Moonshine

Elva Funk, Dolph's cousin interviewed and taped the conversation with Adolph (Dolph's dad)in 1989. This is taken from the typed copy...

Elva:  Moonshine, we were on the moonshine.

 Adolph:  "Oh, yeah.  Make a little moonshine.  Well, again, after it got started out Dad got a still fixed up.  We had to hide out with the dang thing.  They made some moonshine there at home in us boy's bedroom for a while.   And then we moved it up to a neighbor's place that they had moved out of (about 1/2 hour from our place.)  We went up there and run off several batches.  Then we went over to the Kurchers.  Each of us had our distillery."

 Elva:  "And the sheriff came out there one day?"

 Adolph:  "He came and knocked on the door and dad was gone.  We had the stuff brewing down next to the old barn right next to the side of the creek.  We'd been letting it go so dang long we just got careless.  We had the still down in the potato cellar.  The sheriff was working with Dad as Dad was on the school board    and that kind of stuff.  They got well acquainted and he was over at Roberts a lot of the time where they had contact.  He said that he had heard rumors and he was forced to come out and take a look.  I told him 'yes, go ahead, take a look.  As quickly as he moved out there and went toward the shed (used for a car garage), Mamie lighted out around the house the other way and down to the barn. There was a regular 40 gal. barrel filled up pretty well to the top with mash.  She just pushed it over.  There was nothing there when..."

 Elva:  "Wouldn't there have been an odor to some of that?"

 Adolph:  "Oh, hell yes!  He could have gathered some up, but...  He came in the house and looked around a little and there was a stovepipe going through into our bedroom.  He went and looked in there, but we had moved the still out of there. Anyhow he didn't do a very big job of trying to find it."

Another Lundholm Story as Adolph told it...

Adolph's dad, Sam had gotten a blackberry thorn in his finger. He had let it go and the finger eventually got gangrene in it and was extremely painful. He asked Adolph to take him from Sweet Home to the old hospital in the old Scroggin's house in Lebanon (about 13 miles). The road from Sweet Home was dirt. When the ruts were too deep and muddy, they just drove over a little further to miss them. The radiator of the old Model A had a hole in it and they kept having to stop to add water. Sam told Adolph to quit stopping...it didn't do any good because the radiator wouldn't hold water anyway! When after many hours they finally got to Lebanon, the doctor looked at Sam's finger. Said, 'Yes, he could take car of that.' Giving Sam a little bit of anesthetic, he had him put his finger on the table, took a nearby cleaver, and whacked his finger off.

More About The Lundholms Move to Mud Lake

This is what Adolph wrote and it always makes me laugh. Carl was Adolph's younger brother. If Carl was age six, Adolph would have been eight years old...

"I don't remember anything about the trip until we reached Market Lake, now Roberts. We had to get flour, sugar, potatoes, etc., as it would be a long trip with team and wagon for more groceries. They laid about four sacks of flour on a platform for us to pick up and Carl, then 6+, asked me to roll a sack of flour on his shoulder so he could take it to the wagon. I rolled it off and flattened him in the mud."

Reply to Karen's Comment...

I tried to post a comment to my own blog...and I lost it. If it shows up somewhere else, you'll know what happened. So now, I'll try again.

Granddad (Adolph) Lundholm went to work as a "temp" at the paper mill in Lebanon OR and worked there for the next 40 years. He worked in the "wood mill" where they made paper pulp. When Crown Zellerbach discontinued the wood mill, Adolph had seniority, so they "let" him shovel woodchips from a boxcar for the last five years of his work life! Maybe that is why he was so healthy.

Gr Granddad Sam expected his children to give him their paychecks. Shortly after May and Adolph were married, Sam came and asked them for money. May put an end to that...I'll bet he only asked once!

Cynthia Baily Lundholm

This is Dolph's grandmother, Cynthia. She was the daughter of a well to do sheep rancher. Sam, Dolph's grandfather, went to the Baily place to shear sheep, they met and married.

Adolph, Dolph's dad, wrote that "Sam was very capable and was able to do a great many things, but didn't stay with any of them very long". Cynthia's life was not an easy one.

With three small children, in about 1903, Sam sold their house near Blackfoot and bought land in the Mud Lake (near Rexburg) area. It was too late to move, so the family spent the winter in an old log hut, one large room, no sink, no furnishings, and water from a well 1/2 block away. To keep the cold out, they hung quilts up to keep the snow and the cold wind from blowing in. That winter all the kids got whooping cough.

In March, with the snow still on the ground, they loaded their stuff in a wagon and headed for Mud Lake, a distance of about 85-100 miles. According to Adolph, on the trip they saw in the distance, a wagon stuck in the road. Cynthia was afraid that it might be Indians, so Sam went to see. "On coming back, he said it was nothing, just Frank Livermore and Six Shooter Sal". The frost had melted and their wagon was sunk to the hubs. The Lundholms camped overnight and helped them get their wagon out.   More next week!

Other Sams

This is Dolph's grandfather, Samuel Nimrod Lundholm on his wedding day, 31 Dec 1897. He was 25 years old.

He was born on 9 Mar 1872 in Stockholm Sweden. His parents were converts to the LDS church in Sweden and emigrated to Salt Lake City, leaving Sweden in June of 1874 and arriving in Salt Lake the following July.

He died on 9 Nov 1960 in Sweet Home, Oregon and is buried in the IOOF Cemetery in Lebanon Oregon.

More about the Emmas and Sams soon. (I promise!)

Other Emmas

Yes, Karen, you are right. Dolph's Aunt Mamie was an Emma too. I looked for a picture of her...I know I have one (or more), but evidently it isn't scanned. I have been going through old slides of Adolph and May's and there are lots of nice family pictures. Now that I have my pictures, genealogy and scanner all in one place...and I've almost finished this odessy of selling, buying, selling and moving (just one garage sale (or maybe two) to go, I hope to do better at posting to this blog!