♂Glen Eugene Walrath

Glen Eugene Walrath (26 February 1911 – 12 April 1993) was a Minnesota farmer who worked the family land at Raymond after his father’s death, married on his twenty-fourth birthday, and later moved to Roseau County, where he worked for the Roseau School District and for Polaris Industries. He was the elder brother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

Glen was born in Peterson, Clay County, Iowa, the eldest of the six children of Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934) and Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977). His younger siblings were Lorene Mary (1914–1988), Charlotte Mae (1915–2007), Elmer Alvin, who died in infancy in 1918, Nicholas Melvin (1922–2015) and Ora Emogene (1925–2014). Lorene was born in Iowa on 1 June 1914 and Charlotte in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, on 24 November 1915, so the family moved from Iowa to Minnesota between those two dates, when Glen was three or four.

He grew up on the family farm at St. Johns Township, near Raymond, in Kandiyohi County, where a census index for 1920 and the census of 1930 place him in his parents’ household; in 1930 he was nineteen and single. He attended a country school and then the University of Minnesota’s agricultural college at Morris^W.

Marriage and the family farm

His father died on 6 January 1934, and Glen’s obituary records that he “farmed the family farm following his father’s death”. On 26 February 1935, his twenty-fourth birthday, he married Mary Rosamond Hardebeck (1914–2001) at Willmar. The couple lived and farmed around Raymond, and in 1940 Glen was the head of his own household there. His brother Nick’s obituary adds that Nick eventually bought the farm from their mother; the two obituaries describe a sequence, with Glen farming the land after his father’s death and Nick buying it later.

A daughter, Carolyn J. Walrath, died in infancy in Kandiyohi County in June 1946. When the State of Minnesota condemned strips of the Walrath land for Trunk Highway 40 in early 1950, Glen was named among the respondents in the published notice, alongside his mother, his brother and his sisters.

Roseau County

By the census of April 1950 Glen and Mary were living at Jadis, in Roseau County in the far north of the state, where he was the head of the household. They farmed near Roseau, and Glen was also employed by the Roseau School District and by Polaris Industries, the snowmobile maker founded in Roseau. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus, serving as Grand Knight of the Greenbush council, and he was active in the local Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party^W; he had also been secretary of the Town and Country Co-op in Roseau and a member of the International Woodworkers of America^W.

In 1985 the couple moved to Thief River Falls, where Glen was a member of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church. Glen died there on 12 April 1993, at Northwest Medical Center, aged eighty-two. His funeral Mass was said at St. Bernard’s on 15 April, and he was buried in Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery in the countryside near Raymond, which a grave index places in Chippewa County, just west of Kandiyohi. He was survived by his wife, nine children and twenty-two grandchildren.

Notes

The 1920 census index gives his birth year as 1912; his obituary and the 1930 census, which gave his age as nineteen, agree on 1911.