The Palm Family Sand Island History
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The Palm Family, Sand Island The History. by Larry Tanning and Brian Tanning (2013, rev. 2015) Hilda Hanson Dunkle, Bessie Nelson Palm, and Carrie Anderson swimming in East Bay on Sand Island (abt. 1920) his is the story of the Palm family’s one hundred-year love affair with Sand Island – one of twenty-two islands surrounding the Bayfield peninsula in northern Wisconsin, and today part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. It is a living history of five generations, beginning in Norway in the 1800’s and ending in 2000 when the Palm’s twenty-five year lease with the National Park Service was completed. It is a story of simplicity, perseverance and joy, and also of heartbreak and loss. For without Sand Island, an important part of the Palm family’s identity has been lost. This story began in Norway with Wilhelm Johannesen Palm (1833-1899) and Magdalene Hartmann (1840- 1933), a traveling tinsmith/tenant farmer and his wife. Kristiane Maria Palm (1860-1929) was the eldest of their eleven children. In 1890 at thirty-years-old, unmarried and a trained seamstress, she left Norway and immigrated to the United States; her name was eventually ‘Americanized’ to ‘Christine.’ In 1892, while still in New York, she married another Norwegian immigrant, Edwin J. Miller (b. 1870). Whether she knew him previously in Norway, or met him on the boat or in New York is unknown, but Christine’s marriage to Edwin Bonde ultimately became the Palm family’s link to this small island, three miles out in wondrous and dangerous Lake Superior. For unknown reasons sometime after their marriage in 1892 they changed their last name to Bonde. Six of Christine’s siblings also immigrated to America – Wilhelm (Will), and Maria Palm came in 1891, Juliane (Julia) in 1895, Ludwig in 1905, Karl (Carl) in 1906, and Magnus in 1907. Their mother Magdalene, age sixty-six, also came over with Carl in 1906, along with Ludwig’s wife Laura and infant daughter Emma. Magdalene’s husband Vilhelm had previously died in Norway. - 1 - dwin Bonde (1870-1933) was a nursery man, a land-speculator, and a salesman – and extremely driven. He sold a range of products and concepts during his lifetime, including horticultural products, land, stocks, and bonds. And like the vast majority of newly arrived Norwegians, he and wife Christine soon made their way to the upper Midwest – first to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and then to Cottonwood, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Bayfield, Wisconsin. They only had one child, a daughter, Madeline Marie (1893-1926). Edwin Bonde most likely visited Sand Island for the first time sometime around 1909, and in all likelihood went there looking for income-making opportunities. He had most recently been the president and manager of the Lyon County Evergreen Nursery Company Edwin Bonde (abt. 1923) in Cottonwood, Minnesota, and one of the salesman – possibly the only one – was his brother-in-law, Ludwig Palm. They both had ended working for the nursery by the summer of 1908, and soon Bonde was preparing and promoting Sand Island as a fruit-growing paradise. He bought available lots on East Bay, planting apple trees and ginseng and then buying newspaper advertisements in the Midwest promoting Sand Island specifically to the still growing Norwegian population. Between 1836 and 1930 over 852,000 Norwegians immigrated to the United States. By 1910 about 80% of the one million or more Norwegian Americans – the immigrants and their children – were living in the upper Midwest, with Minneapolis their unofficial hub for their cultural and religious activities. Farming and fishing were what the immigrants and their children already knew, so it didn’t take long for Bonde to attract prospects. On Sand Island the 1914 Bayfield County tax rolls listed fifteen plots owned by nine individuals in Section-24 on East Bay. In 1915, after Bonde subdivided the lots, the tax rolls listed thirty-eight plots owned by thirty-two individuals. But the majority of new buyers on Sand Island would never do anything with their land, which meant that East Bay would largely remain undeveloped and pristine – even to this day. Five of Christine’s siblings – Carl Palm, Julia Kerr, Ludwig Palm, Magnus Palm, and Wilhelm Palm – all would at one time have physical connections or ties to land on Sand Island. Wilhelm and his family spent several years on the island between 1918 and 1921 – even investing $2,000 in the failed Sand Island Telephone Company; in today’s dollars (2013) this is the equivalent of $30,000 – showing his significant commitment to Sand Island. Ludwig and his family lived on the island through the winter of 1932-33. Carl Palm lived most of his life in Superior, Wisconsin beginning in the early 1920’s, and it is assumed that he continued to make occasional visits back to the island through the 1940’s and 1950’s. Of the Palm siblings, only Magnus and his family made a significant attempt to live permanently on the island. Instead of buying plots from Bonde, Magnus Palm filed a 41-acre inland Sand Island homestead in 1910, for which he received a patent on in 1917. By homesteading, Magnus’s intentions were clearly to live on the island year-round. With limited farming potential, Magnus tried fishing and logging, and eventually mainly supported his family by working for other year-round and summer island residents. But by 1920, his wife Anna had contracted tuberculosis and she died in April of 1921. The family continued to homestead until 1924 Magnus & Anna Palm and family on Sand Island (1910's) and then relocated permanently to Chicago, Illinois. - 2 - udwig Palm (1880-1955) was ten years younger than Christine, the tenth of eleven children. He had joined the Norwegian army at age 18 and became a sergeant guarding the King’s Oslo palace. He married Laura Marie Lauritsdtr in 1904 at age 24 and a daughter Emma soon followed. In 1905, Ludwig left Laura and Emma in Norway and immigrated to the US to find a new home for his family as times were very difficult in Norway. Laura and Emma followed the following year. The family reunited in Minnesota and over the next seven years five more children were born – two dying very young, one in Cottonwood, MN, and the other in Ambrose, ND. Ludwig was Ludwig Palm, age 33 (1914) a likeable man who played the 8-string Norwegian Hardanger fiddle – as did his father in Norway. After living in Cottonwood for several years, Ludwig and his family moved to the Ambrose/Alkabo area of far northwestern North Dakota, continuing to sell nursery products but eventually shifting to selling life insurance for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. As a traveling insurance salesman he went from town to town across North Dakota, Minnesota and western Wisconsin. In the Fall of 1913, Ludwig’s wife Laura died from Typhoid Fever in Ambrose, North Dakota – not long after the birth of their daughter Myrtle. essie Matilda Nelson (1894-1983), when Laura died, was in her early twenties, and had a history with Sand Island. Her father, Peter Nelson (1858-1900), was a fisherman on Lake Superior, and her mother was Constance Amelia (1875-1915), also with ties to Sand Island. Peter died in 1900 when Bessie was six, and her mother Constance then married Harold Edwin Dahl (1876-1928) in 1903. Harold also was a commercial fisherman, who would later die in 1928 in a tragic accident when his fishing boat disappeared in a spring storm off of Sand Island. Bessie recalled first visiting the Sand Island in 1902 at age eight, but she most likely as a young child had been there before. By around 1910, the Sand Island lighthouse keeper even entrusted Bessie to maintain the light beacon when he had to leave the island suddenly for an emergency. The Sand Island light was one of the most important on Lake Superior and the first the ore boats and freighters would see as they went east from Duluth/Superior to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. To entrust that responsibility to a teenage girl, says much about Bessie Palm. She was a very responsible young woman indeed. Constance and Harold soon had three children – Mabel Harriet (1904-1981), Carl Odin (1906-1985), and Melvin Bernard (1911-1996). Bessie was almost ten when Mabel was born, so she helped her mother Constance take care of her step- siblings since they were just newborns. She helped take care of other children on the island over the years also, including the Moes, the Loftfields, and Sand Bessie Nelson, age 14 (1908) Island lighthouse keeper Emmanuel Luick’s family. We don’t know exactly how or when Ludwig Palm first met Bessie Nelson, but he was the widowed father of four young kids (ages four months to nine-years) by 1914 – and she was obviously very experienced with children. He had probably visited Sand Island by the early or mid 1910’s as his siblings were establishing ties there, and at some point after their mother died, daughters Emma and Myrtle traveled by train to Wisconsin to live with Ludwig’s sister Christine for an extended period of time. By October, 1918 Bessie was moving to North Dakota with plans to marry Ludwig, and on January 1, 1919 they were married in Minot. Four children were born – in three different locations – as Ludwig continued the itinerant ways of a travelling insurance agent. Howard Ludwig (1920-1996), Genevieve Betty (b. 1922), Richard Warren (b. 1925), and Joan Constance (b. 1929). - 3 - y the mid-1920’s, after the Magnus Palm family had left, no Palms lived year-round on the island any longer, and fears and threats of a financial depression loomed large.