attached to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He became pastor of a Lutheran church in New Hope, Wisconsin, where the family lived for six years, from 1904 to 1910. The church services were conducted in Norwegian, and the parents spoke Norwegian at home until their deaths. Marianna wrote this remembrance of the family’s life in New Hope in the late 1950s when she was around sixty-five years of age.
I – Getting Settled
On a mellow, golden fall day, Anne, Pauline, Paul, and I rode from Wittenberg to New Hope with Hans Johnson. We were to be his guests at the mill until the renovations at our new home were completed. Father and Mother had driven the team [of horses], Dan and Daisy, directly to the parsonage to be present when the furniture, brought by horse and wagon, arrived. Harald and Carl had already left for Northfield to attend school.
The week spent with Hannah Olson, Hans Johnson’s daughter, was a very delightful one. The spacious house, the burned ruins of the mill, the precarious, simple boardwalk over the waterfall—all offered wonderful places for play.
In spite of the confusion of cleaning up after the rebuilding and of the installing of the furnace, we were soon settled. We loved the two-winged white house with its large front yard and picket fence. This was our home for six years, and as I think back, this front yard is one of the places most deeply fixed in my memory. On one side of the path leading from the prim, little porch to the gate was a tall white lilac bush; on the other, a huge snowball tree. Round flower beds, edged
