Thorvald (Tom) Aamodt

Thorvald Aamodt, Tom in America and Torval in his brother’s letters, was born in Trøgstad, Norway, on March 27, 1870, and baptized at Trøgstad church on April 18, the second son of Gulbrand Gulbrandsen and Karen Kirstine Studsrud of Lille Åmot. He was confirmed there in 1884. In March 1889 he came to America by way of Philadelphia, by his own later account, a year after Carl and two months before Martin, and joined Carl in Renville County, Minnesota. On November 5, 1894, he declared his intention to become a citizen, signing just below Carl and, like him, as Amoth.

In September 1895, after three failed crops, he and Carl shipped six horses and their machinery to Alberta, wintered at Duhamel, and came back the next summer by wagon through Montana to Cavalier County, North Dakota, where Martin already was. On July 16, 1896, the two of them filed on land in Moscow Township; that October Tom was back at Fairfax, Minnesota, feeding a threshing machine. His patent for the northeast quarter of Section 2 was issued on April 8, 1904. At Dresden on February 20, 1899, the Wales history says, he married Helga Ruud of Fairfax. They began in a sod house at Wales; her piano was shipped from Fairfax to it because she was lonesome. They had six children.

He was among the founders of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, named at its first services in the summer of 1899, and was its treasurer from its organization in 1905 for twenty-one years. He played the Hardanger fiddle and taught his boys. In 1914 he and Carl went back to Norway to see their father, their mother having died the year before, and came home on the Lusitania, landing at New York on July 10, in the last weeks of peace before the First World War: Carl’s story has the crossing. He farmed in Moscow Township the rest of his life, his household next to Carl’s in the 1920 census, and died there on November 4, 1938, at sixty-eight. He is buried in Our Savior’s cemetery at Wales. Helga lived until 1960.

The Long Way to Langdon

Alberta and back, 1895–96, in Carl’s letters home, with Torval’s own from Fairfax.