We have been learning about rural Milroy’s Dorothy (Bossuyt) Swedzinski, whose mother, Irma (Cooreman) Bossuyt, grew up in Belgium in the years before and during World War I. She, her mother, Elodie, and her siblings endured the German occupation of Belgium before finally joining her father, Camiel, who had preceded them to the U.S.

The family settled on an uncle’s farm northeast of Tracy, Minnesota. Fourteen-year-old Irma stopped attending country school to help on the farm, but learned how to read, write, and speak English

Irma Cooreman met her future husband, Alphonse Bossuyt, while visiting relatives near Minneota. Alphonse had emigrated from Belgium with his parents, Adolph and Valentine Bossuyt, when he was four years old. The young, Belgian immigrant couple began dating. They married on Jan. 8, 1930.

Irma and Alphonse began their married life on a farm near Taunton, but their firstborn, Dorothy, was born in Tracy. Dorothy explained how all that came about.

“My folks were living south of Taunton after they were married in a place that my Grandpa (Adolph) Bossuyt built for them — brand new buildings. But she (her mother, Irma) went back home to her dad’s house to be near Dr. Valentine in Tracy and that’s where I was born. Her mother had died even before she was married.”

Dorothy was born in November 1930, as the nation was sliding into the Great Depression and as area farmers were beginning to feel the effects of drought. But Dorothy was young during the worst of those drought years of the mid-1930s and has only vague memories of those times.

“I don’t know if it’s because I was told or if I remember Mom laying towels on the window sills because that fine dust, just like powder, came in and the towels would catch that. The house was new. It wasn’t like it was real leaky. (Dorothy chuckled) We always had enough to eat. I don’t remember ever going hungry.”

Irma and Alphonse added a son to their family while on the farm south of Taunton. Baby Donald was two years younger than Dorothy.

Although Dorothy recalled that her farm family managed to get by, those mid-1930’s were desperate times for Southwest Minnesota farmers. A Works Progress Administration study of rural Minnesota reported that Lyon County farmers’ 1934 harvest, weakened by persistent drought, averaged only 29% of their 1929 yield. Numbers like these brought many farm families to their knees, especially since over 45% of regional farmers were tenant farmers. This meant that scant harvest had to sustain their families and pay the rent on the land they farmed and the home where they lived.

Dorothy explained that a farm disaster other than the Great Depression or the drought years upended the young Bossuyt family of rural Taunton.

“[My] first 6 years was south of Taunton on that farm. My grandpa (Adolph Bossuyt) was paying on that farm, plus paying on where he was living, just down the road a little bit. He got killed by his mules. Then the banker took both farms. When I was 6 years old on February 12th, Lincoln’s birthday, we moved to a farm northeast of Milroy. That would have been 1937.”

Dorothy spent her next ten years growing up on the farm near Milroy and has clear memories of her years there.

“It was a big, square house. It had a nice-sized kitchen; nice-sized dining room; and nice-sized living room. We had a front porch that was the full length of the house. Where that front porch was, there was a full-length bedroom above it and I had that kind of as a playroom.”

The other bedrooms were also upstairs, but that front bedroom was special because, in addition to being Dorothy’s play space, it also served as a bedroom for another family member, her Aunt Selma.

“I had an aunt that was — today they would say she had autism — and she stayed with us mostly all the time because my mother was her guardian [as] my grandma had died even before my mother was married. She slept in there.”

The farmhouse had plenty of room for the Bossuyt’s and Aunt Selma, but no indoor plumbing other than a kitchen hand-pump that drew from a cistern. Downspouts off the roof channeled rainwater to the cistern to be drawn and heated in the kitchen for washing dishes, clothes, and family members. The family used kerosene lamps to light the home during the dark hours.

The Bossuyt farm had a large barn for their dairy herd. Dorothy recalled they had not been on the farm long when the family and their barn confronted a major threat.

“It went off the foundation in a tornado. My mother went out to milk cows. My dad was gone on [a] threshing crew. She only milked a couple cows and I guess she could see the black cloud. She let the cows out and came to the house. Before she went out, she said to us kids to pick up the fallen apples. Well, we hadn’t gotten that done, yet and I thought, ‘Gosh, we’re gonna get it. She’s already done milking and she’s back at the house.’ But she said, ‘Let’s go to the basement.’ The window on the stairway blew out and the window in the basement blew out that was on the north side of the house.”

The family and barn, once reset on its foundation, survived the near miss and restored their farm routine.

I welcome your participation in and ideas about our exploration of prairie lives. You may reach me at prairieview pressllc@gmail.com.