A delicate Native American belt and a Brookings County homesteaders sturdy log cabin have been reunited after 150 years.
Heres how the belt and the cabin are together again at the Brookings County Museum in Volga.
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Jokum and Maren Sundet and their three surviving children arrived in America from Norway in 1868. They eventually settled on a homestead near the then-bustling Brookings County seat town of Medary about seven miles south of what became Brookings, then called Ada.
In 1872, with the help of their 16-year-old son, Ole Jokumsen Olson Sundet, and daughters Matha, 15, and Karen, 10, the family set to work harvesting Big Sioux River trees and building a log cabin that would be home for 17 years.
The population of Brookings County, Dakota Territory, at that time was l63.
The Sundet homestead, like so many others, was in a wide swath of Brookings County that Native Americans in the Sisseton and Flandreau areas and elsewhere on the plains often passed through as they hunted, fished and trapped in the Big Sioux River Valley and beyond. A trading post was located at Flandreau, and a federal Indian School was located there in 1875. Nearby was the Native American mecca of Pipestone.
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In some way lost to history, Mrs. Sundet and a Native American woman passing by the newly built Sundet cabin became good friends. Probably in 1873 or 1874, that woman, as a token of friendship to Mrs. Sundet, presented her with a 28-inch finely stitched, colorful belt she had made.
In December 1876, Mrs. Sundet gave that belt to her future daughter-in-law, Line (Lena in Norwegian) Larson. Lena wore it with her wedding dress when she and Ole Jokumsen Olson Sundet were married by Rev. G. S. Codington, who then lived west of Medary about where the Brookings Country Club is today.
Newlyweds Ole and Lena took a claim southwest of Brookings where they farmed for 33 years and later where they cared for Oles parents. His father Jokum died in 1907 and his mother Maren died in 1908.
In 1914, Ole and Lena retired from farming and moved to a home in Brookings near the northwest corner of the Sixth Street-Main Avenue intersection. Lena died in 1916.
Her survivors included husband Ole, eight daughters and five sons. As Lenas daughters grew older and married, Lena had passed along her beloved Indian belt to several of them, and the belt was eventually acquired by one of Jokum and Marens great-great-grandsons, Lyle Sundet Strande of Volga.
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Strande had the belt and information about its origin framed. He died earlier this year. It was his wish that the framed belt be donated to the Brookings County Museum. His daughter, Rae Strande of Brookings, complied.
That colorful 150-year-old belt, a wedding photograph of Lena wearing the belt and other handwritten records of the marriage of Ole Jokum Olson Sundet and Lena Olson are now on display at the Brookings County Museum.
Interestingly, in 1973, the museum acquired that log cabin Jokum, Maren, their son Ole and daughters built near Medary a century earlier.
Its survival for 100 years on its original site was because at some point it literally disappeared and was forgotten. Jokum and Maren had sold their homestead and cabin to daughter Karen and her husband, Peder O. Pederson, and the property and cabin were sold to others through the years. One owner had covered the Sundet cabin with siding and built a new roof over it. Its interior log walls were lathed and plastered. The log cabin literally disappeared from sight.
As the years passed, fewer and fewer in the area even knew it was hidden inside that nondescript white building.
In 1972, the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department purchased the Jokum Sundet homestead for use as a public shooting area. On a tip that the white building on the property may be hiding a log cabin, the department had it inspected.
Sure enough, Jokum and Maren Sundets century-old log home was re-discovered. Sheltered for a century, it was in unbelievably good shape.
The Game, Fish and Parks Department offered the cabin to the Brookings County Historical Society, and in 1973 the cabin was moved intact from its original 1872 homestead location just west of the I-29 bridge over the Big Sioux River to the societys museum grounds in Volga.
Today, with the finely stitched Indian belt given to Maren Sundet in the museum, it and the museums well-preserved Jokum and Maren Sundet cabin are back together again.
Theres one more link between Ole, Lena and the Indian belt. James Hauxhurst was the Brookings County Register of Deeds at the time of their marriage in 1876. He signed for receipt of their wedding document. The James Hauxhurst house is now also a part of the Brookings County Museum, located near the old Sundet cabin.
Cecil is an author, a former columnist for the Brookings Register and a member of the board of the Brookings County Museum.
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