A Century of Memories

by Jill Funke

Born in Wilmont, Minnesota in 1905, Margaret was the first of eleven children. Those early years, she says, she spoke German as that area was heavily populated by those of German descent. When she was 5, Margaret and her family moved to the Larchwood area in a lumber wagon. At the age of 8, the family took a train ride to Sterling, Oklahoma and traveled by covered wagon to Lawton, Oklahoma. Looking back on that adventure in the early 1900’s, Margaret wonders how her mother handled the trip as at that time, traveling that number of miles with four small children and a baby in a covered wagon must have been quite an adventure.

As a young girl, Margaret recalls many instances of helping on the farm. With a laugh, she tells of the times that she and her siblings would pick potato bugs for her father. They would all take shingles and knock the bugs off of the plants into buckets, which was quite a job as the family had an acre of potatoes planted to feed their large family. Because these insects had a particularly unpleasant smell, Margaret came to hate this chore, and asked her father if she could learn to plow in order to get out of that most distasteful task. After that, she would watch her siblings picking potato bugs and breathe a sigh of relief.

Luckily, Margaret was able to attend school for twelve years. The first car she drove was a 1914 Model T which she remembers they used primarily during the day as they had to light the car’s headlights with matches for any trips made after dark. Although her father had encouraged her to become a teacher, Margaret wasn’t convinced that teaching was her calling. Instead, after dating him for about two years, Margaret married Al DeSmet in 1926 at St. Mary Parish. About ten months later, the couple welcomed twins Leonard and Bernard, then later had their daughter, Geraldine.

Margaret’s life was full of family, church, and hard work. The Great Depression hit the young DeSmet family and many other families hard. Remembering some of the struggles of that time, Margaret says that it was devastating to wear out a pair of shoes, and everything of value had a mortgage against it. At one tough time, Al wanted to sell his herd of steer to another farmer. That farmer asked why Al didn’t keep the livestock and feed them himself, to which replied that he simply did not have the money. The farmer told Al to borrow the money, which Al did and Margaret says it was one of the wisest moves they ever made as it prevented them from losing much needed money at the time. That era made quite an impression on her, as she remembered family and friends losing their farms and suffering financially. When her father purchased a farm north of Larchwood, she and Al moved there and began to rebuild their lives. Initially, there were no buildings at the site, which required them to hire carpenters for quite a while. She says that at many meals, her table was often full of workmen.

During her lifetime, Margaret has lived through many significant events. Her memories include the assassination of President Kennedy, and the declaration of peace was at the end of World War II. Over the past 100 years, she has seen or read about major earthquakes in California, Chile and China which killed hundreds of thousands of people, significant floods like the U.S .flood in 1993, and momentous scientific achievements such as the invention of television, air travel and the first instance of man walking on the surface of the moon. The establishment of the assembly line and industrial advances brought forth the mechanical age of agriculture, which enabled farmers to farm more acres with less man power.

Not one to concentrate on what she didn’t have, Margaret remembers living with electricity in her home, and then moving to a four-room farmhouse which lacked that modern convenience. Because living space was practically non-existent, Geraldine slept in her crib until she was six years old. At that time, the family purchased a hide-a-bed that they kept in the living room, which thrilled the young girl. The DeSmets followed Margaret’s philosophy of living moderately, and remaining thankful for what they had. Naming family as the most important part of her life, Margaret says that her most difficult times were losing Geraldine to cancer and going through the untimely death of son, Bernard.