Title

Logging Cook County

Creation Date

September 19 2000
1929 – 2000

Description

Wesley Hedstrom Oral History on September 19, 2000
OH-0279-2000
Some parts are difficult to hear.

PZ: This is Pat Zankman interviewing Wes Hedstrom at the Museum in Grand Marais. Today is September 19, 2000. Wes, you were born in Cook County, but your dad came here from elsewhere, can you tell me a little bit about your dad?

WH: My dad came to the United States in 1890. And he has a younger sister who gone to live with a family in Kansas. They were a family of eight; my dad's family was eight. They were in compete (cannot hear)

PZ: Where in Sweden was he from?

WH: A place called Dalarna, which is close to big steel, where they make steel about a hundred miles north of Stockholm. He came in 1890 and he went to Kansas first, and when he was there he took a job in the coal mining fields, and they had to lay on their sides to pick (coal) underground. He didn't like that at all, so he left and went to Duluth.

PZ: Do you know why, Duluth?

WH: Well, yes. His older sister was there so he went there and he worked around Duluth for a couple of years. Then the panicin the last summer he filed on a stone and timber place, which is a mile west of where Zellners live (note: County Road 6 near the Meridian Road - former John and Tillie Nelson homestead). He left in the fall of 1893. It was a bad time, no jobs available. My wife and I were in Sweden in 1978. There was a letter he had written home that fall and he said if things don't improve here by spring He came back to Cook County and never left. Then he moved up here and he worked he got into a lot of jobs. My mother, who

PZ: Whose name is?

WH: Alma Berglund. She literally grew up in Duluth. She was only two years old when they came to this county. In Sweden they lived probably only ten miles apart. And my grandparents came to Duluth. She went through normal school in Duluth, which was a teacher's, graduated from there. And she came up here to take a job and she taught and lived in a house, she and her brother Axel, lived together the first winter.

PZ : She lived in a shack?

WH: A small building. And owned, I believe owned by and Indian named Mr. Caribou.



Complete transcript available from the CCHS.