A Cure For What Ails You: Ole B. Berge

Anne Marie (Slaeen/Sloan) and Ole B. Berge,
 Dec. 1945.

One of my maternal great grandfathers was the ultimate grandpa, so I'm told.  Ole Benhardt Berge was a stately, "beautiful" man, according to another one of his great-grandchildren who knew him personally.  Ole had a full head of hair even when elderly, which had gone totally silver from the dark hair of his youth, and a full moustache that was the envy of many.  He was an honorable man all of his life, right up until the day he died.  But, even the most honorable of men can still encounter little blips and challenges along the pathway of life.

Ole B. Berge left the picturesque Gudbrandsdalen Valley near Lillehammer, Norway in 1869 at the age of four, along with his mother, Karen Bue Berge, and older sister, Othilie. Ole's father, Gulbran Olsen Berge, left Norway a year before his wife and children; he was a passenger aboard the Hannah Parr during the eventful Spring 1868 voyage that ended up being one of the best documented excursions of early immigrant sailing vessels.  Karen could not travel until the next year because she was expecting a baby, a little girl who died shortly after birth.  Four more children were born in America, including two daughters who survived childhood:  Gunda and Sophie.

During the early years of his married life, Ole B. Berge farmed west of Maynard in Chippewa County, Minnesota.  In 1896, he moved his family into town where he built the first hotel. A few years later, he operated the town's first meat market with George Lawrence, and also worked as a postal carrier. The Berges then moved to Leonard, Minnesota in 1910, but they were not able to make enough living from their Leonard area farm, so they returned to Maynard after seven years and Ole again took an interest in civic affairs and was engaged in many activities.

Ole was a gentle, well-respected, and somewhat quiet man, but he did have a couple of vices.  For one thing, he smoked a pipe, which was not uncommon among Norwegian men.  When he was a young boy, his mother arranged for a photograph to be taken of her "little man" in Norway before boarding their ship for America in 1869.  Ole was posed with a miniature pipe in his mouth, meant to look just like Papa Gulbran's, I'm sure.


Ole B. Berge, 1869

In addition to his pipe, Ole was also rather fond of whiskey.  Perhaps it helped him deal with day-to-day stresses, since he did not have the kind of personality that would have allowed him to deal with things head-on.  In October 1897, at age 32, he admitted himself to a rehabilitation clinic in Minneapolis.

Although Ole enjoyed a bit of whiskey on a regular basis, family members have indicated that his drinking was moderated and did not appear to be problematic.  His wife, Anne Marie ("Mary") may have been concerned that he was drinking at all, and he obviously did not want to give her cause to worry.  Mary, as she was called, was known to be a sweet woman and loving companion.  Both she and Ole were active in the Lutheran Church.  In 1897, she and Ole were raising five young children in Maynard, Minnesota:  George, Harry, Chester and Esther (fraternal twins), and Mabel, who was a year old.  They had lost a child, the first Chester Albin Berge, in 1892.  In the following years, Mary would give birth to six more children:  Bennie, Cora, Mildred, Clarice, and Stella, and the last child, who died as an infant in 1911.  Esther, one of the fraternal twins, was my maternal grandmother.

The "Gay Nineties" brought an epidemic of alcoholism that swept across America, and Dr. Leslie E. Keeley's "cure" caught the wave on the rise.  The Keeley Institute utilized a special double chloride of gold remedy for "Liquor, Opium and Tobacco Habits, and Nerve Exhaustion."  Professor H. Wayne Morgan in his book, Drugs in America, concluded that "whatever the precise nature of the compounds, they clearly relied on tranquilization and antagonism for effect. Some relaxed and stupefied the patient while others created a temporary distaste for alcohol ... As for gold, its presence, if any, was hard to detect, and it had no therapeutic value, but had strong symbolic appeal."

Letterhead from the Keeley Institute in Minneapolis, from a letter written by Ole B. Berge to his wife, Anne Marie on October 4, 1897.

I have copies of three letters that Ole wrote to his wife, Anne Marie ("Mari"), during his stay at the clinic in October 1897.  They need to be translated from Norwegian into English before it can be determined whether any of Ole's feelings on the matter are revealed in his writings.  All that is known currently is that, after going through the program for several weeks, Ole returned home and apparently picked up his old habit where he left off.

During the Berges' second round of residence in Maynard, they lived in a house on the eastern edge of town, which Ole built himself. A great-grandson, Curtis Leroy Berge, said that Ole and Mary usually kept barrels of lutefisk in the second story of their home and that they seemed to live on the stuff during the winter. Curtis remembered going to Maynard on the train to visit the Berges when he was a boy. His Great Aunt Clarice would meet him at the train station and walk back with him to the house. In addition to the ever-present lutefisk, Great Grandma Mari and the young aunts were continously "baking up a storm."

At age 68, Ole suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered.  Even so, Ole and his wife, Mari, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary before her death in 1947.  Despite Ole's moderate dependency on whiskey throughout most of his adult life, he lived to the good age of 84, passing away on January 24, 1949.  Ole and Mari are buried beside one another at Maynard Lutheran Cemetery in Chippewa County, Minnesota, near their home for many years.


Sources:

--Berge, Ole B., Obituary:  newspaper clipping from Chippewa County, Minnesota, Jan. 1949, copy in the possession of the author.
--Groothuis, Michael J.  Voice From the Past (Chinhinta Productions, 1987).
--"In the 1890s, alcoholics lined up for the Keeley gold cure." (http://www.blairhistory.com/archive/keeley_cure/OWH_story.htm), accessed 5/11/2013.
--Minnesota Death Index, 1908-2002.
--Morgan, H. Wayne.  Drugs in America:  a social history, 1800-1980 (Syracuse:  Syracuse University Press, 1981).

The Irish Adventure of the Hannah Parr

Gulbran Olsen Berge, ca. 1870s.
Chippewa County, Minnesota.

On April 12, 1868, Gulbran Olsen Berge departed Christiania (Oslo), Norway for Quebec aboard the Norwegian emigrant sailing ship, Hannah Parr. Berge left behind a wife, Karen (Bue) Berge, and several children in Gudbrandsdalen Valley, Norway as he made his way to the United States to secure a new life for his family. The ship's list, published on the Norway Heritage website, recorded his passenger information as: Gulbrand Olsen Berget, 32, married - Residence Gausdal, Gudbrandsdalen.
The voyage of the Hannah Parr should have been just another routine crossing, despite primitive conditions that were common aboard early emigrant ships, but it ended up being one of the better documented sailing voyages in the history of early Norwegian-American migrations because of its exceptional nature. After the ship left Norway, it was not until 107 days later that the travelers finally reached their destination of North America, since severe storm damage forced them to make an extended layover in Ireland.

The Hannah Parr encountered severe weather when it reached the mid-Atlantic. On the second day of the storm, a large wave over the stern took out the pilothouse and its gear, as well as the kitchen, and left the ship with hardly any riggings or sail. After the storm subsided, the ship made its way slowly back to Ireland, where it docked for repairs at Limerick.

Gulbran Berge kept a diary throughout the voyage, though it consisted of mostly short reports about weather conditions. His descriptions became more extensive during and after the storm. For April 27-28, 1868, his notes read:

...We ran into a bad storm that lasted 2 days, and everyone thought they would die. The storm began the night of the 28th and lasted until 12 o'clock midnight of the 29th. We lost almost everything that was on the deck. The captain's quarters were completely wrecked. ...The kitchen was washed overboard. The sails and riggings were destroyed by the wind. ...The captain would have been blown off the ship if the one who steered the boat had not rescued him. The foremast was blown off, but we made some use of it. The captain said he had never been in such a storm before. He had never heard of another emigrant ship that it had happened to like it did to us. Three people were hurt, and some were so tired because they had not slept for 72 hours.

The ship turned about and headed back to the nearest land for repairs, anchoring temporarily in the Irish islands at the mouth of the Shannon estuary before continuing on to Limerick. On May 7, Berge wrote:

...Many came on board to sell food and other things. They took up the anchor, and since no steamboat had come we continued on our way because we had the tide with us [...] In between the rivers it was very pretty. The leaves, potatoes, and corn were as big as they were in mid-summer in Norway. When we came ashore we were met by many people, and they looked at us like we had come from another world. They followed us around so much we could hardly move. At night three or four men had to keep watch on deck, and every day hundreds of people came to look at the ship without sails.

While the Hannah Parr was undergoing repairs, there was a great deal of interaction between the traumatized Norwegian emigrants and their curious, hospitable, and lively Irish hosts:

May 10 - [We] all wished to go on a trip on the railroad for a few miles inland, and this was an enjoyable trip. Some gentlemen treated us to 40 pints of Port wine which was all drunk up, and some felt happy from it [most likely a translation mistake, since letters by other passengers mention "porter" (beer)].


May 11 - ...When we were in Limerick we had a very good time. The people did all they could to make it pleasant for us [...] Two hundred of us went to the theater, and even though none of us understood what they said, we enjoyed it. The work on the ship went slow... we were laid up there about six weeks. We sailed from Limerick the 9th of June, and although we were not ready we had to leave because the tide would go out so no ship could come in or go out for 10 days. We transferred to a steamship four miles out of town where we cast anchor to get ourselves entirely ready, and we thought we would be there only a few days. While we were anchored there, most of the passengers had to send word back to Limerick for food because we left in such a hurry we didn't get time to buy all we needed.

After departing the Irish coast to face the Atlantic once again, the Norwegian emigrants found that new passengers accompanied them on the remainder of the voyage, namely: lice, and the dreaded disease, typhoid fever. Only a few deaths resulted, however.

Clair O. Haugen and James Overdahl collaborated on Hannah Parr research, and Haugen wrote a background article for the Norway Heritage website: The LONG Crossing of the Hannah Parr. Also included online are Hannah Parr related photographs, the diary of Gulbran Olsen Berge, and letters by two of his fellow travelers describing events.


Hannah Parr the Subject of Arts Collaboration in Limerick

Recently, a children's theater group in Limerick, Ireland performed a play about events surrounding the 1868 voyage of the Hannah Parr, after discovering that some Norwegian children from the ship were buried in a local churchyard. With the help of Haugen and Overdahl, known Hannah Parr descendants were contacted and asked to submit vocal greetings to the Irish children, to help give a better sense of history of the ship and its passengers. In my own greeting, I asked the children to remember that "an act of kindness can last several lifetimes." Without the hospitality of the citizens of Limerick, my great great grandfather, Gulbran Olsen Berge, would not have continued his voyage to America. Had he not continued his travels at that time, it is likely that his son, Ole Benhart Berge, would never have met his Norwegian-American wife, and my grandmother would never have been born, and consequently, I would never have been born... and so it goes.

An Irish entertainment website contains a review of the collaboration between the Island Theatre Company, St Marys Local Arts Group, and the 16 children from Limerick who participated: Cheebah - Hannah Parr.
Growing New Roots on the Minnesota Prairie

Ole Benhardt Berge, 1869, Norway.



Karen Bue Berge, 1879s.
Chippewa County, Minnesota


The Berge family was eventually reunited a year later, in 1869, when Gulbran's wife. Karen, and their two children, Othillie and Ole, made the transatlantic crossing from Norway. It was the custom for family members to have photographs taken at the point of embarkation, and to mail them home as mementos. In 1869, little Ole was photographed with a miniature pipe in his mouth. It was a sight meant, no doubt, to make Farfar and Farmor extra proud of their grandson, the liten mann (little man) who was about to brave the open seas to help his papa make good in America. The pipe and the original box it was sold in is currently in the possession of one of Ole Benhart Berge's grandsons in Minnesota.

Gulbran and Karen Berge homesteaded in Leenthrop Township, Chippewa County, Minnesota, and had two more daughters after being reunited: Gunda and Sophie. Their son, Ole, who immigrated to America as a boy, eventually had 10 children of his own, one of whom was my grandmother, Esther Agnes Berge. Gulbran Olsen Berge died in his forties from tuberculosis; his death certificate indicates that he was interred at Saron Lutheran Cemetery, also in Leenthrop Township. Saron Lutheran Church, which was built a few years after Berge's death, does not include the grave in its registry, and a marker has not been found.

Many years after Gulbran's death, his sea voyage diaries were stored in a garage and became weather damaged. Only one volume of his notes survived, and it was translated from Norwegian to English by one of Gulbran and Karen Berge's daughters, after which the translation was distributed to many family members. So, because of multiple, individual steps, including the unexpected kindess of Irish strangers, and the passing down of an old weather-worn and nearly unreadable diary, this bit of Norwegian emigrant history has survived to inspire us all.

Inspiration, in my opinion, is what the pursuit of genealogy and family history is all about. Genealogy should never be an end unto itself, with family data existing merely as a collection of names and dates. When genealogy is combined with family and social history, a living timeline of people, events, and challenges can be woven together in a braided chain that serves to strengthen the meaning of our current reality. Thus, genealogy and family history mirror collective human experience in a very personal way.