The Sommercorns Homestead Bingham County
The Sommercorn family in the Tilden and Sterling area
8/24/20268 min read
The turn of the twentieth century was a time without birth control and it wouldn't be unusual in Bingham County to see families numbering a dozen or better. Charles and Rosina Sommercorn, who settled in the Tilden area, were German immigrants who first settled in Wisconsin and had had thirteen children. The Sommercorns bounced around Wisconsin, moving five times and ending in Fond du Lac, where they met LDS missionaries and were converted in 1897. They endured persecution at home, a brick through the window finding their dinner table one evening and the children getting harassed at school, so traded Wisconsin for Idaho (son Edward already resided a mile north of Grandview, at that time sometimes called Varney) in May 1910. Charles found Mormons in Bingham County less righteous than back home so soon became disaffected with the Church. His semi-apostasy, which lasted decades, caused the marital discords and religious crises of his children, at least according to one of his devout offspring.
The immigrant train car to Blackfoot carried their furniture, wagons, and belongings while the Sommercorn family rode in the passenger car on the three day trip from Wisconsin. When they arrived, they were amazed to see Indians everywhere, son Frank would reminisce. They wore blankets, had long or braided hair, and some wore moccasins while some had bare feet.
They stayed at Shilling Avenue for a few months before moving to Springfield, a trip that took a full day to travel the twenty-five miles. They lived at the O. E. Nelson place at Otis for a year before moving to the Henry Berg place—a log cabin with a dirt roof—near Springfield. Frank wrote that they took an old piano box to make an outhouse to improve their quarters. They had beds made of flour sacks sewed together and stuffed with straw.
Charles, the father, homesteaded eighty acres of desert south of Springfield and immediately built a barn—which instead became their home. He bought more lumber to build that intended dwelling, planned to have a kitchen and a living room combination with two bedrooms but it never got built, according to Frank—a common problem, some carpenters' wives might say.
The land Charles selected was very rocky, and there wasn't enough water to make it a profitable farm, despite his clever rigging up of a pumping system that utilized a natural spring, a 10' x 12' x 14' cistern and a four and a half horsepower pump to irrigate twenty-five acres. They couldn't pay back the eight hundred dollar loan so defaulted. Frank said his father was much happier after failure and reported that the land was still barren and covered with sagebrush in the 1980s—he adjudged it the worst piece of land in the country (his son Edward might claim the same about his acreage). Charles preferred his carpentry trade, anyway, and built area houses and the Sterling Hotel.
Above, the Sommercorn sisters with Parkinson and Pope girls.
Rosina and Charles Sommercorn
The Reservation wasn't far from their homestead and sometimes the Sommercorns heard the Native's drums beating for their tribal dances. They also heard panthers screaming on the river. Frank wrote of the Shoshones coming to hunt rabbits near their land, the man standing still while the woman rounded up the rabbits and drove them towards him. "They always went home with lots of rabbits," he wrote. They called Frank 'Gene Autry'. "I guess they thought I looked like that famous cowboy."
At that time Springfield had a store, livery stable, and hotel. The Sommercorn children went to the Tilden School to the south of the village (just north of Boone Creek on Crystal Springs Road, the foundation still is extant) until 1917 when a new brick school was built in Springfield proper. A new LDS Church was also built at that time. Before then, meetings took place in peoples' homes.
The Sommercorns walked one and a half miles to the one room Tilden school, which had a stove in one corner to keep the children warm. They only went to school three to six months of the year as they were called to work when farm help was needed. There were twelve students in all the grades who, besides learning their lessons, had chores to do. They chopped wood, filled the wood box, and carried water from the spring across the road. They drank from the same dipper out of a pail and took their lunch to school each day—usually a lard on bread sandwich, seasoned with a little salt and pepper.
At recess, Frank wrote, "we would walk on stilts that we had made, push hoops with a stick, take a long pole and vault across the creek, play pom pom pull away, jump sticks, play baseball, Annie I over, tag, and hide and seek." They caught crawdads and attached them to each others' ears. An older boy in school hid some whiskey at school and got another boy drunk. He fell out of his seat and the provider of alcohol was expelled. Frank was baptized in Boone Creek and "remember(ed) it was spring water, and very cold."
They made their own tools. A wood plane out of a piece of buggy spring. A wheelbarrow using washing machine wheels. Saws out of corset stays. "I remember how we found an old bicycle frame and a couple of old washing machine wheels. We put the wheels on the bike frame, and coasted down from the top of the cellar, across a plank, over a ditch, and as far as it would go." Many in the community got the flu during the 1918-1919 epidemic, he noted. "In Springfield, our neighbors on both sides of us (Leaches and Edwards) had deaths in their families. That was the first time I went to a funeral. I was a pallbearer at both funerals."
During World War I, Frank's brother Jess went over to France for eighteen months. His brother Oscar was shipped to San Francisco for training during the epidemic, caught the flu and didn't get to go with his Company to France. When he recovered he went on a ship that would be halfway across the ocean when the Armistice was struck. It turned around and Oscar came home.
Frank's first job was thinning beets for fifty cents a day plus board and room. In the winter, August and he trapped muskrats for sixteen cents a pelt. One winter they caught one hundred and eight and one mink—the mink brought two dollars and fifty cents. As a measure of their wealth, sorting potatoes paid fifteen cents an hour. Frank shot three coyotes one day and received $15 a pelt.
Charles made all his boys leave home and work elsewhere at fourteen. Frank began earning a wage of twenty to thirty dollars a month and with the money he saved bought a farm with Oscar. They got land in Springfield from a farmer who agreed to pay ten percent of his crop but refused to honor his offer after threshing so they "walked off the land, and found fifty acres in Sterling." That land eventually proved insufficient to support both brothers, so Frank sold his team of horses and his share of the farm to Oscar.
He and his brother August bought a 1918 Model T Ford in 1920, neither having ever driven a car. The salesman took them up and down the street a few times and showed them how to drive. With that brief lesson they drove from Blackfoot to Springfield on the back roads, changing drivers several times to get used to it. "(Driving) just seemed to come naturally," Frank wrote. Sister Julia would recall that the boys took the car apart when they got home to see how it worked. She thought that might be where Frank was first inspired to become a mechanic.
Frank worked summers in a bakery in Ashton for Ben Fahrquar, who his sister Jennie had married, getting up at 2 AM and working ten hour shifts—the bread would be delivered to Island Park and Rexburg. Tired of that work and schedule, he went to diesel school in Seattle for ten months and, despite jobs being hard to get, found work in Seattle for twelve dollars a week. He would soon receive a better offer in Springfield taking over the local garage,. Heslept on the floor and cooked over a gas, one burner stove. He repaired cars, trucks, farm machinery, and sold gas for eighteen years, in debt the whole time before making enough to pay off his loan in 1940. He decided it was time to get married.
He and Larue moved into the living quarters that were part of the service station—a kitchen, living room, one bedroom, and a bathroom. His father and mother moved into the little log cabin in back of the station shortly after that—his father had built the little cabin, which still stands, years earlier.
WWII bypassed Frank—Bob Houghland, a large farm property owner, stepped in to tell the Selective Service Board he was essential to the community to keep its farm machinery running. He was thirty nine at the time. He bought the Dewey Blackburn house above the Springfield Lake and they at last had a home. On occasion, he drove snowplow for the county.
Frank mechanicked for the Studebaker dealer in Blackfoot, driving back and forth from Springfield to Blackfoot until they bought a house in Blackfoot where they lived here for about a year—until another opportunity arose. The Snake River Schools had decided to buy their buses and needed a mechanic to keep them running—he took the job, and as the Wilson school, where the gym had been converted into a garage, was empty, the district allowed the Sommercorns to live in the building, the caveat being they would have to fix it up.
Frank made one room into a kitchen with an adjoining bathroom while they slept on the floor. The school windows had been boarded up for several years and the building was full of bats. Upstairs, Frank made one very large room into three bedrooms and a living room. Another room served as a storage and play area. They lived comfortably there for several years until the district offices at the High School became overcrowded and relocated to Wilson. The Sommercorns were out a home yet again, so bought a mobile home and moved it adjacent to the school. He worked for the school for fourteen years, until 1971.
Frank's sisters (five of the girls pictured on the Blackfoot Railroad Bridge) scattered across the country. Jennie taught school at Shelley before she married her husband, the baker. Edna married, went to Utah, and lived to be a hundred years old. Clara married John Ward in Blackfoot. Helene married badly, by her account, her non-LDS husband a WWI returning soldier with whom she had two children. She divorced him in 1925 after eight years of marriage. She was devoutly LDS, but being a divorcee she had to personally implore the LDS leadership for a temple recommend—Her husband, she wrote to the authorities, had had an "ungovernable temperament" and "could not hold a job." He lied and swore, had unbeknownst to her previously been married, changed his name and deserted their child. She never married again.
Lillian married and left the area for Alaska before returning to Boise. Julia, the last girl, married the Shelley coach and teacher Raymond Ruff. They would buy the acreage where Sommercorns briefly stayed decades prior, just a half mile south of Springfield (the road past the Ruff house bears their name).
Most of this post takes information from various Sommercorn family accounts from Ancestry.com
