Did you know that Glen and Sophia lived in northwestern Minnesota, southeast of Fargo for about the first three years of their marriage?

Did you know that Glen and Sophia lived in northwestern Minnesota, southeast of Fargo for about the first three years of their marriage?  The place was Manston township, Wilkin County, Minnesota.

Per their marriage announcement, both Glen and Sophia, along with Glen’s sister Lena and her new husband, Monte Sisson, were moving there right after their marriage.  They were moving there to “have charge of a large farm belonging to A. H. McCoy, engineer on the Fairmont-Madelia line of the Omaha”.

By June 5^th they were living in Manston township per Glen’s WW1 draft registration, so I would assume that they would have moved up there some time after their marriage and probably before the spring planting.

I located the A. H. McCoy property on a map of the time and located the farm.  It was 320 acres, and back in the 1917 timeframe, farming 320 acres by horse was probably a very large and hard job.  This would be approximately the size of the farm where Steve originally farmed, which is also where Scott used to live, or about the size of the Trimont farm.  Imagine farming that by horse?

(you can double click on any picture for a closer look)

This is where Sophia gave birth to their first son, Lowel.  He died in Barnesville, just a few miles north of where they lived, and is buried in Barnesville.

When and why they moved back I’m a little uncertain.  On January 29, 1920 they were still living in Manston township, but Raymond was born later that year on December 29, 1920 and they were back in Pilot Grove by then.  By the January 29^th date, Lena and Monte had already returned to Fairmont.  Why or when I don’t know.  So my assumption would be that Glen and Sophia probably returned after the harvest in the fall of 1920.  Why?  A guess would be that with Sophia pregnant with Raymond, and having lost the first son, Lowel a long ways from family, and now even Lena and Monte were also gone, maybe Sophia wanted to be closer to home for this birth.  It may be due to totally unrelated reasons as well.

On Google Earth, this would be the farm place as it is today.