Mrs. Augusta Prehn Bierman.
In the spring of '55 several of us German families, consisting of the Prehn's, Bierman's, Drentlaws and Sumner's, came to Minnesota from a settlement fifteen miles west of Chicago. We settled on claims near the present city of Northfield. We were on the way eleven and one-half weeks. We came by way of Joliet, forded the river at La Crosse and came up here by way of Rochester and Kenyon. We carried enough provisions with us to last most of the trip. We had some sixteen yoke of oxen, many cows, calves, and six colts. We slept in the wagons and we baked bread in iron kettles by burying them in hot ashes.
Our first home and the Prehn's was built in this way: We dug down in the earth four feet, very much as we would today for a cellar, but into a side hill. Above these four feet, logs were built up, plastered together with mud. For a roof, logs and branches of trees were placed across the side walls and then plastered together with mud.
Coming up through Kenyon we saw many Indians camping along the road. The colts and oxen were deathly afraid of them and would turn way out of the road when passing, keeping just as far away as possible.
Among the earliest marriages recorded in Rice county is that of William Bierman and Augusta Prehn 1857.
Mrs. Ann Alexander.
My husband with his father and a brother, Jonas, came in '54 and took up claims adjoining the present site of Northfield. They drove two ox teams and brought cattle, a couple of sheep and some pigs.
My husband's parents kept boarders and had some sixteen or eighteen all of the time and each day brought many extra from the stage coaches plying between here and Hastings and here and St. Paul.
Every mouthful of food consumed that first year was brought from Hastings, twenty-eight miles away, and it kept one man and an ox team on the road all the time.
Pork was purchased by the barrel and it would seldom last a week.