Google Earth

Oh, MY! If you want to see Buckman as it is today, download Google Earth to your computer and search "Buckman, Mn"--wow! There are little cameras along the streets, and double clicking each one advances your position, where you can look all the way around you--its amazing and WAY fun. The only weird thing is that any people who happened to be captured are blurred out. You see vehicles and yards, open doors and businesses, but not one soul!

LOL...they must have cruised Buckman last fall, when Janson kids were selling sweet corn!  COOL, huh?

A magazine from 1889

There's a marvelous website called ARCHIVE.ORG.  It's a stunning collection of digitized books, periodicals, ephemera, photographs and movies....not to mention its' link to the Wayback Machine. 
Clicking the above link opens a whole world of stuff--try it--bookmark it, but then, come back here...lol

Last night, Larry sent an archive.org link to Overland magazine, published in California in 1889.  It's decidedly west coast in veiwpoint, but there are broader issues covered too.
What I find fascinating in The Overland and other publications like it are the contemporary views of things we only heard about in school as "history".  Think about it: in the context of the Janson family, 1889 was only 6 years after they arrived in Buckman.  Anton was now 9, and big brother Wendelin was 17.  The last sibling of the family, Rose, was born in October, 1889. 
By then, California had been a state for 40 years (and Minnesota,  31 years). There were a few telephones then, and the railroads were coast-to-coast since 1869.  People still manufactured and sold snake oil.  It was 24 years after the Civil War.
California was admitted to the union as a decidedly non-slave state, but the ongoing turmoil in the south was still an issue all over the country.  Here's an article from the Overland that describes one contemporary version of those continuing problems: The South Revisited.  It's interesting to note his take on what the problems were, and his proposed solutions.

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Three Janson Families Arrive in the USA

Evidently, cousins John and Joseph JANSON traveled here on the same ship, the SS Zeeland.  They arrived in Phillidelphia in March 1883:

John was the last entry on the page before this one:

And here's the third JANSON family (Daniel) to leave Deilheim, Horrenburg, Germany in 1883, but they arrived on the SS Vaderland in October that year.

Ice Harvesting in 1919

This may not be totally relevant to JANSON history, but it was certainly part of MINNESOTA history.  I think dad had one of those hook-tools when we were kids--did he ever harvest ice?

Amazing Lindbergh films

Four films here that'll give you a taste of the times--Spring, 1927--from the prep and takeoff in New York to his landing in Paris.  INCREDIBLE!

(With thanks to the PRESURFER)

WPA histories in Morrison County

The Morrison County Historical Society has a wonderful website and blog, and one of the pages there has a link to their list of WPA family biographies: 

"During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States Government initiated a number of programs to put people to work. One of the best-known was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). As part of the WPA, several residents of Morrison County, Minnesota, found work through a project to collect oral histories from long-time residents".

Those oral histories were interviews with old-timers, including residents of Buckman and Pierz.  Check it out.  If you find a bio you need, you'll have to plan a trip to the Weyerhauser Museum in Little Falls, but it's WELL worth it, trust me! 

Breaking the prairie sod

I've been curious about how much work would have been involved in homesteading on prairie land.  Our Jansons bought a farm/homestead from a settler who'd quit, but they still had to clear land (mostly of the trees that covered a good part of Morrison county then).  This map is from 1874, see?

I don't know if they had natural clearings to break, but when Larry found a source, I had to transcribe it here, ya know?
The Official Northern Pacific Railroad Guide: For the Use of Tourists and Travelers...(1893) was an unlikely place to find a description.  This section pertained to North Dakota, but it would have been applicable to any northern prairie:

Prairie Farming.»The cultivation of the soil in prairie country is, in some of its processes, very different from the methods pursued elsewhere, and has given rise to at least two technical terms which are known as "breaking" and "backsetting".  Premising that the prairie soil is free from roots, vines and other obstructions, and that the virgin sod is turned from the mould board like a roll of ribbon from one end of the field to the other, a fact is presented to farmers who are accustomed to plow among stones, stumps and roots can scarcely grasp. But the sod thus turned is so knit together by the sturdy rootlets of the rank prairie grass that a clod of large size will not fall apart even though it be suspended in mid-air.
To “break” or plow this mat, therefore, it is necessary to cut it, not only at the width of the furrow it is desired to turn, but underneath the sod at any thickness or depth as well. An ordinary plow could not endure the strain of breaking prairie soil, so plows called "breakers" have been constructed to do this special work.

(Rolling coulter pic from The Oliver Plow Book, 1920)

Usually, three horses abreast are employed, with a thin steel, circular coulter, commonly called a "rolling coulter," to distinguish it from the old-fashioned stationary Coulter, beveled and sharpened for a few inches above the point of the plow to which it is attached.

A furrow is broken sixteen inches wide and three inches thick, and the sod, as a rule, is completely reversed or turned over. Each team is expected to break sixteen miles of sod, sixteen inches wide and three inches thlck, for a days' task.
By cutting the sod only three inches thick, the roots of the grasses, under the action of heat and moisture, rapidly decay. The breaking season begins about the 1st of May, and ends about the 1st of July. The wages of men employed at this kind of work are $20 per month and board. The estimated cost of breaking is $2.75 per acre, which includes a proportionate outlay for implements, labor and supplies. But the ground once broken is ready for continued cultivation, and is regarded as having added the cost of the work to its permanent value. Tbe“broken" land is now with propriety termed a farm.

“ Backsetting” begins about the 1st of July, just after breaking is finished, or immediately after the grass becomes too high, or the sod too dry, to continue breaking with profit. This process consists in following the furrows of the breaking, and turning the sod back,with about three inches of the soil.
In doing this work, it is usual to begin where the breaking was begun, and when the sod has become disintegrated, and the vegetation practically decomposed. Each plow, worked by two horses or mules, will “backset” about two and a half acres per day, turning furrows the width of the sod. The plows have a rolling coulter in order that the furrows may be uniform and
clean, whether the sods have grown together at their edges or not. The “ backsetting" having been done, there only remains one other operation to fit the new ground for the next season's crop. This is cross-plowing (plowing crosswise, or across the breaking or backsetting), or so-called fall plowing which is entered upon as soon as the threshing is over, or on damp days during the threshing season. A team of two mules will accomplish as much cross-plowing in a day as was done in backsetting--two and a half acres.

Sounds simple, right?