The Wigdahl family’s barn embodies a dream that started when Stribe’s grandfather, Leonard Wigdahl, was a teenager. The second of 10 children born to Rev. L.O. Wigdahl and his wife, Anna, Leonard quit school in 10th grade so he could farm.

After homesteading in Montana for a few years, he married his wife, Nettie Knutsen, and settled on the “Wigdahl Farm” that Rev. Wigdahl (who established Zion Lutheran Church in Ruthven) had purchased.

The young couple took over the payments, but then came the Great Depression.

“About this time, my grandpa’s brother-in-law John Osterhus heard about another 160-acre farm in Silver Lake Township coming up for sale. He offered to loan Leonard $2,000 as a down payment. Their bid of $6,000 was the highest bid. With the help of a Federal Land Bank loan of $4,000, they had a new start.”

-Submitted photo
The arched rafters of the barn can be seen in the haymow. All of the sawing for the barn was done with hand tools.

While there was a barn on this farm, it wasn’t much.

“It was kind of a shell of a building, quickly and cheaply built,” Stribe said. “My grandparents moved that building about 200 feet and turned it into a cattle shed.”

Leonard Wigdahl began planning to build a sturdy, new barn. Measuring 34 feet wide by 64 feet long, the barn began to take shape in July 1936.

“They hand dug a trench all the way around for a footing, and all the sawing was done with hand tools,” Stribe said.

The main carpenter, Carl Behrensen, received 50 cents an hour, while his four workers received 35 cents an hour. “At the carpenters’ suggestion, my family put red clay tile along the bottom to make the barn more durable,” Stribe said.

-Submitted photo
The Wigdahl barn in Palo Alto County was built in 1936. Red clay tile was used along the bottom at the suggestion of a carpenter "to make the barn more durable," said Diane (Wigdahl) Stribe.

Stribe’s father, Alden, was 15 years old at the time. “He ran errands for the construction crew and was fascinated by the barn’s progress,” Stribe said. “I’m sure he dreamed about the day when he would start farming full-time.”

The barn crew used gravel, sacks of cement and a cement mixer with a gasoline-powered engine during construction. It took about 10 scoops of gravel and two scoops of cement and water to make the concrete, which was transported to the barn site in wheelbarrows, Stribe said.

Alden estimated that the barn cost about $4,000, because lumber was much less expensive back then, Stribe noted. [The total cost of the barn in 1936 equates to more than $88,500 in today’s dollars.]

After the barn was complete, with room for horses on the north side and dairy cows on the south side, the Wigdahl family milked dairy cows there.

“Grandpa’s brothers Sam and Carl owned the Wigdahl Brothers Hardware stores in Ruthven and Emmetsburg, and they helped design a system for milking my grandpa’s 10 cows,” Stribe noted. “They would send their customers out to watch the milking process in the evening, and often then they would sell one of their Surge milking machines.”

When Alden was in charge of the farm, he raised hogs in the barn. “I sometimes kept my dad company on cold winter nights out in the barn as he farrowed pigs,” Stribe said. “I remember the sound of the contented sows with their pigs lined up at the milk bar, and I remember the sound of the radio, which Dad contended made for more calm sows.”

The haymow was a magical place for the four Wigdahl kids (Diane, Barb, Susie and Jeff).

“The west end held hay, and the east end held straw for bedding,” Stribe said. “My sister and I would play house up there in the summer. We would follow the mama cat up and would find her kittens safely tucked back in a hole in the bales. I can still hear the pigeons cooing up on the hay track.”

In recent years, the Wigdahl family worked with the Iowa Barn Foundation and a Minnesota-based contractor known as The Barn Doctor to help restore the barn. “My parents, Alden and Elsie, loved this farm so much, and they made it such a wonderful place for us to call home,” Stribe said. “The barn is the symbol of all they loved about this way of life they chose.”