If you want a farm, if you want to raise crops, go north here to the Shell Prairies in Hubbard Prairie.

56 to 59 square miles of grassland.

Oh, it was hard, a lot harder than it is today.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Lakeland PBS.

We're going to go back to the Red River Ox Cart Trail, ran from 1820 and 1870 running from Pembina down the Red River Valley and then going into the Minnesota Valley and then into St Paul, Minnesota.

The reason that started was the Hudson Bay Company was up there and there was a settler, they called Metis, which were half French, half Native Americans.

Peter Garriock he cut the Woods Trail in 1844 and the reason they cut this is because the American government had negotiated a so-called demarcation line between the Ojibwe and the Sioux.

The traders would come this way in order to bypass mainly the Sioux.

In 1832 Henry Schoolcraft came within a few miles of Shell Prairie and again in 1836 Joseph Nicollet also bypassed Shell Prairie by a few miles and then the military built a road from the Crow Wing Indian Agency on Gull River, ran it all the way up to the Leech Lake and again they bypassed Shell Prairie.

But then they built another military road from Leech Lake to White Earth and they missed Prairie one up here, Shell Prairie or the Hubbard Prairie, but they did hit the fringe of Shell Prairie number two at Park Rapids and did on into Osage so that kind of how this area started up.

In 1874, AJ Broadfoot had a trading post, a fur trader by the name of Howitt came down from the prairies and stayed at Broadfoot's place and he told them about these fertile prairies that were up here.

Every source I've ever found referred to there being 56 to 59 square miles of grassland.

Early developers said well we'll try, and three to four families work their way north on an old Indian trail, I'm sure it must have been, and found their way up there.

And a lot of the people that came to this area were Civil War veterans.

At one time there were 200 families of Civil War vets in this area.

Between 78 and 81 population up here boomed.

At one time there must have been 800 people living up in and around this area.

Homesteads when they were given out I think most of it around here would have been 80 acres given out.

You came here with nothing, you tried to survive in a sod house the first year and the first winter and then you probably brought some seed with you or you bought some seed at a general store or borrowed it from neighbors in exchange for labor and then tried to make a go of it.

It took a long time to get land ready to even plant seed.

It kind of started out with a grubbing process, they cleared the trees that were in their way first.

More than likely they would have burned it partially.

A lot of times they tried to plow it in that fall before and then they'd work it over time trying to mellow the soils out and break up the sod with hopes that the next spring they could get it into production.

It did take quite a bit of tillage and at the time that was the method they had was the one bottom plow typically pulled by oxen in this part of the world.

The sod that was here was predominantly bluestems, prairie dropseed.

Okay, so this is a spot on the farm that to anybody's knowledge or my grandpa's has never been has never seen a plow.

It may have been pastured at one time but they haven't turned it and so I was going to try and give you an idea of what this would have looked like when the pioneers came.

And you got to remember this is the same sand or sandy loam that's on this prairie all over, but if you look at there's that thatch layer up on the surface.

I mean here's a good 2-3 inches right here and that's what they would have came in here to.

Can't see it, but you can sure feel it, it's like sitting on a mattress, it's just spongy feeling.

Well, a lot of them at the time would have used the scythes to cut it down and then gather it up and a lot of it would have been threshed in the barn or in a building in the winter time they'd a haul the bundles in.

As far as when they actually got a threshing machine there was some in the neighborhood at an early day, but they didn't all have access to them.

I mean it was a couple years before they were in the area, so a lot of it would have been done by hand.

Was either 1912 or 1919 was the first one on the third Shell Prairie here.

Some of the families still have generations of families in the area.

Our family that was here the earliest would have been the Stephens family which would be on my dad's side.

Martin E Stephens came up here on a hunting trip in the fall of 1879 and actually stood on top of that big hill by what I can tell from the journals over to the southwest there and at that time made a comment in his notes that as they look to the north he could see this expanse of a flat prairie off to the north and as you looked to the east you could see the prairies reaching to the east and he decided that when that ground came open for homesteading he was going to move his family up there, which in turn happened the following year.

That's actually why he picked this area which is actually the third Shell Prairie because he just was in awe of standing on that big hill and the river wrapping around it and just the beauty of it all.

So he came up here with two other families or a friend and his other friend's family.

They each got 3/4 of land.

Was kind of unique too is if you remember Laura Ingall Wilder's book about the blizzard in October, they arrived the night before that storm hit.

If you look at Minnesota's history that's one of the worst winters on record, the winter of 1880-1881.

They slept under the wagons the first night and he talked about waking up in the morning to snow, heavy snow, and ended up with 15 or 16 inches of snow on the ground in October and they said it stayed.

My husband John's great-grandparents Asher and Mary Blunt homesteaded our place back in 1882.

This journal I found downstairs.

It was in an old freezer, inside was a metal lining, so it was preserved from weather and rodents.

It was just a basic little notebook with regular lined paper, kind of fragile.

She had every day, in fact she had written up until the day that she died, well a week before she died.

They came from Claremont, Minnesota up to Verndale and then they took a stage coach to Shell City and from there they crossed the Shell River and meandered their way through until they got here.

160 acres and that was part of the Homestead Act.

If you came and stayed for 5 years and improved the land you would be able to get the land for free.

Mary Blunt finished high school in Waupan, Wisconsin and then she went to Winona State which was a teachers school, so she was educated.

At the end of a day she could write down what had happened so I think it helped her to be a little stress free and to open up about herself.

When I first started reading it it's a little bit hard to associate because they live so much differently than we do now.

Oh it was hard, a lot harder than it is today.

Of course then in 70 and 71 the Northern Pacific Railroad went through Verndale and into Wadena.

So in order to get the wheat from here to get down there they Verndale cut the trail up here.

They started a trail.

In 1878, the next year, why there was a few bushels of wheat came and it was a beginning of what became the Wheat Trail.

From Verndale to Shell City was 30 miles on the road, on the trail.

And what they would do is they would use sleighs to haul the wheat down there.

They would have two sleighs tandem, you know, they could hold or carry about a 1,000 pounds or 2,000 pounds of wheat on those things because these were tandem.

And because they would you had to swing them out in order to get them around the trees.

They had a front set pair and a back set.

Horses were trained to verbal commands of which way to move the rear end of that sleigh so it could get it around the trees without breaking them up.

On the Wheat Trail they had halfway houses.

I'm Joe Graba and I'm a descendant of Jacob Graba.

My great-grandpa ran that halfway house, provided sleeping arrangements, provided food and provided feed for the oxen that were pulling the wagons.

However, if you were coming back up and you stopped there, Graba had a rule that if a hauler came down, no matter what time it was at night, if you were returning back to Shell City you had to get up, hook up your horses and or your oxen and go home so this guy could sleep.

So that was Graba's house rule.

If you just rode on that wagon all the way down you would really be cold by the time you got here cuz you're outdoors for 7-8 hours and not moving and so yeah it was innovative I think and probably a very valued service.

Well, we're in north central Minnesota, our farm section 16 of Wing River Township.

It's on the Wheat Trail.

You know when I bought the farm here in 1951, I don't think I knew much about history at that time about that.

It's cut deep, it's easy enough to see.

Here's something I found on the Wheat Trail, on our farm right out here, and it was right on the edge of the field and Kent was digging.

I heard, I was right in the yard, I heard him something and I suppose this is where it caught the digger caught it and threw it up and I thought I was surprised to see that.

Here's something else right off our farm here which came up with the potatoes after this ground was opened up and these are ox cart oxen I mean shoes.

There you see the two shoes, not the horseshoe but and I don't think they're pairs I think.

But they came up with the potatoes.

In our township here there is the Wing River, there's the Leaf River, there's the Redeye River, and there's Cat Crick up a little further.

It was an obstacle to cross with these loads of 10 to 1,100 pounds and all they had for tools is maybe a saw and an axe and so if a wheel needed repairing, it needed a new spoke, needed a new wheel, even needed a new axle why they stopped and tore it apart and made the repair.

William Kindred came up here in May of 79 and he settled and that began where Shell City was going to be.

He set the post office up in 1880 and he called it Kindred after himself.

In 1880 then Kindred sold his property to a guy Francis Yoder and Sewall Chandler.

I think Chandler, I think both of them are out of Verndale.

So they bought over the town and they renamed it and then in August of 1881 they had the town plotted.

The biggest the population I think ever got here was probably about maybe 100 at the maximum.

There were two blacksmith's shops, Robinson and Stambaugh.

Morrison built had a mercantile store there were probably a couple mercantile stores in here.

There was a Duran and a Yoder family that built a hotel in Shell City and that was so that when you went like from Hubbard to Shell City and various places you could stay and then go to Verndale and then the next day come back.

But the other thing was the logging industry was partial to this area too, a lot of loggers would stay there and stay at the hotel and then go on the camps and work the winter then they'd come back and then they'd farm in the summer.

When the town finally died out he tore that hotel down, moved it to Menahga and then from there he moved it to Fargo and I guess there's couple houses still standing there in Fargo that were built from lumber from that house.

They built a sawmill and then Yoder and his son started a lumber company and the remnants of the sawmill was right along the river.

This is Yoder Sawmill.

He started it early 1880's.

He ran that until 1899.

They were going to build a dam but they never did.

There was also story about a German guy, he was going to build a mill, a flour mill, but the story goes that some guy wouldn't give him the opportunity for the land unless he got 50% interest in the mill and so it just it never got off the ground.

There was a schoolhouse here, School District 16 and the kids attended school through 8th grade.

And then in '83 Chandler sold his half to Yoder so then Yoder owned the whole town.

This is where they forded the Shell River from the Wheat Trail.

You get down the bottom and if you angle that way you can't see much of the river, but they angled across the river to get up on the other side.

This was the trail here.

Then they did have a stage line that did run down this, started in 1880's.

They had what they call on this stage line they had pee passes, you bought a ticket to ride in the stagecoach.

Give that to the driver and he'd stop so they could get out and pee.

For a landmark, to see a landmark, for a school, by the schoolhouse, stop behind the tree.

You want to stop behind the tree, stop at the bend in the road, stop by the bridge and so this is a pee card.

This whole paper right here, this is a story she wrote about coming across the Shell River when she first came.

I have often wondered if anyone is living besides myself who took the stage in Verndale October 6th or 7th, 1882 for the Shell Prairies.

There were several passengers besides my daughter and myself, it was a long tiresome ride, dark and rainy.

There had been much rain that fall and the roads were very bad, no roads made for autos in those days.

It was dark some time before we reached Shell River, one of the darkest nights I ever saw.

We were closed inside, curtains drawn so to keep us dry from the rain.

There was then a high hill on the south bank where we had to go down onto the bridge.

The driver said he would go down ahead to see if everything was all right as the river was very high.

When he came back he reported that the bridge had gone out, and we would have to ford.

Oh, how frightened I was.

I begged of them to let us get out but we had not passed a house or shelter of any kind for miles back.

He said to take things from the floor of the stage into our laps as the water might come onto the stage.

We went down into that water in total darkness.

Someone had tried to cross and their load and wagon was passed way up the bank on the other side, horses and drivers were gone too, so we had to go up a steep bank.

The horses were tired and had a hard time making it.

Some of the men walked out on the wagon tongue and lightened the load some but were in high mud.

The stage swerved and swayed giddily and we pulled up our feet as water covered the floor, but we moved constantly forward and finally the horses started pulling the stage up the steep bank on the other side of the river.

The driver was a brave man to go through them days and nights work.

My husband and brother came with oxen and load of goods the next day.

The eighth of October we wound our way through trees and brush to our homestead which we named Evergreen Home.

Trees were blazed on many places so people would not get lost.

We landed there October 8th.

Started about 1880, early 1880's, Wadena and Park Rapids started working on construction of a road straight from Wadena straight up to Park Rapids and that road was completed in 1889.

One cuz it killed Shell City's Wheat Trail, second thing was the construction of the what they call the K-line spur of the Great Northern Railroad which ran from Eagle Bend all the way up to Park Rapids.

And there was a portion here and the construction of that railroad in 1890, you saw Sebeka and Menahga pop up.

That was more or less the end of the Wheat Trail because it bypassed Shell City which very prominent you know led people from there to Verndale and that's kind of what was the end of it.

People maybe wonder why we named our farm what we did.

I call it Three Prairie Farms and I named it that in honor of the settlers that developed the three prairies.

Everything that we look at up here today was built on the backs of many of those early settlers.

I think it's pretty cool and just incredible the work they put in and the effort they put into doing it.

And they tried to progress and carry on with life and that's what they did and we owe a lot to these families because otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Lakeland PBS.