Chris and Clara Amoth

April 20, 1953

Clara was home alone. She’d been cleaning up the yard and set the rubbish afire, and it got away from her. The flames caught the bales of straw banked around the house for insulation, and then the house. A man driving past, Fred Bohn of Langdon, stopped and helped her carry out some of the furniture. Most of it burned. The insurance covered part.

It was the house Carl and Mina had built in 1916: two stories, eleven rooms, the one Pete was born in. The family lost nearly everything they owned, along with the wedding presents of their daughter Ruth and her husband, Lee Darling, and the things the newlyweds had stored there until they moved into their own apartment. Clara had come down with polio the November before, the seventh case in Cavalier County that year, and been treated in Canada.

They spent the summer in Guy Amoth’s house on Arbor Street in Langdon, and a new house went up on the farm. In September they moved out to a cook car and a bunkhouse on the farm, in October into the basement of the new house, and they finished the upstairs that winter. The house was still standing on the homestead in 1995.

The homestead

Chris was born on the homestead on May 8, 1903, one of Carl and Mina’s six children. He went through the eighth grade at Moscow School No. 1 and later went to the Agricultural College in Fargo, the “AC,” now North Dakota State. How long he was there isn’t known.

In the spring of 1919 he was in the confirmation class at Our Savior’s. The pastor lived a long way off, so Carl taught the class at the house. His cousin Mabel, Tom and Helga’s daughter, was teaching school at Numedahl and boarding with the Kjemhus family, and she came home that weekend for the confirmation of her sister and brother, Ida and Clarence. She asked the Kjemhuses if she could bring their daughter along. On Friday evening, May 2, Clara went with Ida to the class at Carl and Mina’s, and that’s where she met Chris. She was twelve; he was a week short of sixteen. What she remembered of him, sixty-eight years later, was that he was very bashful, and so was she. On Sunday, May 4, the class was confirmed by Pastor Alfred Brevik, and Clara went home to Numedahl with her parents.

His certificate is in Norwegian. It’s a printed keepsake headed Konfirmations-Minde, in black-letter type between angels and the Last Supper, and Pastor Brevik filled it in by hand in Norwegian too: Christian Amoth, født den 8 mai 1903, born May 8, 1903; konfirmeret den 4de mai 1919, confirmed May 4, 1919; i Vor Frelsers Menighed, in Our Savior’s congregation. Only the address is in English: Moscow twp., Cavalier Co. Chris was born in North Dakota and his mother in Minnesota, and in 1919 their church still wrote its confirmation papers in Norwegian. It didn’t last in the family. Pete, born fourteen years later, wrote that he and his brothers and sisters weren’t taught Norwegian; the Norwegians around them, as he saw it, “wished to become Americans of Norwegian origin, and not Norwegians in America.” At Numedahl, Clara’s side, they still spoke it among themselves.

After that she saw him once or twice a year. She was working at the cafe in Walhalla, and in the summers Chris and his cousins Gordon, Lawrence and Clarence would stop in for ice cream on the way home from Winnipeg.

He was twenty-one when his father died in May 1924. In the fall of 1928 Clara moved to Langdon to work at the Stop and Shop Cafe, and Chris came in now and then. In October she asked after Mabel and said she’d like to see her. He said he’d take her. He came for her with a team and sleigh and drove her out to Tom’s, about fifteen miles west of town. On New Year’s Eve he asked her to marry him.

June 17, 1929

They were married at her parents’ home at Numedahl, in Fremont Township. His sister Marie and his cousin Gordon Amoth stood up with them; Gordon was best man.

They made their home on the Amoth homestead, in the 1916 house, with Chris farming the land he had grown up on. The family history says it was the family farm when they married and that they bought it later.

They had seven children. Gerald, born in 1945, was premature and died at a month old without leaving the hospital.

The farm

The homestead was 159¾ acres. Chris and Clara bought it, and they bought Martin’s homestead, two miles south. By 1964 they were farming 960 acres in Moscow and Waterloo townships. Which quarters those were, and which they owned and which they rented, we haven’t found yet. The two homesteads are the part we can put on a map.

Pete, born in 1933, wrote that one spring when he was a boy, about 1943, the two of them put in the crop on seven to nine hundred acres, Chris on the tractor pulling the grain drill and Pete behind with a thirty-seven-foot harrow. Pete couldn’t yet turn the flywheel on his John Deere, so Chris started it for him. Chris also put the first electricity on the farm, before the power lines came in the early 1950s: an airplane propeller turning a car generator on an eight-foot tower on the barn roof, wired to a battery for the barn lights. After Pearl Harbor he had the house wired to a 32-volt Delco plant. Pete tells it in As I Remember It.

The 1950 census found Chris, forty-six, farming in Moscow Township. He’d worked sixty hours the week before.

He raised Herefords, and for about twenty years, until 1971, he ran a stock trucking line, hauling livestock.

Boards, lodges and the church

Chris sat on the Moscow school board and the township board. Pete remembered him as president of the school board, the man who hired the teachers. He was on the church board at Our Savior’s, and when the family moved their membership to United Lutheran in Langdon, he was a charter member and on the committee that built the new church. Joyce was the first baby baptized there.

He was a Mason, in the lodge and the Scottish Rite, and both of them belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star. The offices there were Clara’s. The Langdon chapter installed her as Ruth in 1952 and as Martha in 1956, and in December 1962 as Worthy Matron of Lebanon Chapter No. 37. A year later she was marshal, and received her past matron’s pin.

Langdon

Chris retired from farming in 1962 or 1963, depending on which account you read, and they moved to Langdon in 1963. He kept trucking until 1971.

On Sunday, June 28, 1964, about a hundred people came to their house on 11th Avenue for their thirty-fifth anniversary. Ruth ran the serving. The paper’s account says they were still operating the 960 acres, that the Herefords were theirs, and that Chris ran the trucking line. Clara had just sold her parents’ farm west of Walhalla to their son Carmen.

From 1968 to 1972 the government bought land around the homestead for wetlands, for ducks and geese, and gave the unit the name Amoth. One tract, bought in May 1972, takes in most of Carl and Mina’s homestead. The federal records don’t say who sold it.

Chris died at the hospital in Langdon on July 27, 1975, at seventy-two. His funeral was at United Lutheran on July 30, and he’s buried at Our Savior’s, the Moscow Lutheran cemetery, two miles from where he was born. Clara outlived him by twenty-two years. She died on May 14, 1997, at ninety.

What the records don’t say

• When they bought the land. The patents went to Carl in 1905 and Martin in 1904. When each quarter passed to Chris and Clara, and what they paid, needs the deeds at the county courthouse.
• Where the 960 acres were. A county plat book from 1954, 1958 or 1964 would show the land in Chris’s name. The State Historical Society in Bismarck has all three; they aren’t online.
• Who sold the homestead to the government in 1972, and on what terms. The deed is in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s title file for the tract.
• What he studied in Fargo, and for how long. No degree is known.

How we know

• The fire is from the Jamestown Sun, April 21, 1953, p. 1, “Langdon Farm Home Destroyed by Fire,” an Associated Press report: the rubbish fire, the straw, Clara alone, Fred Bohn, part insured, and the farm eleven miles northwest of Langdon, which is where the homestead is. The house’s size and age, the lost wedding gifts, the summer in town and the rebuilding are from Wales and the Surrounding Area, 1897–1997 (1997), p. 303, “Chris & Clara Amoth,” written in March 1995. So are the polio, Moscow School No. 1, the AC and Gerald.
• The meeting, the cafes, the sleigh and the proposal are Clara’s own account, as her daughter Judy wrote it down from her in February 1987, kept in Judy’s album. Judy’s note calls the place Neumdahl. The confirmation is on Chris’s certificate from Vor Frelsers Menighed, Our Savior’s, May 4, 1919, in the same album: a printed form, No. 420, filled in by Pastor Brevik. The translations are ours. Pete’s words on Norwegian are from As I Remember It.
• The wedding. Clara’s account, the Wales book and the 1964 anniversary story put it in Fremont Township. The 1964 story names Marie and Gordon as their attendants, and Carl knows them in the wedding photograph, Gordon as best man. His obituary in the Grand Forks Herald says Walhalla; the farm was west of it. The original marriage return hasn’t been looked at.
• The land and the anniversary. “Anniversary Reception Honors Amoths June 28,” a clipping in Judy’s album, from a newspaper not yet identified, 1964, says they bought both homesteads and that “they now operate 960 acres in Moscow and Waterloo townships.” The Grand Forks Herald of June 25, 1964, p. 6, announced the open house. Langdon, North Dakota, 1888–1988 (1986), pp. 220–221, says Chris “was farming the family farm which he later purchased.” The homesteads on the map are drawn from their land patents, as in The Long Way to Langdon.
• The wildlife land. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s realty records list seven tracts in the Amoth unit of the Cavalier County Waterfowl Production Area, bought from 1968 to 1972 with duck-stamp money (the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund); tract 189a, 137.24 acres, on May 15, 1972. None of the records seen names a seller. The district’s reports list the Amoth unit at 154 acres in 1968 and record its boundaries posted in 1971 and 1972. The 1969 report’s visitor list seems to have a Chris Amoth, farmer, of Langdon, at the office three times that year about farming agreements; the copy is too faint to be sure.
• The work. Pete’s memories are from As I Remember It, which he wrote himself; the acres are his estimate, sixty years on. The 1950 census: Moscow Township, enumeration district 10-33, sheet 3, dwelling 14. The Herefords and the trucking line are in the 1964 story; “about twenty years of hauling livestock,” ending in 1971, in the Wales book.
• The boards and the church are from his obituaries, in the Grand Forks Herald, July 29, 1975, p. 5, and a clipping in Judy’s album with his funeral program, and from the Wales book. The obituaries don’t give years, and Pete’s “president” is the only place that title appears.
• The Eastern Star. The Grand Forks Herald’s reports of the Langdon chapter’s installations: December 21, 1952, p. 9; December 13, 1956, p. 6; December 24, 1962, p. 8; December 27, 1963, p. 6. She’s “Mrs. Chris Amoth” in all of them. His lodge and Scottish Rite membership are in the 1964 story and the funeral program; which lodge, and when he joined, isn’t known.
• Retirement. The Herald’s obituary says he retired from farming in 1962; the Wales book and the funeral clipping say 1963. Both are given.
• Clara’s dates are her family tree’s: born January 20, 1907, died May 14, 1997.

Know more, or spot a mistake? Write to Carl.