1982: sixty-year-old Anna was behind the wheel. In the passenger seat, her 90-year-old mother Helena. They were approaching their destination: Mountain Lake, Minnesota.
Helena instructed Anna to turn onto a gravel road. A mile and a half down, she told Anna to turn again, this time onto a long driveway, leading to a farmyard in the middle of the section.
Anna slowly guided the car to a stop in front of a tall white house. Now what?
A curious young farmer emerged, ready for them to explain their unexpected presence. Helena burst out with the reason: she was born here. This had been her grandfather’s farm. When she was 14 years old, her family had moved away. Now, 76 years later, she had returned to her birthplace, one last time.
…
Fourteen is a heady age. One could become very attached to the land that birthed them. For how many long decades did Helena dream of someday returning to Mountain Lake?
…
Helena Buhr Heinrichs was the only great-grandparent I had ever known. The others had passed away before I was born. But Helena lived until I became a teenager. She died when I was 13 years old. So when I think of her, I have my own memory of a person I interacted with. The other seven Greats exist in my mind as names and dates on my genealogy. But Helena is real.
She was also the only great-grandparent of mine who was born in the United States. So, that always stood out. As did the place of her birth: Mountain Lake.
To someone growing up on the bald prairie, both mountains and lakes are beautiful and far away. So when I heard about Mountain Lake, I envisioned a heaven of sorts. I always wanted to see it.
This past weekend, I finally did.
…
So yeah, my great-grandmother was American, I guess. It felt unusual compared to the rest of what I knew of my family background. (Which wasn’t really saying much. All I knew was Koop and Kleefeld, which was my own last name and mailing address. Paternal lines. But what about all the rest, that was so easily erased? And why do I want to know? Because I am relentlessly curious about the patchwork of ancestry that makes me, me. And the more it’s obscured… the curiouser I get.)
There are a lot of family tales that over time get scrambled, or not quite right. But this one I knew was correct, because I read my grandma’s diaries. I read in my grandma’s handwriting, of the day she took her mother (my great-grandmother) back to Mountain Lake one last time. Back to where she was born.
I didn’t know what to expect. I mean… the Buhr family left Mountain Lake in 1906, to go settle in Saskatchewan, which had just become a province and had put out a call for settlers. So, it’s been 118 years. What are the chances there would be anything left? I assumed maybe nothing. My plan was essentially to just go and stand on the road next to a corn field and just gaze at the land for a while. That was it.
But at least I knew the right place.
A few days before we left, I noticed in Grandma Online that there was a section number for Erdman Buhr, who had been Helena’s grandfather. I looked up old maps of Mountain Lake Township, and saw his name there on section 8!
I then found this same township on Google’s satellite view… and thus knew exactly how to get there. So I took Friday off work, and Andrew and I drove down to Mankato and stayed at Laven House B&B. This was about as close to Mountain Lake as we could figure, where we could find lodging. (Mountain Lake is small.)
As we were leaving Laven House on Saturday morning, I told Andrew that our first order of business was to find Erdman Buhr’s homestead. I was navigating and directed him past Mountain Lake and onto a gravel road through corn fields. And then, stop.
This field, here, is where my great-grandma was born, I told him.
And this big farmyard here… was her grandparent’s place.
I stood and took the moment to just be there, in that place. I mean… none of this is particularly exotic to me. It looks very much like where we live. It’s not even that far away. But to be able to actually stand here and look at the site of my great-great-great-grandparents’ farm… was amazing.
And then it got MORE amazing.
Linger long and weirdly enough, and a landowner will drive up and ask you what you’re up to. This is often my hope when I do this kind of thing. I don’t know if all landowners have motion-sensing cameras hidden at the entrances of their properties… but I kind of assume/hope they do. This is the easiest way to talk to people who might know something.
I think we were only there a minute or two before a gentleman drove up and asked if we needed help. I explained that I just was there to see the place where my great-grandmother had been born. His response:
“Buhr?”
My jaw dropped.
He told us that he’s a Mennonite too, Lauren Harder. He told us that he owns this property, and been home on that day when my grandma drove up the long driveway with her mother. He was the one they talked to. My great-grandma told him stories of her grandpa, Erdman Buhr.
He told me that folks say that Erdman had a bit of money — as evidenced by all the land he owned in the area. “So he must have come from Russia with money.”
But he had more business to conclude in Russia, so they say that he went back to wrap things up. Back in Russia, he was on a train, making his way back to where the Bergthal Colony had been. Someone on the train asked him which stop he planned to get off at, and upon his response, he was strongly advised to stay on the train. He listened. So he returned to Russia but never to his property to conclude whatever business he had had there. It was too late. Too much had changed and it was now dangerous. So he returned to America, where he lived out the rest of his days.
Mr. Harder told us that the farmhouse had been on this property and he had taken it down about 20 years ago. But first, he took pictures. He invited us to follow him to his home nearby (he and his wife Kathy no longer live on the property, that’s why the driveway is grassy now) and here is the picture he gave me of the home my great-great-great-grandfather had built:
They kept adding on, he told us, probably, as they had more children. It was fairly big for what you’d think a settler would be building, so again he figured there had been “some money”.
The foundation had had big rocks in it, he said. I can envision this because I’ve seen similar old foundations elsewhere in my nosing around.
He said the house had been more substantial than most others at the time. Another clue that “there had been some money.” (I will pull this thread another time. This is too long already.)
In my mind’s eye, I can see my young, strong grandma in her green 1970s-era car, with her elderly mother directing her, driving down that gravel road, and boldly turning down that long driveway. “This was where my father was born. This was where I was born. This was where I grew up. And then we just… left.”
…
I’ve heard about the Buhr money situation before, in fits and starts — but never from my own family. I’ve also written about this mysterious line of mine before. This is still just the beginning.