The attached interview above is from SDPB's daily public-affairs show, In the Moment.
On a cold day in either 1860 or 1861 - nobody knows for sure- a Norwegian immigrant named Inglebrigt Severson left his wife Syrena and their two young daughters on the Nebraska shore of the Missouri River west of Vermillion. Severson walked north across the frozen river and kept going, crossing about ten miles of flat virgin prairie until he reached the low but rugged bluffs on the Dakota side of the river. He found a spot he liked and staked his claim. He went back for his family and got going on the tough work of homesteading.
Like most of the white settlers who moved into Dakota Territory just behind the U.S. Army and just ahead of the railroads, the Seversons had to live in whatever kind of shelter they could find or build quickly.
The Seversons carved a dugout into one of the hillsides and lived in it for about 8 years. Like many homesteaders who made it through their first years on the land, the Seversons were eventually able to built a more substantial home out of locally harvested cottonwood logs.
It's not known if Inglebrigt Severson built the house himself or if he had it built by someone else, but whatever the case, the old log house still stands after 153 years. That it does is not just because of good building materials and craftsmanship. It probably helps that the house was continuously occupied from the early 1860s until the early 1960s, but more important is the stewardship provided by owners during the 1970s and, more recently, Jerry and Norma Wilson.
The Wilsons, both retired English professors and published authors, have dedicated a great deal of their time and energy to keeping the log house sound, and restoring the land around it to native prairie grasses. The transcript of an interview with the Wilsons follows the photo galleries
An interview with Jerry
SDPB's Brian Gevik:
Jerry, who were the first settlers here, and how did they establish themselves?
Jerry Wilson:
Well, Inglebrigt and Syrena Severson arrived here somewhere, we don't know exactly, but around 1860, shortly after the land was opened for settlement. Oral legend says that they lived in a dugout somewhere on this hillside, but we don't know where, and for several years apparently. Then in 1869, or thereabouts, they built this house.
SDPB:
Could you kind of just describe the home in terms of its size and layout?
Jerry Wilson:
Okay, I've forgotten the exact length, but I believe it's 24 by 17, two stories with a full basement. The basement is built of Sioux quartzite, big slabs of Sioux quartzite, primarily, and they were not even mortared when the house was built. Later, someone mortared the south wall, and some of the north wall, and I mortared parts of the east wall over here, because there'd been a low spot there and water had stood there, and it was bulging it in. So, I had to mortar that, and then my son and I had to rebuild the staircase into the basement on the west side. It's built of cottonwood logs. The historic preservationists think that the little addition on the north was probably added later, possibly in the twenties when they also put siding on the outside of the house. Then that siding was all taken off by Ellis and Mary Ellen and Rick Jensen, in about 1975. They replaced all the broken windows and so on, and they put it on the National Register of Historic Places.
SDPB:
How did you come by it?
Jerry Wilson:
Auction sale on the front steps of the courthouse. It had been foreclosed on by a previous owner, and we bought it at the auction.
SDPB:
You bought it partly for the cabin, but mostly for the land, am I right?
Jerry Wilson:
Yes, actually, as I mentioned in (my book) “Waiting for Coyote’s Call,” I half hoped that this house was not on our side of the line. The property line runs basically down the creek here. It looked like nothing but work, and I had plenty of work. I was still working full-time and trying to restore native prairie and everything. So, I wasn't really looking for another job, but the surveyor said, "Yep, it's on your side," so then the two choices were to let the house and its history go down, or to try to figure out a way to save it.
SDPB:
You knew that it was going to be quite a project, but were you, I guess, surprised by how much of a project, or was it pretty much what you expected?
Jerry Wilson:
I didn't know what to expect. I was editor of South Dakota Magazine at the time, and we had done a story on a man named Ray Chamberlain, who lived just outside Arlington. Ray was a barn straightener, he and one of his sons, they'd straighten all kinds of big old barns around the countryside. So, when I started looking at this thinking, I haven't the slightest idea how to begin. We'd built our own house, but that's something entirely different, and so I called Ray and asked him whether it might be possible for him to come down, and look it over, and give us some advice. So, he said, "Yeah, I'll be down Saturday, or whatever, real soon," and when he showed up, he didn't come to give me advice. He came with the full complement of the tools, two 20-ton jacks and a gigantic drill and all kinds of come-alongs, all the equipment for straightening a barn. We looked around inside and he said, "Okay, the first thing we've got to do is tie the good logs together, so we'll put a five by six post in each corner, and bolt all the good logs to that. Then we'll take one of the 17 foot logs and put it at a 45 degree angle out from underneath an upper log." We dug a big hole out there and put a gigantic rock in it to stop the jack, and we jacked on both jacks until we had raised it up about an inch, which was a lot of jacking. I mean, it moved that rock quiet ways into the earth before it finally started raising the house. Then we were able to take a chainsaw and cut out all the rotten logs, and get them all stripped out.
Meanwhile, there was this man named Steve Aschoff, who had a lumber mill up at Worthing. Steve cut me 17 logs to the dimensions I gave him, the longer ones were 17 feet long, and they were five inches thick, and anywhere from 12 to 17 inches high. I borrowed a trailer and my brother and I hauled them down here and we let them set for a summer to further dry a little bit. But after sitting for a summer, they still weighed well over 300 pounds each. I had to have some muscle to help me so we did the east half in 2003. It took most of my spare time for the summer, and then the next summer we did the west half.
SDPB:
How would you describe the extent of the work that you're doing? You're certainly not trying to change anything?
Jerry Wilson:
Yeah, we were trying to restore it as... I mean, it was impossible to restore it as the Seversons and probably their other carpenters built it, because their logs were hand-hewn with adze. They were all tongue and groove and they had a double slope dovetail joint in the corners. Once they got it all put together, put three or four logs up, they would drill an inch and a quarter hole down through those logs, and drive a sapling down into them as a dowel, so it was built to stay.
SDPB:
I am pretty sure that that would've been hand drilled.
Jerry Wilson:
Yeah, they had no electricity.
SDPB:
Right.
Jerry Wilson:
There was no way that anyone could have done it exactly like they did, because in order to do that double dovetail slope in the corners, you have to start at the bottom log and work your way up. I did a few sort of halfway that way, but most of them, I had to just square the corners off like so.
SDPB:
Yeah, you don't start laying bricks on the top course.
Jerry Wilson:
Right.
SDPB:
I'm wondering, just kind of as a through line of the Seversons, what became of them
Jerry Wilson:
We don't know a whole lot about them except we had a neighbor named Alfred C. Ellison, who grew up half mile north here. I just, by chance, met him in his old age. He was wearing a cap that said ACE, Alfred C. Ellison. So, he told me everything he knew about them, he'd known the whole family, not the first generation, but the second and third generations. So, supposedly Inglebrigt and Syrena are buried just east of the house here somewhere, but there's no marker that we can find. (Note: Syrena died of typhoid fever in ~1879.)
SDPB:
Now, in terms of how many families lived here and for how long?
Jerry Wilson:
It was three generations of one family for a hundred years. Inglebrigt and Syrena arrived in the 1860s, built the house in '69. Their daughter Gurina married a man named John Rice, a recent Norwegian immigrant, a few years younger than her. They had eight children in this house, and it was John who put the siding on the outside and made some other changes. Then the last of their sons, two Norwegian bachelor farmers, lived here into their eighties. One of them died in a tractor accident up on the hill, turned a tractor over, the other eventually had to go to the nursing home for his last days. But so, basically, from the 1860s to the 1960s.
SDPB:
I'm wondering a little bit about your philosophy, in terms of the way that you approach land ownership, and possession, and I know that you're very serious about conservation. I'm just looking in your book, and you say, “The highest obligation of a land possessor is to discover and implement sustainable practices on the land.”
Jerry Wilson:
Our names are on a document somewhere that says it's ours, but that's a fleeting moment in time.
Norma Wilson:
The house is an important part of the history of the county we live in, because it is the oldest standing former home, and it's built of logs, it's built of local materials. It has a certain sturdy beauty about it, I think that it was a place that when Inglebrigt Severson found it, it seemed perfect for his family life. Because he could build a house that would face south, get the most sun in the winter, and it's right by a flowing stream that flows the year round from springs, there's Springs to the north. So, it was not you just a house built on any piece of land, this is a very special place. Now, there's more wildlife on this place than in most areas in this part of the state, partly because there's a wooded area to the north, there's shelter for the animals. For us, it's really important to try to bring back the prairie as much as possible, so that it will be... Not just so that it would be like it was before, when native people occupied this land. But, partly because of that, and partly because it's best for the earth, because tall grass prairie is so good at sequestering carbon. It helps us to fight climate change, to have this land covered with the native grasses. So, I very much appreciate Jerry's initiative to restore the prairie, and have helped him somewhat in that process, and with the house too. I've certainly been less involved than he has, certainly with this house. Now, with the house we live in, I was very involved, because we live in a geo-solar house near here. But this one was rather daunting with its heavy logs, and I helped when I could. When Ray Chamberlain came, he stayed at our house, and I came down and helped from time to time, and provided food for some of the workers, or friends who helped. But I was in sort of a support role, and still am, and I wish I were physically able to do more of this hard work that's being done, but I can hold onto a board while it's being nailed on, or somehow attached, or a log.
SDPB:
Because you're both so articulate and so imaginative, you've spent so much time here, can you in a way put yourself the a place of those people that came here, when they were looking at digging into the dirt for a place to live, and bringing their kids up, and dealing with all of the things that they had to deal with. Can you put yourself in place?
Norma Wilson:
It must have been very hard, but I grew up seeing my grandparents live pretty much a subsistence life, milking the cows, and raising their food. Raising the animals that they would eat. And Jerry and I... Jerry, the same way, he grew up being close to the land and close to people who did that. We've tried to do as much of that as we could, because we want to know where our food comes from, and have some part of in it. It nourishes us.
Jerry Wilson:
But if I were Inglebrigt crossing the river on ice in 1860, and coming through head high prairie, all the way across, looking for a place to settle. When I saw this place, I would do exactly as he did. I would choose this place, it's got good bottom land, it's got woods, it's got some water, what else do you need?
Norma Wilson:
He made the perfect choice.