I can’t believe I’d never heard of this book before, “Giants in the Earth“. It was written in 1927 by Ole Edvard Rölvaag, a Norwegian immigrant and a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. The book is a fictionalized account of original homesteaders on the South Dakota prairie, and goes into quite a […]
OTD in 1843: Peter Joseph Rademacher
On this date (January 13) in 1843, Dale’s great-great-grandfather Peter Joseph Rademacher was born in Olpe, Germany. Known to friends and family as Joseph, he emigrated to the United States with his wife and children in 1878 and settled in Crete, Nebraska, where Joseph’s younger brother Frank had already established successful businesses. Joseph and his […]
Mead, Colorado – 20 vintage photos
Dale borrowed a photo collection from Wayne Nelson. The photos belonged to Wayne’s parents, August and Freda Nelson. The Nelsons used to live on Road 13, just north of the St. Vrain River – the old house that Dale grew up in. These photos were taken on a fall afternoon at the corner of present-day Weld County […]
Joe and Annie Rademacher in Snyder, Colorado – Part 8
In the previous post on this topic, I shared with you the story about Ted being the first of our Rademacher branch of the family to come to Longmont. He had been living in Snyder with his parents and siblings. In 1926, at the age of 19, he was sent to Longmont with some livestock and […]
Joe and Annie Rademacher in Snyder, Colorado – Part 7
By the 1920’s, the good times in Snyder were starting to unravel for the Rademacher family. As we saw in the last installment, farm prices plummeted. Joe had invested profits in the cattle business and his investments disappeared practically overnight. They may have mortgaged the farm to keep things going (based on a cryptic reference […]
