Pierson Farm

The Pierson Farm is significant for a number of reasons. It was the first farmstead in rural North Dakota to be electrified as a result of the establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. The farmhouse also has architectural significance and represents a style rarely seen on North Dakota farmsteads of the 1920's.
The Pierson farm is located on the site of an earlier farmstead which was homesteaded in May. 1899 by Charles H. Banks and proved up, with title acquired from the federal government, in April, 1906. The Bank's homestead consisted of 160 acres of prairie land in parts of Sections 5, 7 and 8 of Township 155 North, Range 69 West of the Fifth principal Meridian. The farmstead was located on the 40 acre plot comprising the Southeast quarter of the Northeast quarter of Section 7, a site no doubt selected for the presence of a small hill which provided a commanding view in all directions.

In June, 1919, Banks sold his property, including the farmstead, to Olaf Pierson, a Swedish immigrant who lived a short distance away. Pierson had already amassed a considerable amount of farm land and was developing a reputation as a breeder of Percheron draft horses. In 1921 Olaf's son Ralph married a neighbor girl, Evangeline Sandven, and the couple moved onto the old Banks farmstead. In 1923 they purchased a "catalog house" from the Gordon Vantine Company of Davenport, Iowa. The price was $3,000 for the structure plus another $1,000 for a coal-fired hot water heating system. Evangeline supplied the money from an inheritance. The new farm house was erected and occupied before the end of 1923.

Ralph Pierson developed the farm, to which title was obtained in 1937, into a combination grain and livestock operation. He also assisted in the operation of the considerable acreage owned by his father. Olaf Pierson owned about 14,000 acres of land at the time of his death in 1948, part of which was inherited by Ralph who enlarged his operations accordingly. Ralph was active in the government of both Beaver Civil Township and Beaver School District and had a particular interest in conservation, planting and nurturing a large number of trees to protect the farmstead as a shelter belt on the north and west sides.

Ralph and Evangeline raised a family of four - two girls and two boys. Their eldest son, Orville, became involved in the farm's operation about 1950 and was established on a small, tree protected farmstead across the section line road to the east from the parents' farm. Following the death of Ralph Pierson in 1977 and Evangeline's subsequent move to a retirement home in Rugby, North Dakota, Orville Pierson became the operator of the farm and is so at present.

The Pierson Farm was the first to be electrified in North Dakota under R.E.A. through a series of coincidental circumstances. The pattern book house purchased in 1923 came equipped for electrical wiring and that wiring was installed at the time of construction. Orville Pierson recalled that each room had a hole in the wall - an uncovered switchbox - and one in the ceiling where light fixtures were to be installed. When the opportunity to obtain electricity for the farm was imminent it was a simple matter for Ralph Pierson to hire an electrician to complete the wiring and install the necessary switches and fixtures.

Although the Rural Electrification Administration was established May 11, 1935 by an executive order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly two years passed before the first rural electric co-op was formed in North Dakota. In early 1937 Baker Electric Cooperative, Inc., was organized and soon after received its first construction load. Headquartered at Baker, North Dakota, a small town located about nine miles southwest of the Pierson Farm, the cooperative's first transmission lines were to run east and west from that point, connecting the towns of Harlow and Balta, with a second line planned to be built north and east to York. This latter line was projected to pass down the section line in front of the Pierson Farm.

The lights went on at the Pierson Farm on the evening of November 24, 1937, the day before Thanksgiving. Several switches left on in the upstairs bedrooms alerted the Pierson children that the transmission line was energized and they rushed to inform the rest of the family. Mrs. Pierson remembers her first reaction was to begin dusting furniture because "everything looked dirty." The new electric lights revealed the accumulation of dust theretofore unnoticed under the weak rays of the old kerosene 1 amps.

Beyond convenience and the improvement in lifestyle which electricity brought to the Pierson family, it also helped to increase their economic well-being. Until electrification Ralph Pierson's livestock raising operations had been limited to about 30 cattle by a lack of water. The water was available from wells drilled on the farmstead but Pierson's forced-water system was dependent upon a windmill to power the pumps and the wind was an uncertain source of power. With electric pumps water was easily available and by 1962 he had become a breeder of purebred Hereford cattle with a herd of more than 200 animals.

The Pierson Farm's right to be called the first REA-electrified farmstead in North Dakota has never been challenged and it has been formally recognized as such by North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives.

The Arts and Crafts architectural style in residential buildings was popular in North Dakota roughly from the late teens through the 1920s. While it does not appear in large numbers, representative examples may be found in many of the state's cities and villages. A combination of historic circumstances has made them a very rare style on rural farmsteads, however.

While the late 1910s were a time of agricultural prosperity in North Dakota due largely to the wartime inflation of farm prices, it was not a period of great building construction because of supply and manpower shortages during World War 1. Following the war it was not until late 1919 and early 1920 before most American industries had retooled for volume domestic production. Agricultural prosperity in North Dakota collapsed abruptly in 1921 as farm prices underwent a rapid deflation at the same time that prices of most other goods were increasing - the press of that day began to routinely refer to the "high cost of living" as a principal ingredient of American life. The result, as historians of that era point out, was that economic depression came to rural North Dakota almost a decade before it struck the rest of the country. And it was not until well into the 1940s, in the midst of another war, that prosperity began to return to rural North Dakota.

Thus, few North Dakota farmers had the economic ability to build and pay for new farm residences during most of the period that the arts and crafts style was at the height of its popularity. The Pierson family can be considered an anomaly in that only Evangeline's inheritance made possible their acquisition of a catalog house in the Arts and Crafts style during 1923 at a time when, as one writer phrased it, "small town banks were bursting like popcorn" while foreclosures, low prices and poor crops were driving many rural North Dakotans from their farms.