“I’ve done all that I need to do
here”
Celebrating Julius Andreas Just on
Father’s Day, 2014
On May 3, 1914, just a few months before shots rang out in
Austria triggering the “war to end all wars,” commonly known as World War I, a boy, the 5th
child, 4th son was born to Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just in a
little house on Karl Just’s rocky homestead in McIntosh County, North Dakota.
Named Julius Andreas, he would soon be followed by four more
sisters. Large families were common in
that era and Karl and Katharina considered each child a gift.
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| Ephraim on Karl's lap, Adam, Aldina, Reinhold and Julius on Katharina's lap 1914 |
An opportunity to move to a larger farm a few miles closer to
the grain elevators and train station at Zeeland, North Dakota, came in March
1920. The idea of avoiding rolling hills when hauling grain to market with a
team of horses had great appeal to Karl and Katharina.
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| House on new Just Farm 1920 |
Julius was just about six-years-old and remembered the move
well. His father, Karl, drove their Overland Touring Car while the older boys, eleven-year-old
Adam and nine-year-old Reinhold walked the five miles to the new farm, herding
the cattle to their new home. Seven-year-old Ephraim was in charge of the cat
and the little girls - four-year-old Eva and three-year-old Katharina. Almost twelve-year-old Aldina was in charge of
two month old Elizabeth. Julius didn’t remember what his job was. Neighbors
helped with the move and neighbor ladies had the big house warm and food ready
when they arrived at their new farm.
According to Julius,
everyone lived and worked in harmony and they were a happy family. He remembered his mother had a beautiful
voice. She sang and played the organ and when neighbors and family visited,
group singing was common. Katharina had
earned a teaching certificate and taught school before she married Karl Just. Religious
and secular education for her children was important to her. Julius remembered
a contented household where friends and family often visited. Karl and
Katharina always took their turn hosting the local teacher. Julius remembered
how much his mother enjoyed the company of another adult woman.
The new farm was a financial struggle. The house and the
farm buildings were not in the condition they expected. A new furnace and
building improvements began immediately. The two bottom plow and ten foot drill
and other machinery they brought to the new farm were not sufficient to handle
more acreage. Julius remembered that his father was a very kind and quiet
person who was well respected in the community. One day little Julius was
riding on the mower with his father at a section of rented hay land when they
had to stop to change the sickle. In the process, Julius cut his finger. In an
interview seventy-three years later, Julius could still remember how concerned
his father was – how bad he felt - as he made a makeshift bandage to cover the
wound.
The move meant a new school in Frieda Township. Julius
remembered that they went to school in a sleigh pulled by horses. There was a
barn at the school site to house the horses during school hours. A school year
was seven months and regularly attended unless the student was needed to plant
or harvest the crop. Many boys, including the Just boys missed school to take care of chores at home.
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| Julius 4th from right |
The family continued to worship at their little Friedens
Gemeinde (Peace Lutheran) Church even though they were now closer to St Andrew’s,
the “mother” church organized in 1893 by Julius’s Meidinger and Just
grandparents and where his parents, Karl and Katharina, were the first to be
married in 1907, in the newly erected tall, white Carpenter Gothic style church
that stands today as a “Beacon on the Prairie.”
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| Karl and Katharina on their wedding day, June 1907 |
Life moved on in harmony and happiness until the winter of
1922 – 23. Diptheria, a deadly respiratory infection was epidemic and four of
the children were placed under the care of the local physician. Julius,
Eva, Katharina and Elizabeth were terribly ill with the dreaded disease.
Katharina’s niece, Katie, came to help the exhausted mother care for her sick
children but Dr. Grace sent her home because he feared the newly married Katie
could be pregnant and could become ill with the disease. The father, Karl, was
also on bed rest, as he was many winters because of a weak heart and lungs
resulting from an accident he had as a young man with a runaway wagon and team
of horses.
It was a cold, hard
winter and the big house was drafty. They were almost out of coal. Karl got up
from his sickbed, got dressed and announced he was going the sixteen miles to
Zeeland to get a load of coal. Katharina protested saying that she was certain
his younger brother, Jacob, could do it. But Karl would not hear of it and set
off for town.
Underestimating his weak condition, Karl collapsed and was
brought home by neighbors. Dr Grace examined him and announced to Katharina
that Karl’s heart was weak and he likely would not survive. Overwrought,
Katharina implored Karl to get well saying, “I cannot run this farm by myself.
I cannot raise these children by myself!” Karl opened his eyes, took her hand,
and said, “I’ll take some with me.”
Karl died on February 12, 1923. He had just turned thirty-eight-years-old.
Eva died on February 14, Katharina and
Elizabeth died on the 19th and 20th. Karl took three of
the children with him. Julius remembered waking up one morning, seeing sunshine
and getting up from his sick bed at some point in the middle of all the illness
and death. He walked into the parlor where people were assembled near two of
his sisters laid out in caskets. While he was deliriously ill, he had lost a
parent and three siblings. It didn’t stop there. The same epidemic claimed
Julius’s Aunt Christina Just Thurn and her sons, Edwin, Julius and Jacob in
those same days.
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| Karl Just cemetery marker. Children each have granite markers with their initials at the foot of the grave. |
The winter weather was unrelenting. Karl and Eva were buried
at tiny Friedens Cemetery in one coffin. When Katharina and Elizabeth died a
few days later, the grave diggers exhumed the coffin holding Karl and Eva and
dug into the earth horizontally below the frost line to create a grave for the other
two girls who were buried together in one wooden coffin.
The sad family continued on. Julius remembered that
sometimes he and his brother, Ephraim, would lie together under a feather comforter
while their mother sang the lullaby, “Müde
bin ich, geh zur ruh” Translated it means: “Weary am I, to Rest I Must Go”.
Years later Julius would sing that same lullaby to his grandchildren. Still
later, Julius’s granddaughter, Katharina, sang it in his honor at his funeral.
One night young Julius couldn’t sleep and walking into the
kitchen of the big house, discovered his mother filling Easter Baskets for the
children. Even in her sorrow, Katharina tried to keep life normal for her remaining
children.
Taking care of the six surviving children and a farm with
considerable acreage was a daunting undertaking. Katharina was able to lease
some of the land to neighbors. Reinhold and Adam did most of the remaining farm
work and the neighbors helped plant and harvest the rest of the acreage.
Katharina’s father and father-in-law hired farm hands to help out.
In November, 1925, Katharina Meidinger Just, since
remarried, died while giving birth to her tenth child. She joined Karl, Eve,
Katharina and Elizabeth in tiny Friedens Lutheran Cemetery, leaving her sixteen-year-old
daughter, Aldina, to care for the remaining children. The infant son, Edwin, survived
and was raised by his maternal uncle and aunt.
Everyone soldiered on. Julius, a good student, attended
eight grades at Frieda School #2. In the eighth grade he achieved the highest
math score in the county and was recommended by the McIntosh County
Superintendent of Schools to attend high school. But Julius’s stepfather
determined his fate and deemed that “Julius does not need a high school
education to be a farmer,” – thereby refusing to fund the expense of room and
board at the nearest high school. It is likely that, had she been alive,
Katharina would have felt differently.
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| Ephraim, unknown friend, Julius and Adam |
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| Julius with pets |
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| Young Julius |
Julius and his brothers worked for their stepfather on the
family farm and on the stepfather’s acreage for the next many years until each
emancipated at age twenty-one. The
happiness and harmony of their early years with Karl and Katharina never
returned. Life with their stepfather was a struggle and unrewarding. Their oldest sister, Aldina, took care of the
garden, laundry, housekeeping and cooking while helping to raise the youngest
sister, Marie, who was born just a year before her father and sisters died.
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| Aldina and Marie 1931 |
Julius
became Aldina’s right hand, carrying in the water, carrying out the slop and
helping with the gardening and the milking as well as taking his turn with
field work.
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| Aldina Just 1940's |
In later years, Aldina worked
as a housemaid for their stepfather until he died in 1953. She never married
and was the glue that held that sad family together for all those years. Their
stepfather saw no need to provide land, livestock or machinery to help his
stepsons get established and no dowry for his stepdaughters to get a start in
life - as was the custom in our Germans from Russia culture.
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| Helen Dockter |
In November, 1939, Julius married a local girl, Helen Dockter,
and they embarked on a sixty-three-year marriage. They rented land in McIntosh
County until April 1944 when they purchased a run-down farm just north of
Berlin, in LaMoure County, North Dakota, some 80 miles to the east. Two of Julius’s
brothers, Reinhold and Ephraim, and their wives were already established on
farms nearby. Julius and Helen raised five children on that farm. Their two
oldest sons, Donald and Myron, remember as small children planting rows of
trees north and south, then east and west to shelter the house and out
buildings. In February 1945, a large hip-roofed barn was moved onto the property.
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| Julius and Helen Just Family 1950 Don, Walter, Julius (hanging on to Carol) Marcella, Helen and Myron |
Over time, every shabby out-building was replaced and in 1949 the run down farm
house was remodeled and modernized. Over time, more acreage was added to the
farm operation. Switching from cattle to
raising sheep with sons, Myron and Walt, took up much of the 1960’s.
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| House on Just Farm 1/2 mile north of Berlin, ND circa 1960's |
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| Julius on tractor |
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| Julius counting sheep |
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| Walt and Julius surveying freshly sheared sheep |
In 1969, twenty-five years after their move to Berlin, Julius
and Helen retired to five acres of land at the edge of Berlin, ½ mile south of
their farm. There they raised bumper vegetable and flower crops and hosted
their children and grandchildren for every Christmas and a reunion round-up
every summer. They enjoyed their retirement years, including travel across the
US and Europe.
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| Helen and Julius enjoying retirement in Berlin, ND |
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| Helen and Julius Just Family at Just Farm 1982 Helen and Julius in front Walt, Carol, Don Marcella and Myron in back |
Their son, Myron and his wife, Ruth, took charge of the farm for
the next twenty-five years and at the helm today is their grandson, Christof
Just and his wife, Kelli. Julius and Helen can be assured that Just Farm at
Berlin, North Dakota is alive and in good hands.
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| Brothers Julius and Reinhold enjoying a beer during harvest circa 1970's |
Julius Just was my dad. He lived to be 88 ½, outliving his mother
and father by seventy-seven and seventy-nine years. Almost every Memorial Day
in my memory, Dad and my mother, Helen, would make the pilgrimage back to
Friedens Cemetery in McIntosh County, lovingly attending the graves where his
parents, three sisters and one brother are buried.
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| Myron with Julius, Fall 2002 during Julius's last visit to his beloved Just Farm at Berlin |
Not long before he died Dad told me, “I’ve done all that I
need to do here. When it is my time, I’ll be ready. I miss my parents, sisters
and brothers and I look forward to a reunion with them.” The image of him in
reunion with the ones who were taken from him when he was so young sustained me
in the years after he died. I still miss him but he is happy because he has even more company now.
Mother has joined him along with Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia. I’m pretty sure they
are playing some fantastic rounds of Pinochle or Whist and talking politics
from on high
.
Happy Father’s Day in your centennial year Dad!
Carol Just, June 2014
Much of the information for this story came from interviews
I conducted with my dad, Julius, and his brother, Reinhold, the two remaining children of Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just, in September, 1996.
They were the men I admired the most in my life and I will always be grateful
to them for sharing their stories with me. The deathbed scene between Karl and Katharina
was shared with me by Rosina Wiest (Just) Schauer in an interview at her home
in Ashley, North Dakota, November, 1974. Rosina and her first husband, Andrew
Just, witnessed the exchange between Karl and Katharina while they were sitting
vigil at the bedside of Karl Just in February, 1923.
A big Thank You to Myron Just for generously sharing 50 years of family photographs for this essay.
