Olive Seymour…She saw her homestead in the sky

By Eva Hallam Solberg

Published in PCN December 12, 1979

“Dad tied a strong from the house to the barn so he wouldn’t get lost in the snowstorm.”

Olive Seymour remembered when she was only a few years old and they lived in a sod shanty in North Dakota. She had moved there with her mother from DeKalb Junction, New York, in 1882, when she was only three months old.

Olive moved to Grand Forks where she finished grade school and two years of high school. After passing a teacher’s examination, she taught a rural school for a year. She had a horse and buggy and people told her she was a good horseman.

“In looking back now, I think I was often in a very precarious position while driving that skittish horse, but I didn’t think so then.”

After receiving $30 a month for wages for the first year of teaching, she moved to a different school and was considered for higher wages. One man convinced the rest of the school board, however, that she was young and “probably not worth any more than $30.” She had 21 pupils to teach, one of whom was her cousin. He complained to his mother, her aunt with whom she roomed and boarded, that she was bringing up all sorts of strange things in school.

“She’s bringing up something about a verb and I don’t think I’ll ever have any use for that.”

Olive chuckled as she thought of it. “He’s 91, nearly as old as I am now, and I just got a letter from him the other day. He used a good many verbs.”

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