Elk Point History-Part 5 by Don Fowler

  Rural is rural and open land is farm land, and for the period March to November the enduring conversation in my town always was the weather.  It was the daily talk not only of the farmer, but of the dependent doctor; lawyer and merchant thief [oops!—I mean,] chief.  As a fifteen year old boy, then a clerk in a self-serve grocery, my opening gambit to an entering customer was “ did it rain out your way today?” or “did the hail get any of your corn crop?” or just plain “how is the weather treating you?” or even better,  “it’s a beautiful day.”  Always the weather.  And in my area the weather was variable and hovered near the point of loss and even disaster for the ordinary farmer.   There was the need of rain during the growing season, the need of hot sunshine in August, the need of a sharp frost in October to mature the corn crop, while at the same time there was the fear of drought, the fear of hail, the fear of wind storms and the fear of pests, like locusts or grasshoppers.   As a boy, I remember that the town of Jefferson erected a cross near the town to ward off the plague of locusts.   It was difficult to balance all of the fears and the needs with perfect weather, and even if one could, I would bet that the subject of conversation in Elk Point would have been the weather.

Don Fowler (left) in the Elk Point Council Oak Store, with manager Gene Matson

 

  South Dakota is a state with a large native Indian population and with huge tracts of state land assigned as Federal Indian Reservations.  Yet, in my town, as a young person, I don’t recall seeing or hearing of a single Indian.  None lived in the town, none was in my school, and none apparently visited us.  In later life I wondered about this conundrum which did not penetrate my thinking up to the age of twenty-three when I graduated from the University and when I didn’t have knowledge of an Indian in my graduating class.  A generation or two before my time, our history told us, relations between Indians and the immigrant folks in my town were fearsome, with the possibility of Indian attacks ever present and self protection as well as counter attacks always on the minds of the local people.  I seem to have lived in a quiet, peaceful time when personal safety was assumed and fear of a deadly attack was far removed from our daily thoughts.

  In my youth, religious differences in my town’s population were of little consequence.  All families were either Catholic or Protestant.  We all attended the same school.  No child for religious reasons left the town for an elementary education.   My parents sent us children to the local Baptist Church for Sunday School, since the Church was close to our home, didn’t involve crossing dangerous street intersections and we could attend by walking with the older neighbor children. Later, in about 1925, without special notice, all of us Fowler children switched to the Lutheran Church, the denomination of my mother’s membership.  My Fuester grandmother was of the Roman Catholic faith and I remember her attending the town Catholic Church when she came from Iowa to visit us.  I heard rumors of Catholic prejudices among the predominant Protestant population of my town, and perhaps some discriminatory action on their part was practiced, but the major focus of all concerned was generally on good relations and mutual respect for everyone’s religious beliefs.

  It is time to relate another family episode.  When we Fowlers changed our allegiance from the Baptist Church to the Lutheran Church it was incumbent on my parents to arrange our baptism.  In the Baptist Church, as you may know, the time of baptism is at the age of reason, not shortly after the time of birth as in most other Protestant churches.  We were thus as young people un-baptized.  Reverend Runsvold of the Lutheran Church came to our home on an appointed day and baptized en masse all six of the then assembled Fowler children.  I always noted baptisms were “cheaper by the dozen.”

  If there were serious differences, or possible harmful discrimination, among the people of the town, it was more likely on economic and social grounds and not on faith differences.  Substantial farmers, merchants and professional persons of the community tended to occupy a common social status. Common laborers and farm helpers seemed to rank a lower status. The levels of those in between were somewhat vague, not easily defined, and seldom concretely noted.  Social relations in our town were fluid, open, and generally a matter of individual choice.  No criminal element formed a section of the community, the city jail was generally vacant, and for the entire county only a small segment of the County Courthouse was needed for the confinement of criminal types.  Poverty was not unknown in the community and there was a so-called “County Poor Farm” on which a few of this category lived and labored to cover their keep.  If any residents of the town could justify a pinnacle position, untouchable by all others, I was not aware of them.  For a very short period, a member of the Dupont Family was a local resident for easy divorce purposes (for which Elk Point was widely known) and rather unobtrusively asserted a special “rich person” status, but that was not a common condition generally indicative of the town.       

  In 1930, the youngest member of the Fowler family and the last of our seven siblings was born.  It was also the time when I had graduated from high school and I wanted to pursue a college education.  No one else in my direct ancestral line had continued his or her education beyond high school.  Why did I wish to do so?  I can’t put my finger on a single incentive, but it seemed at the time a sensible thing to do, even though I was not the shining academic success in high school that the rest of my siblings were, and my resources to accommodate my ambition were non-existent.  My inclination appears to have been to drift along while expending a minimum of effort.  At any rate, within six months of brother John’s birth, I moved to the University of South Dakota to enter on seven years of higher education. I never returned to live in the town. My first hand knowledge of Elk Point came to an end.

       Donald D. Fowler
       December, 2011