Lindseth Ridge View Farm History

Lindseth Ridge View Farm History

Written By Tara Lindseth

Every place has a history. Many different people have been in the exact same spot we are now. The buildings may have changed, but the land stays the same. If the land could talk, it could tell some very interesting stories.

This paper is about one such piece of land. It is in North Dakota, in Grand ForksCounty, in AllendaleTownship. It is a piece of section 17, and it’s 6 ½ miles from the small town of Thompson. In 1913 it’s owner named it Ridge View Farm.

Land is usually divided into quarters that are half a mile by half a mile. This is considered 160 acres. There are four quarters in a mile. This particular section of land was divided differently. It was divided into 160-acre quarters 1 mile long by ¼ mile wide. The two quarters I will be writing about are the middle two. They are officially described in the land abstracts as being the W ½ of the NE ¼, the W ½ of the SE ¼; and the E ½ of the NW ¼, the E ½ of the SW ¼.1

In February of 1884, the first owners of the land were George Morency and Gaspard Gregoire.2 They owned 160 acres each. In 1885, Gaspard Gregoire was the owner of fifty acres of tilled land and 110 acres of unimproved land. The value of his land, fences, and buildings was $2,000. The value of his livestock was $350. The estimated value of all farm productions sold, consumed, or on hand in 1884 was $250. He had two horses, forty barnyard animals and in 1884 he planted twenty acres that gave him 400 bushels of wheat.3

Both Morency and Gregoire mortgaged their land and in April 1886 they couldn’t pay back their mortgages and so the land was sold.4 It was after this that the two quarters were put together. In 1889 L.D. Armstrong and his wife Sarah mortgaged the property. There is no entry of them owning the deed, therefore they may have rented the land during this time. A later entry declares Armstrong never owned the property and that he was the brother-in-law of John A. Howard, who had the deed to the land in 1890.5

L.D. Armstrong is listed in the 1885 census as living somewhere in the area. Armstrong and his wife were both thirty years old. They had four children, Louis, Emma, Louisa and Grace who were 9, 7, 5 and 2 years old respectively. They also had a boarder living with them, a twenty-four year old single farmer named Freeman Robinson. The three oldest children all had attended school within the last year.6

The deed to the land was moved from John Howard to E.T. Spafford on October 31, 1892.7 This begins an interesting chapter in the life of this farm.

Edwin T. Spafford was a businessman. He was born December 5th, 1860 in Minneapolis.8 His father, David Spafford, moved there from Maine and Vermont to engage in the logging and lumber business. David died in 1872 when he was 56. Edwin T. Spafford’s mother, Huldah A. (Townsend) Spafford passed away in 1912 when she was 76. In 1878 Spafford became a resident of Dakota territory.9 In 1884 he bought one of the stores in Thompson. Before this, he owned a lumberyard, the Red River Lumber Company10, in Thompson. Spafford also saw that the way to make money was to buy farm land. In the 1885 census, Spafford is shown as having rents for shares of land.11 In 1894 he owned and managed the Freeman farm, the Ray farm and the Armstrong farm.12 The Armstrong farm is what this farm was known as in the 1890’s. Other farms and land Spafford managed over the years were: W. A. Clark estate, P.P. Allen, Robert Smith, Phelps farm and A.A. Towns.13 Spafford also bought and sold lots within the city limits of Thompson and owned the town hall. He was the president of the Farmers State Bank of Thompson, a director of the Citizens State Bank of Minneapolis, vice president of the Harriet State Bank of Minneapolis, and he owned stock in the second National Bank of Grand Forks. He had lumber interests in Oregon and was connected with the Valley Mercantile Company in Box Elder, Montana.14 So Spafford had many business projects all over the place. Having all this still didn’t stop him from having to declare insolvency in March of 1896.15 He didn’t lose the Armstrong farm or the store and I didn’t find anything that described what happened. Spafford mortgaged his land to people he owed money and they were eventually repaid.

Spafford owned the store in Thompson from 1884 until he died in 1927. It had two rooms with a stairway that lead to a low-ceilinged loft. It had two sides, one side with fine things for women, the other side very masculine. It contained almost everything a person would need. There were household gadgets, necessities, a grocery area, work clothes, shoes, fashionable clothing, yard goods like lace and cloth, lingerie, etc. It is described as being one of the best stores outside of Grand Forks.16 This building is still standing in Thompson, one of only five that were there at that time. It was a store until 1997 when the contents of the building were auctioned. It was a very interesting auction because the building hadn’t been cleaned out since Spafford owned it. The loft had been turned into an attic and many things were just moved up there and left for all those years.

In February of 1891, Spafford married Eva G. Johnson.17 In 1893 a daughter, Helen, was born in Thompson. In 1900, Spafford's mother Hulda was living in Thompson with the family.18 In 1910, Spafford was the only family member living there.19 Spafford had bought a house in Minneapolis where his wife and daughter lived. Helen graduated from WestHigh School there.20 In 1916, Eva had to co-sign a mortgage which was notarized in Hennepin County21, which is west of the city of Minneapolis. Helen married Morris Sandy and they lived at 2409 Bryant Ave.22 until they passed away. There was no record that Helen and Morris had any children.

Spafford was unable to repay the mortgage he made in 1916. In 1927, the mortgage was foreclosed.23 Spafford owned 2,320 acres of farm land and all of it had to be sold.24 In March of 1927 Spafford was asked to speak at a farewell party for his friend.25 Being a prominent business owner he often spoke at gatherings. He liked to practice his speeches in his garage with his car running. There had been a few times Spafford had lost track of time and he almost got too much carbon monoxide. Well, E.T. Spafford never showed up at the farewell party. He was found dead in his garage.26 He died on March 17, 1927 five years to the day after his wife, Eva, died and a few months after he lost the farm. There were rumors that his death wasn’t an accident.

After the foreclosure sale the land was taken over by the bank that held the mortgage. The Wells-Dickey Company and the O.M. Corwin Company, which were both from Minneapolis, owned the main part of the farm.27 During this time, as it had been when Spafford owned it, renters lived on the property. Some of the names are known. Paul Willert rented the farm from Spafford. He lived there from 1910 to 1925.28 In the 1930’s it was known as the Hart farm. From 1941 to 1942 it was occupied by and Ernie Olson family.29 In 1945 the Walter Miller family lived there. The success of the farm depended on its renters. Some renters were good renters. They kept up the buildings and didn’t let things deteriorate too badly. Many of the renters weren’t good renters. In the 1930’s the farm suffered form a lack of good renters.30 The buildings deteriorated.

In 1939 the farm was bought by Anton Lindseth31, who is my grandfather’s brother. Anton was also a businessman who invested in many diverse things like Spafford. He was a partner in a car dealership in Rugby, North Dakota. In the early 1950s he bought a large semi truck and transported cattle from Rugby to St. Paul. He would then haul cars back to Rugby to the car dealership there. Anton lived most of the time in Silva, North Dakota, where he was a farmer. He bought the land near Thompson after the depression. It had been drier at Silva and he thought this would be better land. Anton lived on the farm for three years, from 1939 to 1941. He then moved back to Silva where he farmed until he was 80 years old when he died in 1974 from wounds received in a farming accident. He was never married. He lived in a house that was just two shacks pushed together. Anton was also a strong member of the John Birch Society.32

In 1954 Anton needed additional money for his ranch in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Anton had purchased the ranch in the early 1950s. So he sold the farm to my grandparents, Olaf and Ingred Lindseth. Olaf and Ingred gave the farm to their four boys; David, Lynn, Tony and Paul; in1969. In 1971 Lynn Lindseth, my father, took over managing the farm.33

Francis Ackerman rented the land from 1946 to 1971. Francis lived in the house from 1946 to 1965. In 1965 he built his own house closer to Thompson. Gilman Haugen moved to the farm in 1959.34 He lived in a trailer and worked as a hired hand until 1994 when he retired and moved to a house near Portland, North Dakota.

The farm had many buildings, more buildings than most of the farms in the surrounding area. All buildings were red with dark green trim except for the house, which was white. The barn was built in 1906. It was a large barn. The total floor space, including the lean to, was 95’ by 55’. It had a large haymow. The floor in the main part of the barn was part concrete. The lean to had a wood floor until 1946 when Francis cleaned it out. There was so much old manure that it had rotted the floor. The names of the horses were written with red paint above the stalls of the barn. Minnie and Butch were two of the horses’ names.35 In 1977 the barn was being renovated. The lean to’s were removed and it was being lowered so it could be used as a machine shed. While it was sitting up on blocks there was a windstorm and it blew the building over. Some of the siding was used as wainscoting inside of a McDonald’s in Grand Forks and some of it was used to make picture frames.

In 1913 Spafford built an elevator. It was powered by a stationary engine motor. There was a loading and unloading annex next to the elevator. The annex was used for mixing feed. There was a ramp that ran in front of the elevator and then turned into the annex. The annex was torn down in 1972. The elevator was empty for most of the 1930’s. When Anton owned the farm the motor that ran the elevator was rusted and wouldn’t run. Anton sold the elevator and it was moved into Thompson in 1941.36 It still stands there today, even though it has been empty for many years.

In 1917 a new house was built. Before this a small, L-shaped one-story house had been the main house on the far. In 1965 this small house was torn down and it was discovered it had been built with square nails. The new house was a square two-story house with a screen porch and an attic. When Francis moved to the farm in 1946, the roof was leaking. The house had wood shingles that had rotted and caused the upstairs ceilings to collapse. The roof also had built in gutters that were make of wood that also had to be removed because they were rotted.37 In 1984 the house was moved closer to Grand Forks when a new ranch style house was built.

There were many other buildings built between 1900 and 1910. There was a hog barn behind the elevator. It was make of metal and corrugated tin. There was also a tunnel leading from the pig pen to a pasture. This was built so they could drive to the elevator without having to open any gates.38

There was a feed mill. This feed mill had a feed grinder and it also had overhead bins for storing feed. When these bins were removed in 1971, they looked as though they had hardly been used. The feed mill also contained a steam engine that powered the shop. This shop was like a blacksmith shop. It had a forge, a power drill press, and a trip hammer. The shop was rebuilt into an oil shed in the 1980’s.39

The farm had a chicken coup, which was later used as a garage. It was made of tin. There were windows on the south side and air vents in the roof. Near the chicken coup was a potato cellar made of cut stone. It would have been a very attractive building. It had a front like the false-front stores that was made of stone. Past the elevator was a machine shed. The farm also had a long granary that had double walls. That means the granary had a hollow wall space that just happed to be very popular with mice.40 Right north of the barn was a sheep barn that was made with corrugated tin. The roof collapsed in 1964, and it was torn down in1965.41 There was a bunk house that was moved about three miles to Elmer Robinson’s farm in the 1940’s. They added a garage and a few rooms, and Elmer and his wife still live in the house.

Around 1900 there were trees planted, some of which are still alive. These may have been the first trees planted on the farm. A windmill stood by the barn that pumped water for the farmstead. There were more foundations for buildings that were found, so the farm at one time was full of buildings. Horses and sheep at one time or another had been raised on the farm along with cattle. There was sheep fencing around the entire farm. The old dump contained miles of sheep fence.42

The only building left on the farm from Spafford’s time is the smokehouse, which is now used as a woodshed. A new shop was built in 1976. In the 1960’s a new outhouse was constructed, a pole barn was built and also a granary was built in 1954. Steel bins have been added down through the years, the new house in 1984, plus a new barn in 1991.

Ridge View Farm has seen many changes over the years. Looking at the farm when Spafford owned it and the way it looks now, a person wouldn’t even think it was the same farm. There may be different things to see, but the land always stays the same. The land would remember all the people who lived on Ridge View Farm.