The August 15th PotD was of the five older Wright siblings standing in front of the sod house in Alberta in about 1913. At that time, I wrote that it was the only photo of the Wright children on the homestead in Alberta that I knew of. Well, guess what turned up in Dad’s photo album? Two more photos taken in Alberta. These were taken in 1921 or 1922, so not too long before Grandma and the kids left for the US.
The first photo is of the two girls in the family, Ann and Mina. In 1921, Ann would have been 14 and Mina would have been 5.
The second photo is of the three youngest, Lee, Mina and John, aged about 3, 5 and 6 respectively in 1921.
I believe what is in the background of both photos is the “frame house” that was built in 1918 (finally) to replace the sod house. Dad remarked at how much colder the frame house was in the winter compared to the sod house. (He tells of how water dripped on the floor would turn to ice in the night.) A frame house probably would have been colder even under the best of circumstances, since the walls of the sod house were one foot thick solid material and I imagine this was before there was any practical form of insulation for the walls of a frame house. Nevertheless, I look at the way he exterior walls of the frame house were built–just boards side-by-side, nailed to a frame, many of them cracked on the ends or worse. It appears that the boards have shrunk as they dried out (as would be expected), leaving noticeable gaps between the boards. No paint, no effort to fill the gaps with something. One hopes there was at least tar paper or something similar underneath the boards. No wonder the house was cold in the winter! It would be interesting to know whether this was typical of frame house construction on the plains of Alberta at that time. It’s probably not a fair comparison, but I look at houses built in Albany around the same time, and they certainly don’t look like the frame house in these pictures.
The third photo is one Art took in 1958 (just 36 or 37 years after the other photos were taken) showing what remained of the frame house at that time: just a hole in the ground where the cellar was.
Kathryn asked: “I wonder if the sod house would have been available to live in during the winter after the frame house was built?”
My answer, for what it’s worth:
No, not really. The sod house was slowly collapsing. The last few years in it they had to put braces on the outside because the walls were beginning to collapse outward. I suppose they could have built a second sod house, if there was any of the original sod still around that hadn’t been plowed under for farming. Sod houses were never intended to be any more than temporary structures. Grandpa really pushed his luck living in one for seven years. I don’t think it was typical for a homesteader to stay in a sod house for more than a year or two.
That it took seven years to get around to building a permanent house, and that even with that the permanent house was little more than a shack (by all appearances) is a reflection of their poverty. There were probably all sorts of contributing factors to that. Regardless of the reasons, you can certainly appreciate why, after eleven years on the prairie, four of which were living in this shack that provided little protection from the elements, Grandma finally put her foot down (apparently) and said, “I’m not saying here another winter, and my children aren’t either.” We don’t know how that discussion actually went, of course, but the fact is that in the late fall of 1922, Grandma and the kids boarded a train for the US. Except for Irvine, none of them ever went back (well, not until decades later).
Grandpa stayed behind, determined to make the homestead work. It was four more years (three more farming seasons) before he finally moved to Oregon for good. I don’t know how many of those seasons he was actively farming the homestead and how many he was just getting the place ready to sell. Presumably at least one more season of farming, maybe two.
I’m wandering pretty far from answering your question, so I’ll stop here.
Art wrote: “I hadn’t realized that grandpa stayed behind in Alberta four more years. That sheds a new light on Dad, Ann and the other kids contribution to family success/survival in Oregon. By the pictures you have shown, they together didn’t do all that badly assuming they arrived dirt poor.”
My impression is that Grandpa was not in Alberta that whole time. At the least, he came to Oregon for visits (presumably in the winter). Perhaps some of those visits lasted the whole winter. There are a lot of gaps in my knowledge of Grandpa’s comings and goings during this time. I also know that Uncle Irvine went back to help Grandpa on the homestead, perhaps for harvest in 1923. But I don’t think he could have been there a long time, given all Dad tells about Uncle Irvine in Oregon during this period (though Uncle Irvine mostly did not live with the family).
Grandpa somehow worked out a real estate transaction that got them the Goltra farm in trade for the homestead in Alberta. One would have thought that would equate to Grandpa being in Oregon from the time they moved to Goltra, but I don’t think that was the case. There are some inconsistencies in the chronology Dad gives, but it seems that they moved to Goltra in late 1924, but Grandpa didn’t make his final move to Oregon until late 1926. Dad’s memories aren’t clear on that, but the diary he kept at the time suggests that Dad was running the Goltra farm himself until he and Uncle Irvine left in September 1926 to work the apple harvest in Hood River. And Dad does say the reason he left at that time was that Grandpa had come and Dad “didn’t relish” working with him. Perhaps part of the deal in trading the homestead for the Goltra farm was that Grandpa would stay on in Alberta and help with the transition to the new owner. But that’s just a guess.
Within a year after Dad left the Goltra farm and Grandpa had to run the place himself, they moved to Jefferson and Grandpa “retired.” Evidently Grandpa didn’t care to run the farm himself. This drips with irony, since the Goltra farm had much better prospects of at least providing a living for the family than the homestead in Alberta ever did.
As for Grandma and the kids, the poverty didn’t end the minute they arrived in Oregon. After staying a brief time with the Hulshofs, they lived in an abandoned logging camp on Hale Butte (the hill just east of I-5 and just north of the South Jefferson exit) for about six months. The boys worked cutting and splitting wood, which they sold. That was their only income. After that they moved to a place near Hulshofs referred to as the “Ingram [or Ingraham] Place,” where they lived for most of a year until moving to Goltra. I don’t know anything about this place or what the financial arrangements were. It wasn’t until they moved to Goltra and got the farm running that their standard of living began to improve significantly. Or at least that’s my impression.
The arrival of Grandma and the kids on the Hulshof’s doorstep must have been culture shock on both sides. I think I remember Aunt Persis saying that the Hulshof kids didn’t even know their Wright cousins existed until they arrived on their doorstep. And what were the Hulshof’s going to do with a woman and nine children? Who knows what Gerrit and Lottie thought of all this. But no matter how much they might have wanted to help, they couldn’t possibly house ten extra people for any length of time.
I have no way of knowing, but I imagine Grandma was fully aware of the extent to which she was imposing on her brother’s family, and it was probably embarrassing to her. It speaks to her desperation, I think, that she was willing to do that anyway, just to get out of Alberta.
That’s some of what I know about this period, with a healthy dose of speculation thrown in.