George Henry Ziebarth, along with his twin, was born on the 21st of December in 1854. At the time, the Ziebarth family were new immigrants to the United States and just getting settled into their home in New York. William and George were the fourth and fifth children born to Charles and Louisa, and the first to survive early childhood.
It’s unlikely they had any memory of their life in West Sand Lake. By the time they were three, just after their their brother Herman was born, the family had already moved to Minnesota. George was to spend the entirety of his youth there.
We know little of the George’s life in Minnesota. The family made various attempts to put down roots. Some records indicate that they worked to purchase or homestead land, but none of these efforts were successful. Instead, they were likely tenant farmers, working the land and paying the landowner in crops or cash.
George’s brother, William, led the family to Dakota Territory at the end of the 1870’s, and it was after this move that the older children in the family began to strike out on their own.
Shortly after settling in the new territory, George married Ellen Henrietta Weier. According to Arthur Seebart, both William and George courted Ellen, and she refused to chose one over the other for many months. Eventually, for reasons not passed down to us, she decided on George. The wedding took place very quickly—just a matter of weeks—after she made up her mind.
Ellen Henrietta Weier
Ellen1Born Ellen Henrietta, it’s said that she disliked the nicknames Ella and Ellie, by which she was universally known during her lifetime. was the daughter of Christian Weier and Ernestine Henrietta Ziebarth, born in New York on March 11, 1856.
We owe Ellen a debt of gratitude, as she was the source for much of the information that makes up our history. When Arthur set out to compile his genealogy, his father had long since passed. Ella outlived many of her contemporaries and his interviews with her provided the foundation of his work. There were some errors and inconsistencies in her recollection, of course, but they are easily forgiven; she was, after all, recounting the history of her husband’s family along with her own.
Ella’s mother passed around 1868, when Ella was only 11 years old. Her older sister, Mathilda, had already married at this time, so the burden of caring for the household fell to her, forcing her to give up her childhood nd schooling. Despite having only a fourth-grade education, she remained an avid reader over the course of her life. According to her children, she was also a gifted storyteller, no doubt a valuable thing during the long winters on the prairie.
As a teenager, she took on the work ethic of her father, working at housekeeping jobs in the surrounding community. Later she took on work in cities as far away as Troy and Albany (Both about 10-15 miles from her home, a distance she likely traveled on foot.) During this time, it appears that she still considered her home to be on the family farm, as she is listed as a residence in that household in both the New York census of 1875 and the U. S. census of 1880.
Ellen’s mother, Henrietta, was the sister of Charles August Ziebarth, and there’s no doubt that she was in correspondence with her cousins when her uncle’s family moved from Minnesota to Dakota Territory. We do not know her motives, but once her cousins were settled on the frontier, she decided to join them—against her father’s wishes.
Date unknown, likely the late 1870’s, as it was taken while she was still living in New York.
She traveled to Dakota Territory by train. The railroad reached Grand Forks in 1880, replacing steamboat travel, and she was among the first to take advantage of the overland option. She recounted that the journey was very slow, as the ground was saturated with the spring breakup and water covered the tracks in places.
Ellen’s marriage to her first cousin, George Henry, took place in 1881, though the exact date is not known. North Dakota was still years away from statehood and Grand Forks at the time was little more than a frontier outpost. There is some uncertainty about the location of the wedding, but it’s likely that it took place in Grand Forks at a Methodist Church. Any record of the wedding was likely lost in the flood of 1997. At the time of her marriage, she was 25 and her new husband was 27.
Married Life
William acquired land adjacent to his father’s claim, and it appears that George made a similar attempt. It’s unclear whether he filed for a land grant (no record of that has been found) or he tried to buy acreage for a farm. Whatever the case, he was unable to hold the property; he and his new wife resorted to renting a room from his brother, the man whose proposal Ellen had refused—a situation that must have been awkward at best.
George and Ellen’s first child, George Herbert was born in 1882 while they were still living with William. During the interim, George was able to build a house for his family, likely on or near the same 80 acres where his father and brother lived. On February 10th, 1885, he filed his own claim for 170 acres near the Turtle River.
It’s unclear how long they stayed on the Turtle River farm. Their next two children, Charles Wesley (1883) and Clara Mabel (1886) listed their birthplace as Grand Forks, but that may have been shorthand for the vicinity, not the actual city, since they lived in a very rural area.
After the birth of Clara, but before her sister Grace Ellen came along in 1888, they had moved twice. The first came about when George traded his homestead for 41 lots in the Grand Forks boom town. Unfortunately, shortly after the deal, he discovered that the properties had not been researched and were heavily encumbered with back-taxes. The properties were presumably seized for non-payment. Ruined financially, he was forced to rent land, a farm known as the Bond Place, west of Grand Forks near the English Coulee Creek. In addition, he managed to sharecrop on a farm known as the Hunter place.
Despite their loss and change in circumstances, Ellen was delighted to return to farming. Though she had frequently lived and worked in town, her heart was in the country where she could grow vegetables and large stands of flowers. To her children she often said, “I never want to live in the city again!”
Their stay on the Bond place was short. George Henry was able to acquire enough money for a mortgage on a farm of his own, known as the Hummis Place, along Hazen Brook and not far from the Turtle River. The land was purchased from the holdings of George Emery, for whom the nearby town of Emerado was named. Many of the children were old enough to remember the move, which was made by buggy, wagon and on foot. George Henry’s son, George Herbert was likely about 12 and recalled:
When we got to within a half mile of the Hummis Place buildings, everything was covered with water. From the Great Northern Railroad Tracks, which ran east and west past our place parallel to the road (trail); and within a few rods of the farm buildings. As far as we could see there was nothing but water. Several times before we got to the buildings, before we got across the lake of water, that water came up to within a few inches of the bottom of the wagon box in which I was riding.
George Henry eventually began to move away from farming, volunteering as a local constable, cutting ice for refrigeration, and hauling goods, including mail. By the mid-1890’s, with many of the kids of school age, they decided to sell the farm and move closer into Emerado. There, the children could walk to school and George could better manage his businesses. His brothers, William and Gustave, who owned a construction company, helped to build their new house.
It was while living on this farm that George Henry suffered the first of two injuries that defined his later life. In the winter, he would cut ice from local ponds, store it and sell it in the spring for use as a refrigerant. Part of the process involved hauling the blocks of ice from the pond and letting them freeze or “dry out” overnight. Once, when returning to load his ice the following day, he encountered two men helping themselves to his work. Confronting the men, he was attacked and hit in the head with an ax, knocking him unconscious. Though there were no immediate ill effects apparent, in the months following the assault, his family noticed lapses in memory and judgement that were out of character, almost certainly the after effects of a serious concussion or blood clot2Some recount, too, that George took to drinking at this time, to the extent that it affected his general health.
Ellen and George’s last two children, Arthur and Mavorite were born in the Emerado house, shortly before the turn of the 20th century. By this time, their eldest children were reaching adulthood. Although they lived in poverty all of their lives, by 1900 George and Ellen had achieved a stable existence.
At some time around 1908, while George was working to unload a train in the July heat, he suffered sunstroke. He passed out and was carried on an improvised stretcher back to his house by two of his sons. This, along with the earlier head injury, completely incapacitated him for a period of months. He eventually recovered enough to take care of himself somewhat, but he was never able to return to work. A few years after his collapse, he died on November 22, 1912, just 57 years old.
After her husband’s death, Ellen continued to live in their Emerado home with many of her adult children. In the final years of her life, she was under the care of her son, George Herbert. She away passed on May 6, 1940 at the age of 84.