In our early visits to the Fagerlie farm site using the Sagnes driveway my fear was the hill we had to climb after crossing the small bridge below the Sagnes barn. I felt like the car would be losing power and that we would surely roll back down the hill. I sat and pushed my body forward in an effort to help the car continue its momentum. I was very naive. We always made it! Then Mom and Uncle Olaf would comment about the folks living in the kettle and I am absorbing all this information. I had questions but children were to keep quiet and so I did.
There was the Engebret O. Fagerlie family that resided there. Engebret was married to my Dad’s aunt, Bertha .I had been told later that this was one of the first places that Dad visited on his first day in Sacred Heart. Engebret and Bertha raised a family of five daughters in the kettle. So I was related to them I was always hurt when the one daughter in later years said she was born in East Granite Falls. The kettle, also referred to as the bottom, became a place of intrigue to me.
Another family living here was the Falla family.The story about them was their forgetting the wedding gift behind when they had reached my grandparents place. Mother was elected to run down to the bottom to get the gift while the Falla family waited at Grandfathers’ place. I do not know if the Falla’s were driving a car or carriage and horses. Again, children were to listen and not ask questions.
Another person who had his home in the kettle was Pete Hershberg. My Aunt Emma told how he would set a rooster on a post, feed it a little alcohol and the rooster would entertain whoever was in the audience. In doing research and writing for our Sacred Hear Town and Country..More Than a Lifetime history book, I found the newspaper editor writing a blurb about Pete: he would come to town on occasion but always had his pillow along to sit on when visiting around. He married the single, but pregnant girl sent to America by the doctor that she had worked for in Norway. She came to my grandparents place and stayed until the marriage to Pete. The couple had two daughters of their own besides the girl she delivered. Aunt Emma visited the girls in California years later and they had nothing but good to say about their father, Pete. Another one who lived in the kettle was named Ole who had no family in America. When Engebret’s widowed mother, Ragnhiild, arrived to stay with her son and Ole proposed and the two were married.So by listening I learned some interesting facts about the kettle and that there were people that lived down there. But I never got any farther than the gate that led to the floor of the kettle and to this day I have not been to the bottom of what to me in childhood was a big hole in the earth.
The Reason for no Private driveway to the Kettle or to Peder Fagerlie farmsite.
East of Grandfather’s farm site looking towards the township road that ran north and south was a huge ravine in front of the barn that stretched north past the outbuildings and the house. Oftentimes there would be water in the ravine so building a driveway here was out of the question. Not until a road was built to the Minnesota River in 19– did a private driveway become a reality.
UFF DA! Such rambling. This needs editing and then some!! Sept. 13.
Back to the Kettle and how it came into being: “As the great Lake Agassiz drained into the Glacial Ricer Warren, causing a wide valley that is now the Minnesota Valley, the boulders came to rest in this valley and round about to create a lumpy moon-like landscape along the river and the nearby area.. Thus we have an area shaped like a kettle and given the same descriptive name by the early immigrants to the place as well as the bluffs and ravines around and about.