Lee Epps

“Commies” were not communists, but there were those who “lost their marbles.” The idiom “lose your marbles,” thought to have originated in the United States in the late 1800s, referred to someone behaving in such a silly or strange manner that they might have become insane. But some boys of that era literally lost some or all their marbles in competition with their companions. In the game of marbles, it was part of “playing for keeps” and might have been the origin of the idiom that has long outlived the popularity of the game.

Some thriving villages in southeast Minnesota, established in the 1850s and 1860s, especially those served by stagecoaches on territorial roads, met their demise when bypassed by the first railroad tracks in the late 1870s. Contrarily, the village of Newhouse was founded by the Caledonia, Mississippi & Western Railroad Company, which built a station and grain elevator in Spring Grove Township, one and half miles north of the Iowa state line and about halfway between the villages of Spring Grove and Mabel.

“A splendid view of the rich country on both sides of the tract could be had. The train moved along rapidly and the station of Newhouse appeared in view,” wrote George Kuster, Spring Grove newspaper proprietor and editor in 1903 and 1904.

To the uninitiated (non-Norwegians), it might sound at first like Halloween – nighttime visitors on your front porch wearing masks and all sorts of costumes. Treats were expected. But it was late December, not late October. There were no children; costumes were worn by adults, maybe some teenagers, too.

She was home alone that night when she heard some footsteps in the house. Her husband was away on a call as a veterinarian. No one in Spring Grove locked their doors back in the 1970s. Soon, 15 to 18 “creatures” entered the kitchen and formed a circle around her – surely alarming. No one said anything until finally, one approached and whispered that she was supposed to guess who they were. She would have recognized all of them except they all wore disguises – weird clothing selections with faces covered in some manner.

Two young, probably teenage, cousins were on a passenger train from Houston, Minn., to visit relatives in Northfield, when they understood the conductor to say, “The coach is on fire.” But when the train stopped, they were the only ones to grab their coats and baggage in preparation to detrain. What the conductor had actually said was, “There’s a colt in the wire.” Two train employees got off, freed a young horse from its entanglement in a barbed -wire fence and then reboarded as if it were nothing unusual. The relatives in Northfield were two sisters, also from Houston but attending college around 1920, one of which became a Houston-area historian. Ingrid Julsrud included that family tale while writing an invaluable account of railroading in her hometown during the first two decades of the 1900s.

“Any little gopher hole could and did start washouts,” wrote Houston area historian Ingrid Julsrud. Washouts of train tracks were expensive mishaps for the railroads and inconvenient interruptions for the daily lives of residents. During the first two decades of the 1900s, the tracks around Mound Prairie were especially susceptible to washouts during the spring and summer rainy seasons. Then, there would be no trains reaching Houston for as many as two or more days.

Surely praiseworthy were the pioneer settlers of southeast Minnesota, immigrants from Europe or those moving west from previously settled areas of the United States. Hard-working farm families and merchants established communities, built churches and schools and were even willing to leave their families to serve far from home as Civil War soldiers. But opportunity in the west also attracted characters with less-than-honorable character, with criminal intent, who preyed more than prayed. Among the most infamous were the Mississippi River pirates, including a band based in Houston County, Minn.

As commercial traffic on the Mississippi River followed settlement north into Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, thieves were attracted as well as honest merchants. A band of river pirates, thought to consist of 10 to 12 men, operated out of the southeast corner of Houston County. Their base, known as Robbers Roost, was located in Minnesota Slough, a backwater a mile-and-a-half into an almost uninhabited portion of Minnesota with several convenient accesses into the main channel of the Mississippi River, which was the interstate highway of the 1860s. In addition to its seclusion, the slough was large enough for travel in a small steamboat, which designed to navigate on tributaries of larger rivers, was a common vehicle for waterway transportation – and piracy.

Walls, a wood stove and even spectators were hazards; you might run or dribble into one – or someone. But it was too cold to play outside when high school basketball was first witnessed in Caledonia. The year was 1907; the venue was the Hundt Opera House, which built on North Badger Street, was originally intended to provide an indoor roller-skating rink. But that rolling recreation would not be as financially profitable an enterprise as expected, and the building changed ownership several times before Mr. and Mrs. Hundt made changes, including a stage, so the edifice could be rented for dancing, stage performances or other community gatherings, which turned out to include basketball.