David put up more than a pole shed

The Immigrants
by Eric Bergeson

When the immigrant pioneers built our local small towns, their ambitions went far beyond the practical necessities of scratching out a living.

You would think clearing the land with an axe, building cabins and barns with hand tools while at the same time raising enough food to survive would occupy one full-time. Yet, the civic-minded settlers took time out to build public buildings.

Those public buildings were more than functional. They were meant to be grand. The churches had tall steeples, stained glass windows and expensive pipe organs.

Each county seat tried to outdo the next by building an opulent, neo-classical courthouse. The fairgrounds had to have an exhibit hall and a grandstand. Long-forgotten fraternal lodges like the Odd Fellows built halls with grand ballrooms.

Big brick schoolhouses were a matter of pride, meant to symbolize the importance of education to the people of the town. No bland cubicle classrooms in those buildings. They had high ceilings, grand staircases and tall windows.

Small-town businesses built brick buildings meant to last. The old bank building in town, built in 1914, looks like the Parthenon, complete with columns. It seems to say, “We’ll be here for the ages, we won’t take your money and run.”

Out in the country, the immigrants built beautiful one-room schoolhouses, most crowned by an expensive bell. Each township put up a town hall. In my little neighborhood, there were also band stands, two beautiful brick creameries, several churches and at least two temperance halls, one of which still stands.

Where did these people get the energy to build all of these buildings, especially when they had all they could do to clear enough land to raise enough food to eat?

The immigrants’ energy arose from a belief that they were building a new society, one which would last hundreds of years. They attempted to recreate the villages they left back in the Old Country, where the barns and churches were hundreds of years old.

The immigrants up and left the Old Country to make good, and they were eager to prove that their endeavor was a success. Making money for one’s self wasn’t enough. Building a grand town, leaving a legacy, starting traditions and building institutions mattered just as much.

Filled by energetic immigrants, rural Minnesota hit its peak population in 1915. The small towns survived World War I, the Great Depression and World War II in good shape, but by 1950, the writing was on the wall.

The immigrants, bless their hearts, didn’t forsee the technological changes which would soon decimate the culture of the countryside they worked so hard to build.

Soldiers who returned to the small town after World War II found that in their absence, farms were forced to mechanize. Combines had replaced large threshing crews. Most returning GIs took their brides and moved to the suburbs to find work.

Main Street, which thrived when the surrounding countryside teemed with large families on 160 acre farms, dried up on the vine as the average size of farms doubled, tripled, quadrupled and finally moved into the thousands of acres.

The biggest loss: The hope, the vision and the drive to build the small town for subsequent generations. Once it became apparent that the future generations would leave town as fast as they graduated from high school, the goal of building a better society for one’s children and grandchildren lost its magic.

Today, we look at those old buildings and find their architectural flourishes a little silly. New churches and schools which go up tend to be as plain as a pole shed.

Indeed, pole sheds are what we build now. Undecorated, practical, designed to last one lifetime at most, modern small-town buildings don’t even pretend to be grand monuments to higher principles.

If we are going to return our small towns to the glory they knew 100 years ago, we’re going to need a lot more than a factory moving into town to provide jobs. We’re going to have to recover some of the long-term vision, big dreams and vital energy of our immigrant ancestors.

Eric writes the Country Scribe from his home in Fertile, Minnesota.