The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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July 9, 2006

A living space

Frontier cabin being restored

By Dylan Thomas

ST PETER — When she fell ill as a child, Kay Mowbray would spend her days in the small kitchen of her family’s New Sweden Township home, where there was a daybed.

The kitchen — in the 1940s already decades older than the rest of the house — had walls of large white oak logs. Mowbray remembered lying in the daybed and picking at the old, dried-up chinking that sealed the spaces between them.

Mowbray, who now lives in St. Peter, said she never thought much about that unusual room in the house once owned by her grandfather. Then, when she was about 10 years old, her father covered the exposed kitchen walls with plywood.

What was just a kitchen to Mowbray was once an entire home to the Syversons, Norwegian immigrants who came to the area in the mid-19th century. Like many area log cabins, their frontier home was expanded time and again until the original structure became just one room in a larger house.

Soon, visitors to the Treaty Site History Center in St. Peter will see what the home looked like when homesteader Sander Syverson built it sometime in the late 1860s.

The cabin was moved in October from its original site, about a mile east of Rice Lake, to the Treaty Site. This summer, it is being restored by the Nicollet County Historical Society to something close to its original condition.

“It’s a unique classroom space once it’s all done,” said Ben Leonard, historical society executive director.

The cabin was donated to the historical society by Kathy Padgett, the owner of the New Sweden Township property. When the restoration is complete, possibly sometime next year, the cabin will be filled with artifacts of frontier life.

Right now the cabin has been stripped of the plywood that covered the interior and the clapboard siding that likely helped preserve it from the elements. The chinking Mowbray remembered has been picked out, leaving wide gaps in the foot-thick logs.

Some of those old logs are now black and rotted through. They will be replaced with white oak logs from another cabin found just a mile from the Syversons’, now piled up on the Treaty Site grounds.

Terrasol, a St. Peter company specializing in cabin restoration, is advising the historical society on the restoration and lending labor in exchange for some of the leftover logs. Grants from the St. Peter-based Schmidt Foundation and Alliance Pipeline are funding the project.

Terrasol project manager Jared Groebner said the Syverson cabin, with its dovetailed corners, is typical of the regional style. Despite some rotting, it stood up well over the years, Groebner added.

When it is completed, Treaty Site visitors will get some idea of what life was like for a frontier family, crammed all together in a two-story home measuring little more than 15 feet on each side.

In 1870, the Syversons numbered eight: Sander, 57; his wife Ragnild, 43; and their six children, ranging in age from 3-year-old Peter to 21-year-old Christine.

Leonard said they probably expanded their small home on the prairie at some point. But for a time, at least, they presumably ate, slept and spent a long Minnesota winter in that little space.

“To think that was all they had,” Mowbray said.

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