Claudia PlauntMartin

An excerpt from The Epic of Clapp's Flat

This article is the fifteenth in a series written by Grace Pilgrim Bloom as her contribution to the bicentennial. She was very respected in the community. She and her husband ran a newspaper in New Richmond, Wisconsin USA

When Nelson Davis, the Welshman set out that March 22, 1932 spring morning from the home of his son Roy for the old Davis home where his eldest son Elmer was living, it was altogether fitting that death should stalk him. He was 87. He had had 55 of the happiest years of his life on the flat. That quarter mile stretch of county line road was hallowed ground to him. As he walked he may have cast an eye toward the north rim of the flat to the home site of Peter Mork, for when the Davises and the Pilgrims arrived in the mid 1870's the prairie was not untenanted. At the extreme north edge of the rim Peter Mork already had a set of buildings on the Alden side of the town road that separated Alden from Farmington. Peter Mork may have been the first dweller with his acres stretched out over the rich prairie.

How Peter discovered such a fine farmstead in the New World we never shall know but we do know that it was he and his good wife Jensena who attracted their neighbors living over at the northwest corner of the rim, Andrew Christopherson and his wife, Anna Marie, for the two women were sisters. It was in 1869 that the Andrew Christophersons set sail from Christiana, the old capital of Norway, afterwards rechristened Oslo, bringing their family to the Land of Promise. They cruised by sailboat for three weeks to reach Quebec. There they disembarked and set out by horse-drawn Conestoga for Green County, Wisconsin, where there was a settlement of their own countrymen. There they tarried but a short time. In 1873 when their Charles was eleven they were already well established on their own farm to the west of Uncle Peter. Until they could improvise living quarters on their own land the Christopherson had bound living with the Peter Morks a pleasant interlude in their family life.

Excitement and good will ran high in the Andrew Christopherson home as the 1874 Yuletide season approached for their married daughter Mathea, left behind in Christiana, had just made the Atlantic crossing with her husband, Antony Gilbertson and their two little boys, Charles, four, and Conrad, two, to join her people in Polk county. On December 24, elaborate last minute preparations were completed for Christmas, the most important day on the calendar in every Scandinavian household. Uncle Peter decided to drive that day to Jeweltown for some extra treats for the approaching Yuletide season which often lasts two weeks with Norsemen. He took Antony Gilbertson with him.

On the way home he took a shortcut across the ice on Cedar Lake. Early darkness approached. When they reached the outlet of Horse Creek where it empties itself into the lake, the horses plunged through a crevice in the thin ice and all went down - men, sleigh and horses. Gone, for his first Yuletide in America, was Antony Gilbertson. Uncle Peter managed to save himself. All else was lost. The young wife was bereft of her husband in a strange land where she did not even speak the language. She was a well-bred young woman, a city girl brought up in her country's capital, yet the only occupation open to her in the pioneer period of a frontier community was to become a housemaid. Her parents kept her four-old; Charles Gilbertson was destined to dwell with his grandparents at their home on the rim of the flat for another seventy-five years. Uncle Peter Mork and Aunt Jensena who had an only child, their daughter Emma, took Conrad into their hearts and home and brought him up as their only son. The Mork home where he grew up is now the Lee Carlson farmstead. When Conrad married Carrie, a daughter of the Nelson Davises, they lived for forty years on the heart of the flat on part of the Samuel Hemenway estate, a large tract Uncle Peter had acquired.

In the meantime, with her sons so secure, Mathea was working in Jeweltown, now Star Prairie, for Mr. and Mrs. Trueworthy Jewell, pioneer founders for whom the community was originally name. The years sped by. Eventually Mathea met Sven Wilen, born in Varmland, Sweden, who had come to America to homestead on the Kansas plains. Bereft of his wife and twin sons, he had come to visit his sister Betsy near Star Prairie, Mathea and Sven, both tempered by sorrow, found solace in each other. They married. He traded his sun-baked quarter section in Kansas for a rolling piece of land near Star Prairie where they settled down together. The tow sons born of their second marriages were William Wilen, a master farmer who lived west of Star Prairie and Dr. Arthur N. Wilen, a prominent dentist and oral surgeon of Minneapolis.

The Andrew Christophersons, departing, left their holding to their son Charles who had married a girl of Cedar Lake area, Nettie Everson. Their son Norman Christopherson, long associated in the McCarty Implement business in Osceola, ultimately disposed of his holdings and now lives here in retirement while his brother Henry and his family carry on the century-old farmstead on the flat. Such were our good neighbors, the Morks and the Christophersons.

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