My dad, David Barland, 82 and living in Hopkins since 1949, grew up in Camden at 5222 4th St. N., two blocks from Lyndale. The freeway wall now looms up east of the alley behind the house, but of course the freeway wasn't there when he was living there. His father was French, and he made welding gas at 45th and Lyndale from age 19 to retirement as superintendent. His mother was English and Irish; she raised six sons and one daughter, my dad was the firstborn. He has many childhood memories of the area, such as swimming at the old Webber Pool and in the Mississippi River with the dangerous currents and the sewage, and playing in the tunnels of the old brickyard on 44th and Lyndale by the river.
There were farmers at 57th Ave. and Humboldt, Howie and Alfa Carlson. Howie and his brother Nils were both journeymen carpenters and also owned land. In the summer Howie Carlson farmed a piece of land about three blocks square, southwest of his home. He and his brother also owned 40 acres apiece in Johnsville and Howie also farmed there (his brother's acreage was not cultivated). My dad and two of his brothers approached Howie about working for him. According to my dad, Howie's response was, "I can use you two guys but I don't think the crippled guy can do it." My dad had had polio as a child and wore a leg brace. His younger brothers, my uncles Ed and Jerry, refused to work without him and so they were hired on as a team. After only a few weeks they were joined by yet another brother, my uncle Jack, who was nine years old at the time but big for his age (the others were 10, 12 and 13). The Barland boys always stuck together.
They were first hired to weed and then helped with other tasks. They worked at the small farm in the city, and they also traveled up north to Johnsville, which they called "the forties." Howie did the planting, growing a wide variety of crops: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, beets, carrots, radishes, green beans, lima beans, cucumbers, spinach and tomatoes. The small farm also had laying hens, Ed collected the eggs and cleaned the hen house. Both locations had wells and the small farm had an irrigation system. The hand-pump well at the forties had very cold water, good for drinking, and my dad remembers filling a barrel with water and putting several 1/2-gallon jugs of Dad's Root Beer inside to stay cold, and enjoying them with their lunch of sandwiches.
They would travel north up Central Ave. to the forties. At the time there were no bridges crossing the Mississippi River between the Camden Bridge and Anoka. They'd ride in a ‘37 Chevy pickup, or if it was harvest time, a larger Ford straight-axle truck. After a few years, Ed was able to get a farm license and got to drive, which made my dad a bit jealous - he was the oldest, he thought he should be doing the driving. Howie would take Ed to the Farmer's Market at Glenwood and Lyndale. It was much larger then and stocked mostly by Norwegian and Swedish farmers, there were also a few black farmers working there.
They would harvest in any weather, bringing the produce back in the big truck to Howie's city property. There was a big shed with garage doors and inside there were two or three cattle tanks. They would fill them up with well water to wash the radishes, spinach and rutabagas. They would also wear rubber boots, and my Dad says it was a good thing because they could have been electrocuted with the water and electrical cords on the floor. Some vegetables - carrots, turnips and parsnips - they would tumble in a special washing machine. It was wooden, had a drum like a clothes dryer, a water pipe in the middle, and a pulley. My dad said the vegetables would come out "nice and beautiful."
One year everyone planted Victory Gardens, with lots of cucumbers. Howie, thinking ahead, planted several acres, hidden in a back comer of the forties, with dill. Nobody else had remembered to plant it and he made a good profit. The next year he didn't plant any, everyone else planted it and couldn't sell it. He was evidently quite shrewd. Dad remembers Howie had a lot of funny sayings, like, "Do you think the rain's going to hurt the rhubarb?"
I asked my dad what they did with their earnings. They were first paid 4 cents an hour to weed; harvest work was paid by the amount. He said they really liked harvesting radishes because, working in a team of four, they made good money. He said they would bring the money home and contribute some to household expenses, the rest their father would save until fall when they used it to buy their school clothes. They held out a bit for treats like going to the Camden Theater. My dad ended up working for Howie Carlson the longest as his brothers went off to military duty in the army and navy. They all made it back home and they all continued living the ethic of hard work they learned as children. Incredibly, my dad outlived all his siblings. He is such a strong personality that it's hard for me to imagine the world without him in it.
A little bit about our guest writer, Jodie Walters: She was born and grew up and went to school in Hopkins. After attending the U of M she moved around quite a bit, living in London, England for a year and in Rochester, New York for seven years, working at Kodak. She eventually moved to the Cleveland neighborhood of Camden, near where her father grew up, and has lived there for 26 years. She works part time at General Mills when she isn't gardening. Barbara Meyer Bistodeau