Lena Franklin…Uses her mother’s spinning wheel

By Eva Hallam Solberg

Published in the PCN on June 26, 1980

One of her earliest memories is that of standing on a big platform on her parents’ farm in North Dakota. Around and around she kept the horses going. Lena Franklin’s father had a feed grinder, and the “horsepower” did the work. “People came with big loads of barley and oats to grind, and I helped,” she said.

Lena also helped her mother with the cooking, milking cows, and separating the cream. “Sometimes we made butter, but other times we just exchanged cream for butter. It was a lot of work.”

James Byron Franklin, one of twin brothers, was born in Canada, and moved to North Dakota. He and Lena married there on August 10, 1904.

Lena had taken up sewing at the age of 16 when she stayed with a dressmaker in Grand Forks. She made her own white wedding gown and they were married at home.

“I used to go from house to house to sew. You couldn’t get ready-mades at that time. You could make a good dress for less than a dollar.”

The Franklins lived on various farms, and for awhile, James managed an elevator. He later bought a relinquishment of 120 acres, and came to the homestead north of Saco, Montana, in 1918. In February of 1919, Lena and their five children—Ben, Carrie, Florence, Marian and Ruth—arrived in Saco by way of the Great Northern “Skidoo.” They were surprised to see the sun shining, as there had been deep drifts of snow in North Dakota when they left. Dorothy was born later, the only one of their six children to be born in Montana.

Read the rest of the story in "Looking Back Again: Life Stories from the Prairies of Montana"
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