Mina Pederson

Mina was born in 1872 in Renville County, Minnesota, near old Fort Ridgely, to Lars and Olava (Asak) Pederson, and married Carl Aamodt there in 1893. When Carl and his brother Torval went to Alberta in 1895, she stayed in Minnesota with their son Guy; Carl’s letters to her are The Long Way to Langdon.

She reached Cavalier County, North Dakota, on October 14, 1896. They first rented a homestead in Waterloo Township, and her first winter there brought the Thanksgiving blizzard of 1896. “It had snowed for days with no wind so there was approximately 3 feet of loose snow,” she recalled. The wind drifted it until the buildings were covered, and a neighbor, Mrs. Wm. Ring, lost her way going to the barn and froze to death. The next spring Moscow Lake flooded, “so we were afraid the buildings would wash away.” Asked why she had come: “We came to Cavalier County to have a home of our own.”

She was a charter member of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Moscow Township and the first president of its Ladies AidLadies Aid A congregation’s women’s society (in Norwegian Lutheran churches, the kvindeforening). Its sales, suppers and bazaars raised money for the church, its building and its missions. All the words, organized in 1906, which she led for seven years. She was treasurer of the Moscow chapter of the Red Cross. Days in the life of Carl and Mina Amoth follows the farm and the neighborhood in the years before Carl died in 1924.

After his death she kept the homestead for some years, then lived in Huron Township and at Dahlen during the school terms while her daughters taught. In 1934 the Cavalier County Pioneers Association named her one of the county’s pioneers. In her last years she spent summers on Guy’s farm near Clyde and the school months with her daughter Marie in Lancaster, Minnesota. She died at Hallock, Minnesota, on June 2, 1958, at 85. Her six grandsons were her pallbearers, Pete among them, and she is buried beside Carl at Our Savior’s.