Homestead Days

By Dorothy Martin

In the early 1900s, people could go to the West and secure a piece of free property through the Homestead Act. My mother's sister, Vergie Frakes, and her husband had gone West and filed for a homestead in Chugwater, Wyoming. My mother and another sister went out there to join her.

Chugwater was a small town but had a big railroad junction of the Union Pacific and another national line, where railroad men stopped to eat and sleep. Mother got a job as a cook at the hotel. When a train was going to stop, it blew a special signal when it got near the town, and Mother had to have dinner ready for the crew in an hour.

She and her sister returned to Wisconsin in 1916, married their buddies, and returned to Chugwater where they filed for homesteads.

I was born in 1918, and that's the year the Chapel Car, Glad Tidings, came to a railroad siding to stay in Chugwater for several months. My parents were Congregationalists and were happy to have a church to attend. They took me to be baptized. The missionary explained the Baptist belief of dedicating babies and adult immersion. So my parents were immersed in baptism, and I was dedicated.

That start led to a journey rich in the church.

I became the State President of the Wisconsin Baptist Youth Fellowship. That put me on the National BYF Board, with a youth gathering in Estes Park, CO, where I was a representative with Dick Beers from Wisconsin. There I met Waka (Mochizuki) Dannenhauer, who has been a life-long friend.

After graduating from Oshkosh State, I was a high school English teacher, but on Friday nights I was usually out the front door before the students because of my active church life. After two years, I felt that I really wanted to go into full-time Christian work so resigned and enrolled at Colgate Rochester Divinity School to train for the ministry. I was married and had a family before I finished.

During the years in Illinois, I was President of the Comic Sans MS Baptist Women's Association. In Rhode Island, I was an officer on the State Women's Board. That's when I was also in charge of three carloads of young people to the Youth Conference at Green Lake and was one of the conference leaders.

Then, when I had to start life over at 50, it was the year the ABC Convention was in Milwaukee. I went since it was a time to also visit Mother and Dad at Weyauwega. When I asked on of the leaders if there was a job opening any place I could apply for, he asked, "You aren't by any chance a librarian, are you?" I was! I was the youth librarian at the Reading (MA) Public Library. He pointed to a display booth and told me to see the man over there. I went over, and who should it be but Donald Burkholder, a good friend, who had been chairman of the Board of Deacons at our Warrenville, IL, parish. I got the job as Reference and Research Librarian for the National Board of Educational Ministries, American Baptist Association, at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where I worked from August 1968 to February 1983.

See Places I Have Lived or return to CA's Family.