By Rod Anderson

Because I’m a native of Cannon Falls, Minn., there was a brief moment in the planning process for Minnesota Statehood Day when I had the opportunity to emcee the May 11, 2008, birthday celebration on the State Capitol Steps. Remember that commemorative wagon train traveling 101 miles from my hometown, Cannon Falls, experiencing trials, but lesser trials than our ancestors did along the way? (The first day the “pioneers” had to get out and push to get up the steep hill on Goodhue County Road No. 8 not far from our farm – plow horses and ponies just aren’t in condition like they were in the good ol’ days!) Planning committees’ plans change, and I was out as emcee, but I’m no less enthused this Minnesota Statehood Week, May 11 to 18.

The wagon train included 85 people, eight wagons, two buggies and the “Bestemor” Stagecoach, a name that, ironically, on this Mothers’ Day celebration at the capital, means “grandma” in Norwegian. Horses, wagons and participants came from around the state to form the train, but it all began at the Cannon Valley Fair Grounds, a magical place in my childhood memories where we all gathered every Fourth of July week to show our cattle in 4-H competition, experience every ride on the midway and take in the harness horse races and the shows in the old wooden grandstand!

But another childhood memory is called forward by the Sesquicentennial (“sesqui” means one and one half). When I was 11 years old, my part in the centennial pageant for our Spring Garden Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church in the country outside Cannon Falls was that of a school boy dressed in “knickers” with lunch pail in hand reciting my ABC’s in Swede in the replicated one-room-log schoolhouse. Fondly, I recall my Grandpa teaching and rehearsing the letters with me. Now I’m recollecting and re-learning them again, this time with the help of Linda Wallenberg, EPHS English Teacher and also full-blooded Swedish instructor for years at Concordia Language Camps. This summer I’ll recite them again at my home church’s 150th anniversary that coincides exactly with the state’s Sesquicentennial! Spring Garden’s celebration theme is “Pioneers in the Faith – Breaking New Ground.”

In 1958 for the Congregation’s Centennial a team of oxen and ox cart were transported across the state so that characters playing the church’s earliest pioneers could arrive at the pageant the way first settlers did. The night before the pageant, the oxen were bedded down in our neighbor’s barn, but in the morning it was discovered they had broken out and were nowhere to be found. The whole congregation went on a “round-up” on that Sunday morning in the summer of 1958. The oxen were found, captured and stars of the pageant. The congregation made it to morning worship and the “show went on” in that afternoon’s pageant!

One of my favorite stories of the pioneers on Eden’s Prairie came from my former Bishop Herb Chilstrom who phoned me one day when he was doing some reading of Minnesota church history after his retirement. He wondered if I knew of any early Eden Prairie settlers named Anderson (Scotch-Irish Andersons, of course) who arrived, began establishing their homestead and the first week walked with their family six miles each way to the nearest Presbyterian Church because they had no team of horses or buckboard wagon and it was unacceptable to Father that they arrive by ox cart for worship. After such a long walk, the next week Mother said, “Would it be alright if we rode in the ox cart five miles, tie the oxen in the woods, and walk the last mile?” Our church now stands on the farmland once owned by descendants of that first pioneer family of Andersons!

The sesquicentennial, and every celebration of the history of faithful peoples, should be a teaching/learning time in which we all are moved to greater commitment in the values and beliefs that “pioneered” our own!

 The Rev. Rod Anderson shares this space with the Revs. Timothy A. Johnson and Tim Power as well as spiritual writers Dr. Bernard E. Johnson and Lauren Carlson-Vohs. “Spiritually Speaking” appears weekly.