FLORENCE EWALD REMEMBERS WAUPACA’S POTATO HEYDAYS

Waupaca County Post

August 6 and 13, 1981

 

 

Editor’s note:  The Waupaca Historical Society continues it series of historical documentation with the taping of the memoirs of Mrs. Florence (Robert) Ewald, an astute observer of the early potato industry and the general scene of the Waupaca area.  The following introduction to Mrs. Ewald’s memoirs was written by Rev. George R. Warren of the historical society.  Mrs. Ewald’s memoirs will be presented in a two part series.

 

INTRODUCTION by Rev. George Warren

 

I am privileged to be in the group who interviewed Mrs. Ewald.  I went thinking that I did not know her but found that I had met her on two different occasions:  at the home of a sick relative, and again I was present when she attended a meeting of the Town of Farmington Board when newly elected officers were taking over duties that she had long, lovingly and efficiently performed.

At the interview, she (this 86 year old pioneer), regaled us with a detailed story of her long and very useful life with no need to refer to notes, resulting in a very faithful portrayal of the life of Waupaca in a very different era.

We knew that potatoes had a large place in Waupaca’s early days but she made this take on a dramatic quality as she told of seed potato prices; rotation to avoid soil erosion and depletion; riding the loads into town to thwart unfair competition; piling of loads into railroad cars that must be heated in cold weather; the difficulties of billing out as many as 1000 cars a month; and collecting for these when jaded appetites for potatoes failed in far away cities.

Of equal veracity were her vignettes of the early grocery stores; the goods they handled, and the throes of the grocery clerk.  The winter chore of cutting the necessary ice in Mirror Lake; the much needed role her mother played when her upstairs rooms were turned into a home hospital for baby cases.

            I would not forget to mention the faithfulness and integrity in family life, in 40 years (husband and wife) as town clerk, membership in the First Baptist church since 1907.  What a stupendous debt of gratitude do we all owe to such stalwart souls as Florence Ewald. 

 

(Members of the Historical Society Taping Committee included:  Rev. George Warren, George Jeffers, Ken Poulton and John Holzman).

 

 

Florence Ewald’s Story

 

“Mary and Christian Peterson were my parents.  They started their married life on a farm near Saxeville in Waushara County.  There were nine children.  The first were twins.  They all grew to adulthood except the twins.  On my sixth birthday, we all moved to Waupaca.  My mother’s health was poor and thus she would be nearer to a doctor.

 

“My father then went in business with his brother, James, and ran the Peterson Cash Grocery.  That store was located on Main Street.  I don’t recall who’s in that store now, but the adjacent stores were Dutton’s Bakery, Brettschneider’s Jewelry, and on the other side, the U. S. Post Office and Gordon’s Meat Market.  Then there was an empty lot and a big store – Knaaps Variety Store.  That’s Simpson’s [Restaurant] now.

            “We lived in Waupaca for a year and a half.  There wasn’t enough income for the store to support the two families.  You see, we had seven of us and five in the other family.  We moved to Saxeville and father bought the stock in the General Store there.  My Uncle Jim was included in the deal.  We lived there for six years.  These were the most interesting years in my life.  I learned to clerk in that store when I was about nine years old.  I helped my father in all ways that I could.

            “This is the first paid position that I had in my life.  I was paid 25 cents a week and I was in a good position, Ha Ha.  I enjoyed that part of my life very much.

            “Then we moved here to Waupaca.  My father had been doing some outside work with the Penney Company selling potatoes – although he was still a partner in the store.  In the meantime, my oldest brother had finished eighth grade in Waupaca.  Then he went to Lawrence College and took the business course.  He had been helping A. M. Penney.  Another brother of my father’s, William, had also been working for Penney.  Then my father, my Uncle Will and my brother, Eli, formed the Peterson Produce Company.  I believe that this was in 1910.

            “During my senior year in high school, I suffered a long illness with a burst appendix, and I was unable to make up the work.  So it was decided for me to go to Bushey’s Business College in Appleton.  My brother needed me in the office so this plan worked out very well.  I worked in the office for eight years before I got married.”

           

THE POTATO BUSINESS

 

“The people of today don’t realize what the potato business was like in those days.  The amount of business that went through this city was really enormous.  We were not the largest by any means.  We had two warehouses and shipped about 1000 carloads of potatoes a month during the top season.

            “At one time, Waupaca was considered the potato capital of the world.  That was quite a title!  I believe that there were fourteen dealers here.  They had warehouses here and some had way stations here.

            “We had fourteen stations in small towns, like Embarrass, Belle Plaine, Weyauwega, Fremont, etc.  We didn’t own all of the stations, some were rented.  The business was done in the home office.  That is, everything was sold from the Waupaca office.  I liked the business very much.  It was exciting and interesting.”

            “How many carloads of potatoes were shipped out a month?”  asked Rev. Warren.

            “Our company shipped out 1000 cars a month during early fall months if there was a good crop.  Each car held 600 bushels of potatoes.  That’s a lot of potatoes.” Answered Florence.  “Every farmer had to have some cash income.  This is where the potatoes helped.  This was before the dairy business boomed.  It’s different now.  Dairying brings in the cash now.”

            “Many times in the fall, loads of potatoes would come in by 8 o’clock a.m. and continue all day until long after dark – 35 to 40 loads a day. Talk about competition!  Some of the larger companies had their own buyers here from Chicago, Cincinnati, etc.

“Some had their drivers go to the edge of town to meet the potato loads and ride the loads into the warehouse; this would insure they got the loads, as sometimes another would offer a nickel more and they would lose out unless they road it in.”

            “What kinds of potatoes were raised?” asked Ken Poulton.

            “Mostly Rurals, some Burbanks, they were a lot like the Russets that we have today,” answered Florence.

            “Was your husband one of the partners of the Peterson Produce Company?” asked George Jeffers.

            “No, I worked there for eight years.  My husband came from Chicago to look for a farm.  He was a manager of the Akron Telephone Exchange for the Bell Telephone Company.  He was tired of city life.  He had a notion like so many city people that life was easier in the country; don’t have to buy everything; raise your food in the garden or from animals and the money comes rolling in.  Of course, it was quite different.

            “My husband didn’t know anything about farming.  It just happened that my brother Eli happened to be at the bank and heard Robert talking, so he said ‘If you are looking for a farm, you could go down and help my brother on the home farm.  He needs a man very badly to gather in the farm crops. Maybe you’ll run across a farm to buy.’  He said that he would do that.  But after a month, he had not found a farm.  “So my father said to him, ‘Why don’t you come and help out in the warehouse this winter?  We need a man.  As farmers come in, you may find someone who knows about a farm for sale.’

            “This was kind of smart of my father.  Maybe he was looking for a husband for his daughter, I don’t know.  Robert did find an 80 acre farm which he thought he could handle.  It looked beautiful with the snow on the ground.  Everything looked level.  There didn’t seem to be any potholes or anything of that type.  However, in the spring, things looked different.  It had 80 acres of which 57 were tillable.  So it turned out not to be prosperous. But we had a very good life there. I wouldn’t have changed it four anything.  We had two children. I lived on that place for 59 years.  We wouldn’t have known what to do with a lot of money anyway.  I really did hate to leave it and move to this apartment.  But when you get to be 86, you can’t manage as well.

            “My husband died in 1960 and a neighbor bought our farm, but gave me permission to live in the house as long as I wanted to.  So last May, I moved here.”

            “Where was your farm?” asked George Jeffers.

           “It was west of town.  Just west of the John Erickson place.  In 1935, my husband became town clerk and I was his deputy.  He was treasurer besides that.  Then in 1960, after he died, I took his job.  So we had the town clerk’s job in our family for 40 years.  I enjoyed that job very much.  But I resigned it when I was 80 years old because my sister, who was 95, came to live with me, and I couldn’t handle both.

            “Coming back to the potato business, the large company in town was A. M. Penney.  I don’t know how many stations he had.”

            “You mentioned the warehouses.  Did you have ways of heating them?” asked Rev. Warren.

            “Yes.”

            “In the potato business, we had to keep the warehouses cool.  We had heat that could be used. The sacks were stacked so that the air would circulate.  In cold winters, the cars were heated with coke fires. It didn’t take a crew of men very long to load a car with bags of potatoes.

            “Right after WWII, my brother and Mr. Nelson of Christensen and Nelson Company were called to Washington to standardize and to change the size of potato bags.  Up to that time, they held two and a half bushels.  They were heavy and cumbersome.  The new standards brought the average weight down to 100 lbs. a bag.  It was a good thing.  The bigger bags were very had to handle.  Also, cars were permitted to carry smaller loads.  This helped out dealers for emergency purposes.

            “We had refrigerated cars and they could be heated.

            “To get back to our grocery store, we had no self-service.  The clerks weighed out the articles that were not packaged.  Lots of flour was sold.  I remember Pillsbury and Gold Medal.  My father had to build some kind of scaffolding so that the mice could not get into the bags.  We had carloads of apples sent in.  I remember my brother and I ate a lot of them.  We probably ate up a lot of the profit.”

            “Where was your warehouse?” questioned John.

            “At the corner of Oborn and Ware where the Badger Building Company is located now.  Just north we had another smaller warehouse.”

            “George Feathers also had a warehouse nearby,” added George Jeffers.

            “Our men were paid quite well, $10.00 a week during the winter.  In those days that was enough to live on.  Of course it was not enough for today.”

            “You spoke about the short time it took to load a car.  How did they load the cars?” asked Rev. George Warren.  “Did they have trucks?”

            “Hand trucks.  The bags had to be stacked carefully.  Two bags were placed upright and one crosswide on top.  They were careful stacking in the cars so that the heat could circulate among them.

            “There were a few times when the market would drop.  Some would stop eating potatoes for a while. Some customers would not buy and the potatoes would be refused.  The warehouse men had a way to get around this difficulty by attaching the bill of lading to the draft.  Then they could not pick up the goods until the merchandise had been paid for.

            “Right after the war, one of my brothers, Harvey, who had lived in Chicago, moved to Joliet and handled the business from the warehouse there.  This happened after WWII.”

            “How many children were you blessed with?” asked Ken Poulton.

            “I had two children, a son and a daughter, both live in Madison.  My daughter is a dental hygienist and my son is a statistician for the U. S. Soils Conservation Service.  My daughter has four children and my son, two.  I have one grandson in the postal service.   Two grandsons, both live in Green Bay, one who is a math teacher in Green Bay University, and the other is a carpenter/contractor.

            “My son’s oldest daughter was in the A.F.S. Service and worked in Africa for four years.  Now she is back in school working on her Ph.D.  She has a young baby.  Also, I have a granddaughter in special education in the state of Oregon.  My youngest granddaughter in the State University in Madison is training for journalism.

            “We lived on a farm for many years in the Town of Farmington.  My husband and I were town clerk for 40 years.  Before this, when we owned the store in Saxeville.  My father was town clerk there.  I enjoyed working in the store very much.

            “Then the family moved to Waupaca so that my brother and I could go to high school.  Then I worked in the Peterson’s cash grocery in Waupaca on Saturdays and vacations.  The grocery store was quite different in the early days.  The clerks picked up the items that the customer wanted.  We would write the items that a customer wanted in a bill book with the cost.  The customer would pay the cashier.

            “Very few articles would be packaged.  I remember that Kingsford Starch and Arm and Hammer Soda were packaged.  Sugar, coffee, and candy trays all came in bulk.  Hard candy came in pails and the good candy came in trays for showcase display.  Bar soaps, fels naptha, P and G soap were all very popular.  Gold Dust Twins was a cleaning powder.

            “In Saxeville, the tobacco came in pails.  Fine cut like Brother Jonathan was sticky and mean to handle.  I didn’t like to handle it because of its fine and syrupy quality.  In the Waupaca store, a glass showcase was on the right as you came into the store, displayed cigars, five cents or three for ten cents.  Also on display were small sacks of Bull Durham, from which cigarettes could be rolled.  No cigarettes were rolled in the factory in the early days.  Fine cut Brother Jonathan chewing tobacco was very popular.

            “It seems that the candy tasted so much better in those days than they do today.  When customers would pay their bills, usually my uncle would give them a small sack of candy.  Lovely chocolates in those days.  I always felt sorry for those who paid their bills when they bought.  I thought that they got cheated.

            “Coffee came in 50 pound bags.  One company had four different grades, each came in a different colored bag.  The cheapest was in a yellow bag – 18 cents a bag, I believe.  Another came in a blue bag.  The red bag was the best.  In the basement, we had a barrel of salt pork and also dill pickles.  We gave the service of delivering, once in the forenoon and once in the afternoon.  Sometimes the ladies would come to town in the mornings and give their orders, which would be delivered in the afternoon.

            “At one time, there was a man named Thomas Price who lived at the lakes.  My Uncle James, who was a carpenter, built a cottage to be used as a store. The store was built at the level of the water and the upper floor was to be lived in.  Price used this store for many years.  They bought the staples for our store and sold them on the lake.  Eva Price ran the store for many years.”

            “Was that on McCrossen Lake?” asked George.  “I can remember going to that store.”

            “On the Fourth of July it was a very exciting day.  We had a boot outside and sold ice cream, candy, oranges, etc.  My father had a nephew, Will Olson, who ran a restaurant here.  Ideal Restaurant was the name.  He made his own recipe for ice cream.  It was very, very good.  He advertised his own brand of ice cream.  Most of the stores had a special day. I guess they still do.

            “Mr. Danielson, Sophus, had a store down the street.  He worked well with my uncle and father.  Often, they would exchange staples.”

            “Where was the location of your store?” asked George. “Was it where the Glover Store was?”

            “No, there is a sign where the location of the first Post Office in Waupaca was.  It was next door to this.  Then next door to this was Dutton’s Bakery and the Jewelry Store.  In those days, grocery stores did not handle any bakery goods.  That was left to the bakeries. Also, there was no medication sold in the stores. This was left to the drug stores.  In those days, each store sold its own kind of goods.”

            “Same way with butcher shops,” added Ken Poulton.

            “Yes, there was Gordon’s, a very good meat market,” agreed Florence.

            “I remember Spencer’s Drug Store.  They sold a lot of Paris Green,” said George Jeffers.

            “Yes, I guess so.”

            “Didn’t people need kerosene?” asked George Warren.

            “Oh yes, everybody needed kerosene.  We didn’t have running water in the store, so it was not easy to wash up after kerosene.  But it was something that had to be done.  You can’t handle groceries after handling kerosene.”

            “Farmers would bring in boxes of eggs, I remember,” remarked George Jeffers.

            “Oh, yes.  They had to be repacked in 30 dozen cases.  Of course, these eggs had to be candled.  We fixed a box with two holes, one for each eye.  A lamp was set in the center.  One could hold an egg in each hole in front of the light to see if it was clear.  If it was not clear, it would be destroyed.  Rotten!

            “It was always easy to drop an egg, which made a mess.

            “People brought in butter. We had to handle it, which was not always pleasant because it was not always top grade butter.  The money paid for butter would be used to buy groceries.  We had to pack it in two or five pound jars and store it in the basement.  We would bring up small chips with butter on it.  If the customers liked it, he’d take it.  Otherwise, we’d bring up a chip with butter from another jar.

            “We handled lard the same way, in cardboard chips.  Raisins were also hard to get out.  They usually come in five to ten pound wooden lugs.  And we dug them out.

            “I got 50 cents a day working there.  I was thinking the other day about inflation.  I remember Cristie’s Store got in some very fine shoes for $3.50 a pair.  At fifty cents a day, I would have to work for seven days to earn a pair of these fine oxfords that buttoned on the side.  This doesn’t compare too well with today. We sure don’t need to work seven days to earn a pair of shoes.  That’s for sure.”

            “Let’s see if we an get the Petersons straightened in order.  There was a Peterson Cash Grocery Store, wasn’t there?”

            “Yes, my father had several brothers:  J. P., who was in the store with us; Uncle Will, who was in the potato company with us; and H. P., who had been an evangelist and retired, also living in Waupaca.”

            “Are your Petersons any relation to Celia, etc.?” asked Ken.

            “No relation.  That family is related to Ken, who is in real estate,” answered Florence.

            “The Cristy Store on the corner was a very good store.  The Fair Store was also.  They both had folding chairs on which the customer could sit while being waited on.  The Fair Store stood where Schultz’s store is now.  It had its grocery department downstairs.  It was a big store.  There were several grocery stores:  Ole Hole, Rueben Danielson’s father, “Speedy” Burkowski, had a store on Union Street; and in the not too distant past, there was Glover’s.”

            “You mentioned growing up in Saxeville,” queried Ken.  “You probably remember Myrtle Jensen then.”

            “Oh, yes, I knew her well.  She was a classmate of mine.

            “The dry goods were different from today. They had so many more yard goods.  Comparatively few made-up garments.  Many families made most of their own shirts and pants.  Each store specialized in its own brands.  They generally did not interfere with each other’s lines.”

            “Do you think that that made for better relationship with competitors?”

            “I wouldn’t be surprised that it did.” answered Florence.  “People were more friendly than they are now, I believe.  This was particularly true on the farm, I believe.”

            “Speaking of changes, I remember driving over the Mill Street Bridge a few days ago. Now it’s a very small stream.  It used to be a good sized river.  The Mill Pond was a good sized body of water.  It used to be very busy around Fallgatter’s Mill.  My mother used to send me down to the creamery to et a pail of buttermilk for a dime. I did that quite often.

            “As I look back to my childhood, it was fun hearing the hustle and bustle in the morning as the wheels started turning.  On the hot mornings, the street sprinkling wagon would go down Main Street settling the dust and cooling the air. The road was macadam and needed freshening up.”

            “How did you keep the ice cream cook in the hot summer?”

            “We didn’t sell ice cream, except on holidays.  Oh, we had a large refrigerator eight feet high and ten feet wide.  Ice was the cooling agent.  Larson Company, I believe, delivered the ice.  There was room in back of the store for the delivery boy to load the groceries and for the iceman to deliver the ice to the refrigerator.  Oh yes, the ice harvesting. The ice was harvested on Mirror Lake.”

            Mr. Jeffers:  “My dad helped in this enterprise.  When I was seven or eight years old, my dad used to drive the horse that pulled a steel plow that cut the ice one way and then they sawed it the other way. It was cold, painstaking work, but an interesting business.  Was your farm between Waupaca and Sheridan?” asked Mr. Jeffers. “I grew up in that area and remember Anderson Lake.  My dad harvested the ice we used for our use.  We kids used to play ball near the lake and then swim in it after the ball game.”

            “I was interested in that clock on the wall,” said George Warren.  “Is it a Seth Thomas?”

            “No, the name on it is New Haven.  Mr. Dickinson fixed it.  It needed an adjustment.  It used to decorate our store. Our store started about 1898.  My uncle ran it after my father went into the potato business.”

            “How many ears ago did that store go out of business?” asked Ken.

            “It was sold about 1921, when Uncle J. P. passed away.

            “My mother always worked very hard. She was happy when she was doing things.  It got so that she was helping with baby cases.  In those days, a baby case usually meant working with the baby in the home 10 days to two weeks.  This included cooking for the family, cleaning the house and other duties.

            “In about 1918 or thereabouts, a new doctor came to town.  He was looking for a house in which he could start a cottage hospital.  And he asked my mother to run the hospital.  Suitable places were hard to find, so finally they planned to use the upstairs of our house for it.  She ran this for about 12 years.  The doctor’s name was Fred Wood.  The doctor was a surgeon.  The place was Ware Street, two doors from our warehouse.  This was a very hard situation for mother because she couldn’t’ get any replacements for nurses for there were none.  But this arrangement worked out well for the doctor.  Later, Dr. Wood moved the hospital near the Episcopal Church on the same side of the street, on Main St.”

            “I enjoyed things as they went along. We had many cousins because of our large families.  Family gatherings were a lot of fun.  We enjoyed working. We had to be in the store by seven in the morning, sometimes earlier.  Coffee and sugar had to be prepared and weighed out in bags.  We worked until six.  We walked everywhere.  On band concert nights, it was ten o’clock before we got home.  We enjoyed working.  I enjoyed working at thins that I like.  There were some things, though, I didn’t care much about.”

            “When you worked in potato warehouses, was there lots of work?” asked George.

            “Oh, yes, invoices, correspondences, telegrams.  Trains had to keep moving,” answered Florence.

            “My father came from Denmark when he was 17.  My mother was 11.  They were married in 1877.  They bought a home on Cedar Lake.  They were a part of a great generation.”

            “Did the land wear out – raising potatoes year after year?” asked Ken.

            “Oh, yes.  One hundred bushels to the acre was quite common.  And we paid $10.00 a bushel for seed.  And in the fall, we sold them at a great deal less.  We had to build up the land.  Alfalfa was introduced.  Being a legume, it added nitrogen to the soil.  Clover also added nitrogen and did not kill out as easily as alfalfa.  So we tried to rotate grain, alfalfa or clover, and potatoes.  This built up the soil.

            “My husband fixed up the barn and added improvements to the house. He had spent some time at Lewis Institute in Chicago, where practical engineering and manual training were interspersed with theory.  They’d work for two weeks and then attend school for two weeks.

            “Our neighbors laughed and called him “city man.”  I’d like to recite an incident.  After election one spring, when he went to town, someone asked him, ‘Where are you from?’  He answered, ‘Farmington!’ ‘Oh, how did the election go?;  ‘Oh, all right, I guess.’  ‘Well, who got to be clerk?’  “Oh, Robert Ewald.’  ‘Oh, is that so?  Well, he must be smarter than he looks.’  We enjoyed this incident.

            “My husband died in 1960.  I became town clerk after that for 20 years.”

            “Who followed you?” asked George.

            “Ron Danielson for a couple of months.  Then Mrs. Lawrence was appointed.  She is doing a good job.  Mrs. Turner is treasurer.”

            “Are there Bartons still living in this area?” asked Ken.  “I remember checking through the Barton cemetery recently, looking at the grave stones, and I wondered.”

            “Yes, I believe that some are around,” answered Florence.

            “Norman Clayton is a second cousin.  We are trying to find out more about our ancestors.”

            “When moved from Saxeville to Waupaca, we all joined the First Baptist Church and I have been a member there since 1907 and am the oldest resident member.  The church has always been a very important part of our life. Robert and I were married there as were both of our children.  My faith and trust in God has given me strength and much comfort all my life.”