Knowing Daddy’s fondness for frontier adventure stories, which we all enjoyed, Mother had asked him to choose a Christmas book for me about girls my age. Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott turned out to be a more important choice than any of us realized at the time. I was enthralled with the story and quickly found the other books in her series Little Women, Eight Cousins, and Little Men in the library after winter vacation. We had our usual family discussions about the books we were reading, but as we talked, these interrelated novels and their characters began to stir Mother’s memories, scenes from her own childhood, long forgotten … a part of our mother we had never known….
We knew only that she lost her father about the time John was born, and that her mother had died before that. As we talked about the books, she slowly – and at times painfully – began to recall her early life and share the stories with John and me. She identified with the orphans that Jo March and Dr. Baer adopted, and Marmee from Little Women was like the mother she never knew.
Piece by piece, she filled in the blank spaces of our own heritage. Her parents emigrated from Sweden in1894 with their two girls, when Mother was only a few months old and her sister Jane was three. They settled in the Cedar-Riverside area, a Swedish neighborhood in Minneapolis where my grandfather, John Wennerholm, who was a master baker in Sweden, could only find work as a laborer. He began saving money to establish his own bakery.
They were living in a small apartment when Mother’s curiosity led to their first misfortune. Eager to check out the dining room table top, she pulled on the cloth, tipping over a lighted oil lamp. The fire quickly burned out of control, seriously damaging their furnishings, and the apartment building where they had recently settled.
Then her mother, who was pregnant with their third child, came down with tuberculosis – in those days a lethal scourge of recent immigrants. It was the type that progressed so rapidly it was commonly called “galloping consumption,” and she died shortly after giving birth to their only boy. My devastated grandfather placed his tiny son in an infant nursing home, but the baby also died soon afterward.
And then he was alone with two small daughters. With all of his efforts to support the family and save money for his own bakery someday, he still worked irregular hours as a lumber company laborer, and had to travel often for out of town jobs. Having no relatives to turn to, he sought help from the only resource he knew of – the local First Covenant Swedish Tabernacle Church. He wanted to find a family the girls could live with until his life was in order and he was able to care for them. No one would take both girls, but one family offered to provide a foster home for Jane. Another family agreed to take Mother – but then, fearing the pain of separation later, decided they wanted to adopt her. Grandpa had no intention of giving her up permanently, so he searched desperately for other options.
Someone from his church finally suggested the Washburn Memorial Orphan Asylum. It was established in 1883 by C.C. Washburn, a philanthropist who operated the Washburn-Crosby Milling Company (now General Mills). It was considered an enlightened facility, and after he visited and met with staff, he was satisfied that Washburn would be an adequate home for his daughter, until he could provide for her.
So at age three, traumatized by losing her mother and brother, separated from her father and sister, Mother found herself among more than a hundred other children, in a strange institution – where everyone spoke English. The only words she knew were in Swedish. Fortunately they found Freda Olson, a newly hired laundress – the only person at the home who understood Swedish – so she became her translator as Mother learned the new language.
For the first two years she was in a large nursery with several other toddlers, but after her fifth birthday, she was moved to a dormitory room with other girls near her age. The orphanage had its own two-room school attended by all children through eighth grade. This arrangement kept the children completely isolated from outside contact. Even relatives were allowed no more than one visit every three months. The children left the grounds only when chaperoned, either individually with a matron for doctor and dentist appointments, or in groups for field trips, picnics, and to attend church downtown. Older children went to religious services – boys and girls on alternate Sundays – at the Universal Church of the Redeemer, which the Washburn family attended. But at age fifteen they were discharged to make their own way – in a world they had hardly seen.
Small groups of children rode the streetcar downtown with their chaperone to Dr. Fryberger’s office for periodic check-ups and treatments. During a clinic visit, mother remembered, one of the boys was playing on an open window ledge three floors up from the street. He slipped, and would probably have fallen to his death, but mother grabbed him by the legs and held him until he could be pulled back into the room. A few days later she found an orange in her desk – left by the boy.
Staff enforced a strict no-talking rule during meals. As much as John and I were notorious for non-stop chattering (my dominant trait), we could not imagine a room with over a hundred mute children, staring down at their food, chewing in silence. Although some matrons were more lenient, their tolerance was limited by regulations. The more authoritarian ones saw Mother’s independent streak as a challenge – one matron told her that she considered it her job to break Mother’s spirit.
Discipline at the Home was considered humane, meaning they did not beat the children – at least not the girls. A leather strap was used on the boys who got seriously out of line. A stubborn or sassy girl was more likely locked in a dark closet. Apparently Mother’s feisty independence earned her considerable closet time….
Her stifled resentment would leak out on occasion, like kicking a leg of her chair, a behavior that led to numerous closet sessions. One time, as she became enraged and raised her leg to kick, she caught herself mid-air, and quietly put her foot back on the floor. Instead of praising her new-found self control, she was back in the closet once again – for having the thought….
She had only two photographs of herself as a child. The first was a studio portrait done shortly after their arrival in America. She sat at a table with her chin resting on her clasped hands, her long blond hair loosely falling to her shoulders, a winsome smile on her face. In the second picture, taken when she was six or seven, the smile and the long hair were gone. Taken on a visit with her father when she was six or seven, her somber, expressionless face contrasts sharply with her sister, Jane. The only similarity was their matching white organdy dresses, a gift from their father. Jane’s hair was long and wavy, tied with ribbons on either side, and Mother’s was bobbed like a boy’s. The institutional policy requiring short hair for all girls was supposedly based on health and sanitary reasons – but it also meant the matrons did not have to wash and braid all that hair. Girls were allowed to have long hair when they could manage it themselves – but only in approved styles….
One day Mother spotted a new hairstyle in a magazine – a simple but elegant upsweep look, anchored with combs – and decided to try it out. When she made her grand entrance at dinner that evening, the matron in charge sent her straight back to her room, and she was not allowed to eat until her hair was back to the plain style they all wore.
Always competitive by nature, she was proud of the time she found a way to outwit the star of her knitting class. The girls were taught to knit as soon as they could hold needles properly, and they made scarves, caps, mittens and stockings according to their level of skill. They knit in the classroom, where competition to produce became keen, fired by the rivalries of various cliques.
Her main competitor was an older girl who was fast and talented – a formidable opponent. Each girl kept her current project in her personal “cubby hole” in the dormitory room shelves, the only place they could store strictly personal possessions. After the lights were out and she knew everyone else was asleep, Mother got out her scarf and worked in the dark until she was sure she was ahead of the other girl. The next day, shortly after they began knitting – and before her competitor could catch up – Mother made a point of displaying her scarf so everyone could see and admire her progress. No one ever suspected…
Although they emphasized teaching the girls domestic skills, dressmaking was not included in the curriculum. Washburn had a seamstress who worked from a sewing room on the second floor. She lived on the premises and made all of the children’s clothes: shirts and pants for the boys and dresses for the girls. Outfits for the girls were all the same style for each age group, made from gingham or calico purchased by the bolt, and always had underpants to match. Each child had two everyday outfits – one to wear and one to wash – and they were allowed one set of Sunday clothes, if given to them by a relative.
While Mother was riding on a streetcar with one of the matrons, on the way to a doctor appointment, the car jerked suddenly as she was standing in the aisle. She fell in an awkward position with her skirt up – but she told us the most humiliating part was being branded as an orphan because of her matching blue gingham underpants.
One Sunday morning, she wore her best white organdy dress to the annual Children’s Day service at Church of the Redeemer in downtown Minneapolis. She stood up in front of the whole congregation and recited from memory the story from Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, about the boy who saved a town by sticking his finger in the dyke.
The older girls were assigned rotating monthly housekeeping jobs. They learned responsibility and basic cleaning skills – but they also provided a free source of help for the home. These jobs included cleaning and inspecting dormitory rooms, keeping the chapel and assembly room neat, washing inside windows, dining room detail – including preparation and serving in the officers’ dining area, helping in the kitchen, cleaning the two sets of stairs, working in the nursery, and washing and ironing in the laundry room. Mother felt these duties prepared her and the other girls well for life after they left the home. She didn’t mention if the older boys were assigned comparable responsibilities…. But after hearing her stories, John and I certainly understood the roots of her cleaning ethic.
Over the years, she earned personal recognition at the Home in a number of approved arenas, like her skill in fine handwork. She was chosen to do the decorative feather-stitching on a quilt the older girls had made for Mrs. Lowry, a prominent trustee and major donor of the orphanage. Her husband, Thomas Lowry, was president of the Minneapolis Streetcar Company when they built the showers, club room, and library at the station where my father worked, many years later.
Whenever John or I was sick, Mother always fixed us Milk Toast in what she called “boats”. This traditional sickroom dish always reminds me of Robert Lois Stevenson’s poem “The Land of Counterpane”. She cut little squares of toast and put a blob of tart red jelly in the center of each one, all floating in a sea of hot milk with traces of melted butter on top. In a wistful moment she confessed that she had wished to be sick more often as a child – for the extra attention, being waited on and fussed over by the matrons and older girls.
The Land of Counterpane
When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
From A Child’s garden of Verses
By Robert Lewis Stevenson
She purposely dallied one day when the matrons were getting ready for a group outing, and everyone left without her. Realizing that no one even noticed she was missing, she began to cry – so loudly that Mr. Faulkner, the superintendant, heard her from his office down the hall, and came to check on her. Between sobs, she told him that they had left her alone. After trying to console her, he returned to his office, but she started crying again, so he took her back to his desk, sat her on his knee for a while, and they talked. He was sympathetic, but explained that he needed to go to a meeting. She promised to stop crying if she could stay at his desk while he was gone, and then spent the rest of a happy afternoon busying herself in his office.
Mrs. Farnsworth, Mother’s favorite teacher at Washburn, obviously saw something special in this gifted student over the years as she watched her grow into young womanhood. But she warned that there would be much to learn about life on the outside after leaving the home.
Mother’s time at the orphanage amounted to most of her childhood – far longer than most of the children. She was thirteen before her father was finally able to establish his own bakery and have his daughters come to live with him. On her departure, Mother was given a little gold watch which John and I loved to look at, and a Certificate of Merit acknowledging that she had been “an inmate of this institution for a period of (fill in the blank) Ten Years” and had “Attained a Merit Record for Good Deportment in her Home and School Life, Worthy of Special Recognition.” The printed form, routinely given to children when they left, stated that it was “executed and delivered to the said (fill in the blank) ‘Martha C. Wennerholm’ as a testimonial of Confidence and Affection”….
She left with her two outfits – and matching underpants; her Sunday dress, a gift from her father; and a small box from her cubbyhole in the dormitory which held the rest of her personal effects.
Apparently my grandfather soon learned that the adjustment period, once the girls came to live with him, would be a bit rockier than he anticipated. During her years at the home, she had been taught the absolute evils of alcohol. Her father, who enjoyed a beer after work, was shocked to find that his thirteen year old daughter had not only thrown out his brew – but refused to allow any in the house. She became her own version of house matron….
Mrs. Farnsworth kept in touch with Mother for years afterward. Knowing that she had seen so little of real family life, she gave her a bound set of red books on child care after I was born. John and I discovered them one day while looking through our books for something new to read. After hearing her story about Mrs. Farnsworth’s gift, we each took a volume and began to read the examples – little narratives demonstrating “good” and “bad” ways for mothers to handle the daily challenges of child rearing. We were fascinated by them, even feeling a little conspiratorial as we realized how manipulative parents could be. After that we became aware of being maneuvered at times, but we never tried to use our insights against her.
She told us how important Mrs. Farnsworth’s kindness and influence had been in her early life. Without someone who appreciated her inquisitive mind and creative spirit, Mother might have become the incorrigible problem child some of the matrons saw – and battled with for many years.
John and I begged for every detail that she could remember about the orphanage. As we learned more about her childhood, while reading and discussing the Alcott books, our own sense of real and fictional became blurred. Characters seemed to merge in the same stories; Marmee and Mrs. Farnsworth; Jo March and Mr. Falkner….
And our talks stirred one of my own memories. Sheltering Arms was an institution for children a few blocks from our last house in Minneapolis. The residents went to Miles Standish School with John and me. We thought the girls dressed “funny” – all alike with braided hair, and they were the only ones at our school who wore black stockings. We were told they were orphans which meant they had no parents. I remember a feeling in my stomach, a troubling fear each time I thought about something happening to my parents. I didn’t talk with the girls from Sheltering Arms….
John and I asked to hear her stories again and again, and I always wondered what it must have felt like not having a mother. At some point, I started doing her hair when she wanted it trimmed or styled in a new way, and I realized that sometimes our roles were reversed – that I was doing what no one had ever done for her.
While Mother was in the Home her father always sent books, mainly standard literary classics. These were not only a link with him and a demonstration of his concern for her, but also a means of escaping the regimen of institutional life. Her passion for literature became both a solace and a stimulus to her imagination and intellect.
Years later, Mother made sure we read many of the same books. I remember vividly one summer day, when the house was stifling hot from doing laundry, we took our lunch outside in the grove. After we’d eaten, as John and I stretched out on the picnic table, Mother read us the story from Tanglewood Tales about Bellerophon riding the winged horse Pegasus on his way to slay the Chimera. Gazing upwards I watched a puffy white Pegasus-cloud drift across my part of the blue sky, framed by the swaying treetops.
Aware of her love for great literature, Mrs. Farnsworth always encouraged Mother to continue in school, which she did, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota at a time when only about one woman in a hundred completed college. She then went on to complete the course work for a Master’s degree in Greek and Latin, which qualified her to become a high school teacher. After graduation, her first teaching job was in West Concord, Minnesota, where she met my father.
Besides undoubtedly running the best home school program in Hubbard County, Mother’s degrees were not very helpful for our life on the farm. But she saved many of her college textbooks, including specimen notebooks from a botany course, and we used them often to identify plants we found in the woods. We had finally learned where those imposing and helpful books came from.
Once Mother and her sister Jane left their father’s house, their adult lives were on different tracks. Jane, who had little interest in furthering her education, graduated from high school, married, and had four children. With the birth of her last child, a boy who was born at home, she got childbed fever and died. The baby survived only briefly and was buried in the same grave with Jane – a bitter reminder of 1896.
Mother was adamant that her own children would have a loving home. She did her willful best to create the perfect family she imagined while sitting in dark closets and quiet dining rooms. But despite her sometimes harrowing stories, she always defended the “Home” saying many times that they all did the best they could, according to the customs and philosophy of the times….