Red River Girl: The Art of Orabel Thortvedt

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The main section of this book tells a story of emigration from Telemark, Norway to Houston at the outset of the Civil War, and subsequent settlement along the Buffalo River near Moorhead in the Red River Valley, as told through the lives and experiences of one man and his extended family and friends.    

That man was Ole G. Thortvedt (1829-1908), who came to Houston in 1861 in the company of a large group of acquaintances from Fyresdal in West Telemark to join their many compatriots who had settled here during the previous decade. Many others from neighboring parishes also made Houston their destination that year for the same reason. Their actions were a textbook example of chain migration, the main aspect of which is to join others from the same family and community who have gone ahead of you, in this case into the relative unknown, as was the upper Midwest in the mid-19^th century; and which would remain a component of the lives of many of our early settlers for several decades to come.

After eight years on their relatively small farms on Mound Prairie (Section 5), in the shadow of the mound that gave the township its name, Ole Thortvedt led a wagon train with friends and family members 400 miles up to Clay County, and by leaving Houston and their recent experience with chain migration, becoming full-fledged pioneers on the open frontier of the Red River Valley in 1870. They were the first to settle along the Buffalo River, a tributary of the Red River of the North, and here they confronted Nature in all her fury with brutal winters, prairie fires, and grasshoppers, along with all the hardships involved with just “breaking” the prairie to open it up for cultivation and constructing shelters for “man and beast.”

This remarkable new book heralds the completion of an interesting and exciting new venture involving Ole’s granddaughter, Orabel, and ultimately Ole himself and his contemporaries. The West-Telemark Museum at Eidsborg, in conjunction with The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (Minn.) (HCSCC), recently concluded an in-depth research project concerning Orabel Thortvedt and her life as an accomplished artist, writer and family historian, resulting in a traveling exhibit and a beautifully designed and fascinating coffee table-style book titled Red River Girl—the Art of Orabel Thortvedt.

Orabel (1896-1983) was a unique and captivating woman who loved horses, history, and art, but she probably loved her grandfather Ole most of all. It was at his knee she heard so many wonderful stories about the past and his experiences coming over from Telemark and pioneering in Minnesota, both in the hills and valleys of Houston and the great wide expanse of the Red River Valley. Growing up in what came to be known as the “Buffalo-bygdi” (Buffalo River Settlement—Houston’s largest Norwegian colony) Orabel never tired of listening to all that the old ones had to say and took it all into her memory, setting it down in her numerous notebooks as part of what was to become a lifetime research project.

Orabel was an exceptionally talented artist in her own right and loved to draw horses and other animals. As a teenager she lost most of her hearing, so she was fitted with hearing aids and later sent to Minneapolis to learn lip reading and take writing classes. While there she also attended art school to further refine her talents and was introduced to a whole new world, as you could well believe. She found she could make a living painting the pet dogs and horses of the well-to-do families in the city. Orabel developed the remarkable ability to capture the essence, the personality of the animals she painted—a rare talent.

She could have gone on living in Minneapolis enjoying life in the big city, but when both parents died in 1936 she felt compelled to move back to the farm where she and her sisters and brothers continued its operation for the rest of their lives.  It was here that she also continued with what had become her life-long obsession: writing and retelling her family’s story, as well as the other families in the settlement, for posterity, illustrating them with fine pencil or pen and ink drawings and exquisite watercolors, themselves becoming historical and artistic treasures.

Ole Thortvedt’s entire extended family, including every sibling but one, his old mother “Gamle Jorand,” stepfather and stepbrother arrived in Houston during the summer of 1861, staying with various friends and relatives that first year. Because of the intimate knowledge gathered over many years from those older family members and neighbors, Orabel was able to tell the story of the ocean crossing and overland travel to Houston, the movements and activities of her family as they acquired land and built a new life on Mound Prairie, their long slow trudge up to Clay County by wagon train in 1870, their pioneering efforts and encounters there along the Buffalo River, and the development of their new rural settlement up to 1899, in almost unbelievable detail. That, together with her artwork, is what separates her account of the immigrant experience, from all the others that have been written over the years.

But there is much more to the book than Orabel’s stories and illustrations, by the inclusion of several well-researched and written articles, which while scholarly are also very accessible to the average reader. Tillman Hartenstein, educational programs coordinator at the West-Telemark Museum, introduces the book and explains the project, talks about Orabel’s work, and even offers a psychological assessment of her obsessive pursuits, and Dag Rorgemoen, director of the W-T Museum, writes specifically about the circumstances concerning immigration in 1861, the year the Thortvedt family left Telemark.

Mark Peihl, senior archivist at HCSCC, shares information about the family and what they meant to the region, as well as the materials they left to the society which now occupy 70 linear feet of shelving, while local boy Jim Skree provides background information on Houston’s early history with an emphasis on the decade that the Thortvedt, Gedstad, and Gunderson families lived here: 1861-1871.

Lene Teigland Kleivi, archivist and collections manager at the W-T Museum, writes about two people who both influenced the Thortvedt family moves, from Fyresdal to Houston County and then farther on to Buffalo River. On a more personal note Gunnar Midtgarden, a cousin from Fyresdal, tells about his visits with Orabel and her family in 1978 and 1981. Professor Emerita Betty A. Bergland of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls contributed an article on Orabel’s years as an art student.

As a special treat, the last page of the book features a nostalgic poem written in early 1913 by Houston’s own Ivar Vathing (Sigurd’s uncle) as a look back at the early years of Houston’s settlement. It is presented in the original Telemark dialect, along with a literal, non-rhyming translation. On the facing page there appears a large color portrait of Ole G. Thortvedt sitting in a kubbestol (log chair)of his own making, with the farms of he (to the left) and his brother Bendik Gunderson (to the right) on Mound Prairie in the background.

Another significant and beneficial aspect of this book is that it can serve as a vicariously rewarding and revealing stand-in for those who do not have a written family history of their own. After all, the experiences of all the pioneers who came to this part of the country at that time were basically the same, no matter their ethnic or racial heritage. They all had to face the same ordeals and adversities, suffering and privations, and of course accomplishments and joys, as they struggled to make a new and better-quality life for themselves and their successors.   

I believe it would be safe to say that there is not another personal archive collection that comes close to that of the Thortvedt Family of Clay County in the annals of Norwegian-American immigration and settlement history. As historians, especially, we owe a great debt to Orabel Thortvedt. She and her incredible lifetime of work have long been known in rather limited circles, but with the release of West Telemark Museum’s critically acclaimed book, she now belongs to the world.

 The coffee table-style, 9 ½ x 13 inch, hardcover book weighs in at over three pounds, and its 193 pages are printed on luxurious, semi-gloss, art silk paper, profusely illustrated with black & white and color photographs, including numerous scans of Orabel’s artwork. The entire text appears in both English and Norwegian, so you can try your hand at reading Norsk, as well!

Cost:  $45.00 plus S/H