In the Midst of the Big Woods

In my last post I concentrated on the brothers John and Louis Thompson who came to North America in 1882 and settled on adjoining 40-acre parcels of land north of Buffalo, Minnesota. However, John and Louis were not the first members of the family to form part of the massive Swedish emigration to the New World, nor were they the first to settle in Wright County, Minnesota.

Henrik Mattsson was born on the 9th of April, 1843, the son of Matts Persson and Karin Hindriksdotter. He had four sisters and two brothers, and we'll come back to those brothers in another post. The family lived on a small farm known as Snipa, in the parish of Vitsand in Värmland. This is the central western area of Sweden which saw a lot of immigration from Finland in the 17th Century. If I've interpreted the maps correctly (perhaps that's a big assumption) Snipa was a farm somewhere in or around Snipberget, i.e., Snipa Mountain, and wasn't all that close to the village of Vitsand itself. This is a fairly remote, wooded area, where making a living by farming would have been a difficult way to survive.

Birth record for Henrik Mattsson from parish archives in Vitsand. The columns, from left to right, show that (1) he was the 22nd birth recorded that year; (2) born on 9 April; (3) baptized on 12 April; (4) nameed Henrik and living in Snipa; (5) his parents' names, Mattes Persson, Karin Hindriksdotter; and (6) witnessed by Nils Jonsson and Vallborg Persdotter.

The years 1867–1869 were particularly difficult in Sweden. According to the website www.european-emigration.com, this period saw “a series of catastrophic famines … caused first by too much rain, then drought and finally epidemics [that] led to crop failures.” In March of 1869, Henrik, his new bride Wallborg Pålsdotter (in English, Paul´s daughter), and their young daughter Anna Cajsa, emigrated to North America. Wallborg came from Noppen, a tiny settlement just SSE of Snipberget.

I haven´t yet been able to find any documents from the port of Göteborg, from which they probably sailed, nor from New York, their likely arrival point in the U.S. The book, `The Immigrants´ that I mentioned in the last post describes the trials that would be involved in the passage across the Atlantic in a sailing ship. Henrik and family, however, came a bit later, and likely made the crossing on a steam ship, and as a result the voyage was a bit more predictable and relatively quick. Nevertheless, you can imagine pulling up roots, and trying to take everything you´d need in order to make a new life for yourself. The painting The Emigrants by Knut Ekwall gives the artist's impression of what the voyage may have been like, with people huddled on deck, covered to stay warm, while packed in with cattle and horses. And this was on deck, I shudder to think of the conditions below decks where most of the time was spent.

Henrik, Wallborg, and Anna Cajsa emigrated from Vitsand in early 1869. Already in the 1870 census the family – now with the addition of a new daughter Emma – are recorded in the national census in the town of Cokato, Minnesota. So they must have headed here pretty directly, perhaps on the basis of an advertising campaign, perhaps by word of mouth.

In my last post I described by brief visit to Buffalo, Minnesota. At the end of that day, I drove another half hour west to drop into Cokato. The ostensible purpose was to try to track down a reference I´d found to an "obituary" published in the local paper for Henrik, under the name Henrik A. Mattson. By the time I left Buffalo it was already mid-afternoon in November, so it was already growing dark. I stumbled my way into the Cokato Museum near closing time, and the folks there couldn't have been more kind and helpful. They not only helped me to find the (minimally useful) death notice that had been published in the paper, but we also located a tract of land owned by Henrik, and they gave me some guidance on where he probably had been buried.

A short digression here about names, as this has become a point of confusion in the story I'm trying to tell. The name Henrik (also variously spelled Hinrik, Henric, Hindrik, Hindrick, etc.) is fairly straightforward, and it's usually been anglicized as Henry. Also, the surname Mattsson is not such a foreign beast, and is usually recognizable in its many American forms: Mattson, Matson, Madsen, Madison, Mattison …. But for reasons unknown to me, our Henrik also adopted the surname Hult. There is a small village of Hult located just off the southern end of the map above, and perhaps this is the reason he took on that name. But it wasn't simple a one-and-done deal: in some records I can find him as Mattson, in others as Hult, and it seems to go back and forth depending on the whim at the time. Maybe there's a logic to it, but I haven't figured it out yet. So we find members of the family subsequently using the name Mattson (or a variant spelling) as well as Hult (and, later, the spelling Holt). It does get confusing, doesn't it?

The first settlers in the area now occupied by Cokato began to arrive in 1858. The townships of Cokato and Stockholm were established in July of 1868. The St. Paul & Pacific Company, later the Great Northern Railroad, built a line from Howard Lake to Willmar in 1869, and built stations along the way. One of these developed into a small settlement known as Smith Lake (named for the water body nearby). More on Smith Lake in a bit. The name Cokato (pronounced “Co-kay-toe”) is, according to the Cokato Museum, a word from the Dakota language, meaning “in the midst of” and presumably refers to the fact that the town was located within The Big Woods, near the westernmost extension of the hardwood forests before the land transitions into the Great Plains and prairie habitat.

Henrik Mattson, now known as Henry M. Hult (the “M”, I presume, stands for Mattson) managed to acquire two 40-acre parcels of land on either side of the township lines between Cokato and Stockholm just to the west of Smith Lake and to the east of the village of Cokato. Google Maps gives a good idea of the topography of the area: a gently rolling terrain; most of the woods are gone now, replaced by grain fields. The image I copied is just about where I think Henry's lands were located and the road is the boundary between the two townships. The 1880 census reveals gains and loss in the family: daughter Emma (b. 1869) disappears from the records, but her place is taken by Hilma (b. 1873) and another daughter Emma (b. 1879).

Property owned by Henry M. Hult indicated in light blue, to the southwest of Smith Lake. This map is dated 1901, after Hult's death in 1887. It seems that the northern 40 acres was sold to O. Olson by this time.

In Minnesota, the Federal censuses of 1870, 1880, etc. are supplemented by state censuses that were taken in 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905, and 1915. I haven't yet been able to find a record for the family in 1875, but in 1885 they are living in Cokato and have another daughter, Mathea S. Anna Cajsa is now gone: in 1884 she married Mattes Matteson Hult. Now, Mattes is not a relative, at least not as far as I've determined. He may have adopted the name Hult in the same way as Henry, or perhaps he did it as a consequence of marrying into the Hult family. In later years the name morphed from Hult to Holt.

At this point both Henry and Wallborg disappear from the census records. In 1895 the three girls, Hilma Hult (now 21 years old), Emma Hult (16), and Martha Hult (12, yes, Martha, the spelling is quite clear), are living together and are listed in the records for Stockholm. Five years later in the 1900 Census for Stockholm we find Hilma Mattson listed as head of household and her 16 year old sister Marta (yet another spelling). But the trail then turned completely cold for me, and this was the point I was at when I dropped into Cokato last year. We could find no records for any of the family beyond 1900, nor any records that might account for Henry or Wallborg since 1885.

This week I got a bit of a break, though, first with a death record on the FamilySearch website for a Hilma E. Mattson. This Hilma passed away on 13 January, 1901 in Stockholm, Minnesota, age 27, with father's name recorded as Henry and mother's name Welber. All this agrees with the Hilma I was trying to trace, with the exception that the mother's name was really Wallborg. Close enough, don't you think? I've found some pretty creative spellings for that name, including one that listed her as Walter! With this record in hand, I was then able to find the case file for her in the probate court in 1901. The file was for the assignment of letters of administration for her estate after her death. The letters of administration were eventually given to a Henry P. Holt – there's that name again. This Henry Holt, however, was not related to the Henry Hult we started with. The new Henry was married to a Jennie Holt, and that's her maiden name. Actually, her Swedish name was Gertrude Jansson. Jennie was the daughter of Annika Pålsdotter and Jan Olsson, and now we can close the circle with the confusion of names. It turns out that Annika was one of Wallborg's sisters. By the way, our new Henry P. Holt, it seems, did not take on the name Holt out of the blue. His original name was Henrik Persson (hence the initial P.), and he was his wife's first cousin once removed.

Back to Hilma: upon her death the value of her personal estate was a total of $47.02: she left cooking utensils worth $3.00, miscellaneous articles valued at an additional 85¢, $4.95 of wearing apparel, 50 bushels of wheat worth $27.50, sacks valued at $1.25 and chickens valued at $1.50. I know that only totals to $39.05, but that's all that's listed in the documents. The real value, though, and undoubtedly the only reason that all of this legal documentation was undertaken, was in her shares of the two plots of land owned by her father. Her share of these, a one-third interest, was worth $900.00. Seeing the value of things in 1901, this sounds like real money! Two persons were deemed to be entitled to inherit this estate. To quote the case file: “And it further Appearing That the following named persons are the persons entitled to said estate by law, viz: Matea S. Matson and Anna Holt.” Anna is Anna Cajsa Holt; Matea S. Matson was Hilma's other sister.

So this leaves a few questions: what happened to Emma, Henry, and Wallborg? The probate records solve two of those. Emma M. Mattson had died a few years earlier, specifically on 3 December, 1897. Interestingly, the application for letters of administration was made the same time as for Hilma's estate in 1901, and Henry P. Hult was given the job of administrator. No cause of death is given for either Hilma or Emma in these case files. And browsing back a little further through the probate records, I found the case file for Henry Mattson. He died intestate in 1887, and his designated heirs were his daughters Helma E. Mattson, Emma M. Mattson and Martha S. Mattson. Two interesting points there: Anna Cajsa is not designated as an heir in these records, although she is in the records for Emma and Hilma. Secondly, not a word in the documents about Wallborg, so apparently she died sometime in the period from 1885–1887.

The listing of Henry's possessions at the time of his passing is interesting: they included a sewing machine, a looking glass, two flat irons, one Bible, and two lace curtains. As for the farm animals, he owned two cows, one that was 8 years old and the other 7; three heifers; one steer; two sheep and two lambs; a hog; and four turkeys. This was topped off by 232 bushels of wheat. The grand total for his personal possessions was $421.89.

Henry's final resting place, and that of his wife and daughters, is unknown. A possibility is that they were buried in the nearby cemetery of the town of Smith Lake. The town was on the north side of the shallow lake from which it got its name, and Henry's properties were just to the southwest of the lake. You may have noticed the use of the past tense there: Smith Lake as a populated place no longer exists. The town was founded between 1865 and 1869, and initially it grew into a bustling little community. However, in 1910 the Church of God burned down, and in 1914 the post office moved out. It seems to have been all downhill after that, and most people had left by the late 1920s. After the church burned and moved to Howard Lake, the cemetery was abandoned and gradually fell into disrepair. Eventually, it disappeared under the plow as the land under cultivation gradually expanded to engulf the graveyard. Grave markers were moved, but the cemetery itself was not relocated. So with any paper records up in flames and markers gone, the identities of the persons buried there are likely more or less lost to history. There is an article published in the local paper in 2010 on the loss and rediscovery of the cemetery. The Cokato Historical Society received a small grant in 2011 from the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grants Program to erect a marker alongside the road marking the position of the cemetery.

Now, what of the remaining two daughters, Matea and Anna? My searches for Matea have largely turned up empty. The only small step forward came by playing a hunch. When sister Hilma died, Matea would have been alone and still a minor. Where did she go to live? I found nothing to indicate she went to live with her sister. The other option was her cousin Henry, the administrator for her sisters' estates. In the 1905 census, after the listing of Henry's family there is an entry for a Sophy Mattson. This, I believe, is Matea, so her full name was Mathea Sophia Mattson. In fact, she has a first cousin, one of Annika Pålsdotter's children, who was also named Mathea Sophia, so I suspect if we look a little farther afield in the family of the two Pålsdotter girls, Annika and Wallborg, we'll find that these names were used more widely in the family. However, after 1905 I have been unable to find any records of Matea. My next step will be to try to track down records associated with the two 40-acre plots of land that she inherited. By 1916 ownership had been transferred to a J. Olson and a Marg. Olson. I hope that these records will give some hint of Matea's fate.

Anna Cajsa's subsequent life is much better documented. She married Mattes Mattson Hult in 1884. Together they had five children: Mathilda Josefina (1885–??), Alfred O. (1889–1974), Amanda Christin (1893–1956), Emily Cecilia (1896-1971), and Walter (1900–1905). As is obvious from the question marks I haven't been able to run down all the details, but I have made some progress. Anna Cajsa lived until 1932, and her husband Mattes died a year later in 1933. Both are buried in Cokato, as is their daughter Amanda. The name Holt is prominent in the area. Alfred's son Ralph Melford Holt founded Cokato Transportation, “...the oldest family-owned school bus contractor in Minnesota.” You can read about that history in two stories published in the Cokato Herald Journal at the newspaper's website (Part 1 and Part 2). The local Ford dealership is owned and operated by the same family. Yes, I've reached out to the ownership by email but, so far, no response.

As you can tell, the frequency of my posts has declined. This is not because I've been totally stymied in finding information. Rather, the reason is that there are so many loose ends! I feel pretty safe in assuming that a data dump of names, dates, and places would be of limited interest, so my goal has been to find the stories behind all of that. Even writing this post, because I go back and double-check my facts and assumptions, has led me on a couple of detours through history. Anyway, we have not heard the last of the family of Henrik Mattsson (later Henry Hult). Henry's brothers also have a story to tell, and writing that up is my next goal. Until then, all comments, suggestions, and corrections are gratefully received. Happy Fourth of July!