There are places that, for families, become like hallowed ground. Places where the family connections run deep, where you feel at home even if it’s never really been home.
For me, that place is the tiny town of Lengby, that sits just off Hwy. 2 between Bagley and Fosston, in northwestern Minnesota. It was my mother’s hometown, and I and my siblings and a handful of cousins visited there this past weekend for a small memorial for my mother, born Patricia Stave, who died in March.
My mother grew up there. So did her mother and father. Her grandparents, who came from various parts of the Old World, all settled in and around Lengby before its founding in 1898. It’s tiny even by comparison to small towns in our area, with an official population of just 92 as of the 2020 census, but it’s still showing signs of life.
It’s perhaps best known in that region for the still well-maintained park and beach on the shores of Spring Lake, a place that attracts families during hot weather in the summer. The lake is clear, and because it is, in fact, spring-fed, it stays nice and cool and is a welcome relief from the heat. The swimming beach includes a diving platform out in the deeper water, although they took down the very high board that always brought an extra thrill when I used to leap from it during summertime visits there. Apparently, the town’s insurance carrier wasn’t as thrilled.
I didn’t try the somewhat lower diving board this weekend. It was a bit cool for swimming, but we met the handful of cousins who came for the memorial under the pavilion roof near the beach. My mother was the last of her generation in the family so only the cousins are left.
Still standing next to the pavilion is the kitchen building, where the Ladies’ Improvement Committee, which my grandmother co-founded decades ago, still occasionally serve sloppy joes, hot dogs, and the fixings for families that use the park. I still remember my grandmother Eva working behind the counter there, probably half a century ago now.
While the years have disappeared, little has changed in Lengby, which I find a tremendous relief. It’s a little place that has been left behind by the development that seems inexorable in larger communities, and I suspect that’s what keeps the handful of residents rooted to the place.
The landscape there is just as I remember as a child. Rolling hills and a mix of field and forest where the bur oaks of the prairie mix with the white pine of the Northwoods. As a teenager, I used to love walking the Burlington Northern rail line that passes through town. By then, I had binoculars and a strong interest in birds, and Lengby was a place where one could hear an indigo bunting on one side of the tracks and a western meadowlark on the other. Fifty years later, little has changed.
Among another of the longtime and seemingly unchanging fixtures of the town is the St. Paul Lutheran Church, which my great-grandfather Johan Stav (later changed to Stave), who came over from Trondheim, Norway, helped build in the early 1900s, and where he served as the sanctuary’s first deacon.
It’s a spartan place, in keeping with those who built it as well as its former affiliation with the conservative Missouri synod (it’s now affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Synod). My mother, a free spirit from a young age, always strained against the church’s prohibitions on, well, anything fun.
But as the generations passed on, it was a place that kept drawing us back, for funerals, or on occasional visits to the small cemetery on the church grounds. It’s a beautiful spot, with towering white pines and a relative scattering of graves tucked into the quiet shade. It’s a strange experience to walk in a graveyard and recognize most of the names, virtually all of them relatives of one sort or another. It has a kind of pull that I have experienced in few other places on Earth. The Stave plot is among the closest to the church, and the sexton had marked out the spot where my mother’s cremains could rest for eternity with her parents and a brother, and a sister nearby.
After some discussion, however, we determined based on our collective memories, that my mother had really wanted to be interred next to her favorite grandmother, Louise Hilliard (born Louise Wangerin in Germany in 1877), who was buried next to her husband, my great-grandfather Herbert Hilliard. I know virtually nothing about my great-grandfather, who died in 1930, but we know that he was descended from William Hilliard, who was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1655. His parents arrived in the New World sometime before that.
Great-grandma Hilliard was something of a misfit in Lengby, who seemed to attract misfortune, which only increased my mother’s affection for her. My mother always rooted for the underdog, after all.
Great-grandma Hilliard
was a bit scary to me as a young boy. She always dressed in black, as if she was in permanent mourning, perhaps for her only son, Harry, who died in a hunting accident at the age of 15. It devastated her, and between that, an unhappy marriage, and living as a near-outcast in a very tight-knit community, life was hard for her.
When I was young, she lived across the gravel road from my grandparents in a two-story house wrapped in tarpaper, as if even her house was in mourning. By the time I knew her, she was very old and frail and walked slowly with a cane. While I had little interaction with her, my mother always brightened at her presence and would later recall to me and my younger siblings all of her great-grandma’s stories, including tales of visiting ghosts and other magical and sometimes horrific occurrences. Like so many small towns, Lengby had its share of secrets, rarely discussed, but my great-grandmother apparently knew them all.
My mother had her own stories of growing up in Lengby, which often began joyfully before turning to heartbreak. She liked to recall her pet talking crow, who would sit on the clothesline in their yard and greet my grandmother when she’d leave the house in the morning with a slight bow and a clearly articulated “Hello, ma!”
The crow would occasionally follow my mother to school and would sit on a tree branch outside the window to her elementary classroom, reciting the name of her other devoted companion, a sheepdog she named “Hubba.”
As a girl, she had a bike with a big basket on the handlebars, and she could pedal down the street with both Hubba and the crow holding on for the ride.
She found her crow dead one day, after a mentally ill neighbor decided it was evil and drowned it in a rain barrel. Hubba met a sad fate as well, when it developed a case of mange and my grandfather, rather than pay the vet for treatment, marched Hubba into the woods and shot him. My mother never forgave him, and she left home not long after, at the age of 13, to live with an aunt and uncle in Brainerd.
Despite those unpleasant memories, Lengby never lost its grip on her. While life took her many places, she’s back home again, this time for good, where I hope she’ll find eternal peace in the quiet shade under the pines.