"Of course I gave it a 5 star since it is about my great grandfather and my aunts and uncles, but if you want to know about the settlers in the Red River Valley this is a great place to start."
--Mara, Amazon Customer Review
--Mara, Amazon Customer Review
"... Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history--his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming--there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport's small-grain production, Probstfield's horitcultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study. A magisterially researched work in American history."
--Kirkus Reviews
--Kirkus Reviews
"By the Sweat of His Brow ... is a fine accomplishment, and a fitting tribute to Probstfield and his family. . . . I like that he portrayed Randolph with warts and all, emphasizing his remarkable accomplishments while remembering his flaws. From my perspective I thought he did an excellent job of telling a story of frontier settlement generally using Probstfield to illustrate the challenges confronting all settlers, expecially in the Red River Valley. I also especially appreciated his intricate portrayal of rural life in the late-nineteenth century, and the relative self-sufficiency it required. More than a story of one family, his is a story of the nature and evolution of rural life over several generations. Beyond that I liked his treatment of government in the Valley and of institutions--schools, fraternal organizations, old settlers' groups, etc.--that sustained residents and helped give meaning and purpose to their lives."
--David Danbom, NDSU Emeritus Professor of HIstory
--David Danbom, NDSU Emeritus Professor of HIstory
Annals of Iowa, 69-70
Anyone interested in the agricultural frontier of the northern Midwest will be interested in By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm. Randolph and Catherine Probstfield settled at Oakport Farm, just north of Moorhead, Minnesota, in the 1860s, and this book traces the experiences of their family over the course of the next century, at times providing interesting detail about a variety of aspects of frontier agricultural life. Although the author lives nearby, this is not a simply a biography or a family history of local interest.
Author Carroll Engelhardt, emeritus professor of history at Concordia College in Moorhead, has written four previous books, including The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood, winner of the State Historical Society of Iowa's 2013 Shambaugh Award. In By the Sweat of His Brow, Engelhardt tells the story of Oakport Farm, placing the Probstfield family "solidly within the context of state and national agricultural, social, and political history" (xii—xiv). Based on the daily journals of Randolph Probstfield, one of the first farmers to settle in the area, the book's thematic chapters ask questions about frontier settlement, immigrant assimilation, community building, and radical agrarian politics, providing "a window on late-nineteenth-century rural life at the eastern edge of the Northern Great Plains" (xiii).
The book begins in Germany—more specifically with Michael Probstfeld's 1832 birth to a devout Catholic family in the Rhineland. He emigrated to the United States in 1852, changing his name from Probstfeld to Probstfield and adding the name Randolph. After a decade of various adventures, he married Catherine Goodman in 1861. Anticipating the railroad, the couple settled at Oakport in 1868, three years before the Northern Pacific established Moorhead a few miles to the south, and Randolph soon acquired over 1,000 acres of land. There the couple raised 11 children to adulthood. Randolph, later remembered "as a stubborn, quarrelsome, hot-tempered man," was "a tenderhearted husband and father," according to family letters (27).
The next six chapters explore the Probstfields' home life and neighborhood relations, diversified farming operations, and social interactions. They sold a wide variety of "vegetables, fruit, honey, tobacco, trees, firewood, fish, and ice" (90). Though the area lacked a German ethnic community, the family actively participated in local government and fraternal organizations, the women's suffrage movement, and agricultural societies including the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance. Through the latter, Randolph was elected to the Minnesota state senate in 1890. The final two chapters describe the transition to the children's operation of the farm and the eventual creation of the Probstfield Farm Living History Foundation in the 1990s.
More than just a local history, this book provides a thorough representation of rural life in the latter-nineteenth century. By providing intimate details, interspersing quotations from an array of correspondence, and apparently overcoming Randolph's "random and partial recording of events" (132), Engelhardt has added depth to an important period of history. Details of Randolph's personal library inform stories, for example, of his interest in and knowledge of growing fruit trees. The Probstfields' hope and optimism as well as determination in hard times are displayed against a backdrop of national changes. Engelhardt provides plenty of evidence to support the idea that Randolph held onto
the farm "due to intelligence, industry, integrity, and sheer stubbornness" (120). Clearly, his wife and children's help were also integral to his success as a farmer and a politician.
This book will appeal to a wide audience. If parts of the book are repetitive it is because each chapter is nearly self-contained. The book provides a lively and interesting read, including anecdotes of wood thieves, bad debts, and plum pirates. Anyone interested in the settling of the midwestern frontier, changes in agricultural technology, national agrarian politics, or berry picking outings with their family will find something of interest in this book.
-- Jesse David Chariton, Iowa State University History Doctoral Student
Nebraska History (Fall 2003), 169-170:
"Born in the German Rhineland in 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfeld studied for the Catholic priesthood and the practice of medicine, but rebelled against his controlling parents and lit out for the States in 1852. He roamed to California and back to the Midwest. Along the way, he supported himself by cutting trees, crewing on Mississippi riverboats, and freighting for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Finally he settled in Minnesota’s Red River Valley, where he married Catherine, a child of German immigrants, Americanized his name to Probstfield, and established Oakport Farm three miles north of the fledging settlement of Moorhead, Minnesota. There the couple had thirteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Catherine passed away in 1899, Randolph in 1911.
Author Carroll Engelhardt is a Concordia College emeritus professor of history and author of several volumes on Midwestern agriculture and education. Here he has drawn on a variety of sources in researching and writing this engaging family biography and agricultural story. His sources include Probstfield’s sketchy early journal, letters to his nephew Paul who remained in Germany, oral family, lore and—most importantly—the detailed daily record of Oakport Farm from 1873 until 1964. The core story focuses on Randolph, who comes across as entrepreneurial, contentious, innovative, strong-willed, and even imperious. He is essentially a survivor farmer situated in a demanding physical environment marked by extremes of temperature and moisture, periodic grasshopper plagues, fluctuations in crop prices, and the politics of the age. Randolph, Catherine, and their children operated a market farm raising vegetables, flowers, and fruit. They took fish and ice from the Red River, cut firewood, and even kept bees for honey— all sold or bartered in Moorhead and Fargo. Randolph was known as an innovative pioneer who successfully grew fruit trees in that far north location and who was a leader of the Minnesota State Horticulture Society. For a period in the later nineteenth century, the farm’s primary output became wheat. Randolph exhibited his wheat at the Minnesota State Fair and at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was an enthusiastic local leader in the Grange, the Northern Alliance, and the Populist and Socialist Parties, through which farmers fought to counter the power of the moneyed interests. He served in many local government positions and briefly as a Minnesota state senator.
The family’s next generation continued to operate Oakport Farm in the twentieth century. Their grew vegetables to sell in their Old Trail Market across the road from the farm. Much of the acreage was sold after 1977; subsequently, Probstfield family members established a Living History Foundation which has restored the family home, preserved the family papers, and worked on educational projects designed to keep alive this story of life in the Red River Valley. The Probstfield family history is an example of a longstanding but always undercapitalized family farm, relying on mortgage after mortgage to finance taxes and daily needs, never achieving real financial stability. In his volume, Professor Engelhardt contextualizes the story within broader agricultural, economic, and political history. For today’s students of Midwestern history, his book brings home what it meant to live “dirt poor.” It is a story of battling railroads and banks, seeking justice in state and federal legislative bodies, dealing with diseases and the deaths of animals, crops, and people, and finding ways to survive though study, hard work, and a determination not to be defeated. Readers versed in the history of the Plains will find many parallels in the stories of Randolph Probstfield and that of Nebraskan Jules Sandoz, subject of Mari Sandoz’ book Old Jules. Both were German speaking-immigrants, had medical training, successfully practiced horticulture, were stubborn and irascible to a fault, readily fought with those around them, and never gave up. A paired reading of their stories offers valuable insights into the realities of the nineteenth century Midwestern frontier.
---Michael J. Smith Overland Park, KS
Prairie History (Manitoba) - pending
South Dakota History - pending
Anyone interested in the agricultural frontier of the northern Midwest will be interested in By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm. Randolph and Catherine Probstfield settled at Oakport Farm, just north of Moorhead, Minnesota, in the 1860s, and this book traces the experiences of their family over the course of the next century, at times providing interesting detail about a variety of aspects of frontier agricultural life. Although the author lives nearby, this is not a simply a biography or a family history of local interest.
Author Carroll Engelhardt, emeritus professor of history at Concordia College in Moorhead, has written four previous books, including The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood, winner of the State Historical Society of Iowa's 2013 Shambaugh Award. In By the Sweat of His Brow, Engelhardt tells the story of Oakport Farm, placing the Probstfield family "solidly within the context of state and national agricultural, social, and political history" (xii—xiv). Based on the daily journals of Randolph Probstfield, one of the first farmers to settle in the area, the book's thematic chapters ask questions about frontier settlement, immigrant assimilation, community building, and radical agrarian politics, providing "a window on late-nineteenth-century rural life at the eastern edge of the Northern Great Plains" (xiii).
The book begins in Germany—more specifically with Michael Probstfeld's 1832 birth to a devout Catholic family in the Rhineland. He emigrated to the United States in 1852, changing his name from Probstfeld to Probstfield and adding the name Randolph. After a decade of various adventures, he married Catherine Goodman in 1861. Anticipating the railroad, the couple settled at Oakport in 1868, three years before the Northern Pacific established Moorhead a few miles to the south, and Randolph soon acquired over 1,000 acres of land. There the couple raised 11 children to adulthood. Randolph, later remembered "as a stubborn, quarrelsome, hot-tempered man," was "a tenderhearted husband and father," according to family letters (27).
The next six chapters explore the Probstfields' home life and neighborhood relations, diversified farming operations, and social interactions. They sold a wide variety of "vegetables, fruit, honey, tobacco, trees, firewood, fish, and ice" (90). Though the area lacked a German ethnic community, the family actively participated in local government and fraternal organizations, the women's suffrage movement, and agricultural societies including the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance. Through the latter, Randolph was elected to the Minnesota state senate in 1890. The final two chapters describe the transition to the children's operation of the farm and the eventual creation of the Probstfield Farm Living History Foundation in the 1990s.
More than just a local history, this book provides a thorough representation of rural life in the latter-nineteenth century. By providing intimate details, interspersing quotations from an array of correspondence, and apparently overcoming Randolph's "random and partial recording of events" (132), Engelhardt has added depth to an important period of history. Details of Randolph's personal library inform stories, for example, of his interest in and knowledge of growing fruit trees. The Probstfields' hope and optimism as well as determination in hard times are displayed against a backdrop of national changes. Engelhardt provides plenty of evidence to support the idea that Randolph held onto
the farm "due to intelligence, industry, integrity, and sheer stubbornness" (120). Clearly, his wife and children's help were also integral to his success as a farmer and a politician.
This book will appeal to a wide audience. If parts of the book are repetitive it is because each chapter is nearly self-contained. The book provides a lively and interesting read, including anecdotes of wood thieves, bad debts, and plum pirates. Anyone interested in the settling of the midwestern frontier, changes in agricultural technology, national agrarian politics, or berry picking outings with their family will find something of interest in this book.
-- Jesse David Chariton, Iowa State University History Doctoral Student
Nebraska History (Fall 2003), 169-170:
"Born in the German Rhineland in 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfeld studied for the Catholic priesthood and the practice of medicine, but rebelled against his controlling parents and lit out for the States in 1852. He roamed to California and back to the Midwest. Along the way, he supported himself by cutting trees, crewing on Mississippi riverboats, and freighting for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Finally he settled in Minnesota’s Red River Valley, where he married Catherine, a child of German immigrants, Americanized his name to Probstfield, and established Oakport Farm three miles north of the fledging settlement of Moorhead, Minnesota. There the couple had thirteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Catherine passed away in 1899, Randolph in 1911.
Author Carroll Engelhardt is a Concordia College emeritus professor of history and author of several volumes on Midwestern agriculture and education. Here he has drawn on a variety of sources in researching and writing this engaging family biography and agricultural story. His sources include Probstfield’s sketchy early journal, letters to his nephew Paul who remained in Germany, oral family, lore and—most importantly—the detailed daily record of Oakport Farm from 1873 until 1964. The core story focuses on Randolph, who comes across as entrepreneurial, contentious, innovative, strong-willed, and even imperious. He is essentially a survivor farmer situated in a demanding physical environment marked by extremes of temperature and moisture, periodic grasshopper plagues, fluctuations in crop prices, and the politics of the age. Randolph, Catherine, and their children operated a market farm raising vegetables, flowers, and fruit. They took fish and ice from the Red River, cut firewood, and even kept bees for honey— all sold or bartered in Moorhead and Fargo. Randolph was known as an innovative pioneer who successfully grew fruit trees in that far north location and who was a leader of the Minnesota State Horticulture Society. For a period in the later nineteenth century, the farm’s primary output became wheat. Randolph exhibited his wheat at the Minnesota State Fair and at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was an enthusiastic local leader in the Grange, the Northern Alliance, and the Populist and Socialist Parties, through which farmers fought to counter the power of the moneyed interests. He served in many local government positions and briefly as a Minnesota state senator.
The family’s next generation continued to operate Oakport Farm in the twentieth century. Their grew vegetables to sell in their Old Trail Market across the road from the farm. Much of the acreage was sold after 1977; subsequently, Probstfield family members established a Living History Foundation which has restored the family home, preserved the family papers, and worked on educational projects designed to keep alive this story of life in the Red River Valley. The Probstfield family history is an example of a longstanding but always undercapitalized family farm, relying on mortgage after mortgage to finance taxes and daily needs, never achieving real financial stability. In his volume, Professor Engelhardt contextualizes the story within broader agricultural, economic, and political history. For today’s students of Midwestern history, his book brings home what it meant to live “dirt poor.” It is a story of battling railroads and banks, seeking justice in state and federal legislative bodies, dealing with diseases and the deaths of animals, crops, and people, and finding ways to survive though study, hard work, and a determination not to be defeated. Readers versed in the history of the Plains will find many parallels in the stories of Randolph Probstfield and that of Nebraskan Jules Sandoz, subject of Mari Sandoz’ book Old Jules. Both were German speaking-immigrants, had medical training, successfully practiced horticulture, were stubborn and irascible to a fault, readily fought with those around them, and never gave up. A paired reading of their stories offers valuable insights into the realities of the nineteenth century Midwestern frontier.
---Michael J. Smith Overland Park, KS
Prairie History (Manitoba) - pending
South Dakota History - pending
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