Interesting people

Today when we finished fixing a fault on this man's electric service we had to inform him of a momentary outage to switch him off of the 1:1 to his own full service.  He was an elderly gentleman, tall, thin and active physically and mentally, his name was Orville Olson.  I engaged him in some conversation about how his farm was being surrounded by subdivisions and the richest soil in the world was being paved over by land hungry people, who someday will wonder where their food will come from after we have paved all of the good farm ground over.   He said his grandfather came from Sweden in 1880 and worked enough so that he could purchase a farm when the land cost $25.00 an acre.  That was 1889, the farm was just north of Cortland, Il.,  no more than a mile.  

He then told me how his grandfather decided to come to America.  It seems the grandfather, let's call him Carl, was a 19 year old who had a buddy, lets call him Swen. It seems Swen had gotten a girl in a family way and did not want to marry her.  The answer seemed to be to leave Sweden and come to America where Swen's sister worked in a bakery in Sycamore.  As fate would play it, Swen decided to leave one night to go to America, he wanted to tell someone. That someone was Carl.   Carl said he would like to go.  But he had no money and his father said he had none to give him.   His dad left the house and came back a while later with enough money to get him to America via a 3 week boat across the Atlantic trip which most like was a sailing vessel of some kind.  Once here in this country they took a train all the way to Cortland and Carl got off, but Swen didn't, until he detrained in Clinton, Ia., and speaking no english someone got him turned around the next day and got him to DeKalb.  There is where that story ended but another started about the marshes around northern Illinois.  In 1889 when he bought the farm there was a 50 acre lake that he had to farm around.  In 1905, Carl along with thirteen other farmers hired a firm to dig a union tile line from south of rte 38 north to Sycamore.  It was an 18" diameter clay tile that was used until 2005 when the town of Cortland replaced it with a 36" one.  A union tile is like a union drainage ditch where farmers could lay their own field drainage system to drain into the union tile which would drain into a natural creek or river.  This made the land tillable.

As I looked out at the now drained field it looked like the rest of the farm land around and you would not suspect that it was full of water before.  Carl lived to be 96 years old dying in 1957.  Then Orville Olson asked me how old I thought he was.  I figured probably in his 70's, no, I was off a few years, he is 92 and pretty darn good shape.  He must have his grandfather's longevity genes.  A footnote to this tale is that he has been offered $50,000 an acre from the developers and has no intention to sell.