Clara Regine Amoth

Clara was born on January 20, 1907, on her parents’ farm west of Walhalla, in Fremont Township, Cavalier County, the daughter of Tollef and Bergit Kjemhus. She went to the NumedahlNumedahl A Norwegian farming community in Cavalier County, North Dakota, named by its settlers after Numedal, the valley in Norway. Tollef Kjemhus farmed there, and his grandson Pete spent boyhood summers on his farm. Numedal and Numedahl → school, where Mabel Amoth was her teacher and boarded with the family. In May 1919 Mabel took her along to a confirmation in Moscow Township, and there she met Mabel’s cousin Chris Amoth. She was twelve.

She worked at the cafe in Walhalla, where Chris and his cousins stopped for ice cream on their way home from Winnipeg, and in the fall of 1928 moved to Langdon to work at the Stop and Shop Cafe. Chris proposed on New Year’s Eve, and they were married at her parents’ home on June 17, 1929. They lived on the Amoth homestead in Moscow Township and had seven children; Gerald, born in 1945, died at a month old.

In November 1952 she came down with polio and was treated in Canada. Five months later, on April 20, 1953, she was alone at home burning rubbish when the fire got into the straw around the house, and the house burned down. In the Order of the Eastern Star at Langdon she was installed as Ruth in 1952 and Martha in 1956, and in December 1962 as Worthy Matron of Lebanon Chapter No. 37. She and Chris moved to Langdon in 1963, and about 1964 she sold her parents’ farm to her son Carmen. In 1987 she told her daughter Judy how she and Chris had met, and Judy wrote it down. Chris died in 1975. Clara died on May 14, 1997, at ninety.

Chris and Clara’s story

The fire, the bashful boy at the confirmation, the sleigh ride to Tom’s, and the farm on a map. Her mother’s story is Bergit Kjemhus.