The Sunne Farm

August 23, 2009

I’m sitting in the dining room of a farm house that was built in 1899 -- 110 years ago. This house was completely rehabed about ten years ago after the State Park Department acquired the farm from the owner, a successor owner after the Sunne family sold the place.

The project included raising this house off it’s foundations, removing the old foundation, putting in a new modern basement, resetting the house on the new foundation, and tearing out the inside wall coverings, installing new insulation and wiring and refinishing the walls and floors.

This dining room is very nice. It is about 8’ x 12’ in size and the walls are covered with beaded boards laid horizontally. The ceiling is also covered with beaded boards. The floor is a bare toung-and-groove fir flooring with a polyurethane finish. The trim on the doors and windows is much like the original.

The entire floor consists of this dining room, a parlor, a master bedroom and a kitchen. All are finished the same way except that the floows are done in a maple toungue-and-groove flooring. There are three small bedrooms upstairs which have no closets, but there is ample room to place clothes hanging poles or clothes hooks in the little niche areas.

What is a mystery to us is how ten children slept in three small bedrooms. We have talked about it and tried to puzzle it out, but there are no answers.

We are here because we do our laundry in the basement where there is a modern washer and dryer -- something else the Sunne family never had here. This farm is a joint project of the State Park and The Sodbuster Association who work together to put on “Sodbuster Days” twice a year to demostrate how horses and oxen were used to power farm machinery way back then. More about that will be detailed in another posting.

This house has a real charm. It was the place where Andrew and Johanna Sunne raised their ten children after coming to America from Norway in 1884 and 1885. Andrew came over in 1884 to prepare for his family and Johanna followed with two children in 1885. To get his family here, Andrew borrowed $54.50 from his friend, John Brink, and that purchased steeerage from Oslo, Norway, to Lisbon ND -- 17 miles away, which was a very long day’s trip in those days by horse and wagon. Today that trip would easily cost $3,000 for a woman with two children.

They lived in a log cabin on the farm for the first 14 years until they could afford to build a house. The children kept arriving until there were eight children in the family by 1899. They moved into this house just before Christmas, 1899, and what a wonderful holiday that must have been. Two more children - Alfred and Emma - were born into this house after the family moved in.

The ten Sunne children, three sons and eight daughters, from the oldest to the youngest, were as follows:
1. Ole Sunne, born 1881 in Norway and married in 1916 in North Dakota.
2. Borghild Sunne, born in 1882 in Norway.
3. Anna Sunne, born November 17, 1886, at the Sunne log cabin (Anna #1 was born in 1883 and died June 17, 1885)
4. Jenny Sunne, born October 27, 1888, at the Sunne log cabin.
5. Mary Sunne, born April 16, 1890, at the Sunne log cabin.
6. Louise Sunne, born January 15, 1892 and died a week later, January 22, 1892
7. Carl Sunne, born May 26, 1893, at the Sunne log cabin.
8. Alma Sunne, born September 29, 1895, at the Sunne log cabin.
9. Helen Sunne, born July 22, 1897, last child born in the log cabin, later married a Libak and moved to Chicago.
10. Alfred Sunne, born January 23, 1900, in the house shown in the photo.
11. Emma Sunne, born _____________________

The Sunne family farmed a total of 909 acres in the Sheyenne River valley (owned and rented acreage) and Andrew experimented with various hybrids of wheat. For 15 years he tried to grow peaches in North Dakota, and finally gave that up. Andrew was also a poet. He was born in Norway in 1858 and died at this farm here on October 22, 1912, at 54 years of age. His wife, Johanna, followed him on June 17, 1921, at 62 years of age.