Haberman farm

On Tuesday’s ride I came across this monument in Nobles County, MN. (See Google map below.)

It’s sad when there is no building — not even a building site — by which to remember a family farm. It sometimes happens, though, that there is nothing left but a cornfield. We visited a place like that the day before — the farm where my wife’s mother had lived for a few years when she was an infant. We had known to expect nothing but a field of corn or soybeans, and that’s what we found. Putting up a stone monument would be an unusual way to preserve a memory like that, but why not?

Tonight in trying to learn more about the Haberman monument, I found it strange that the 1908 plat map for Nobles County didn’t show any kind of farmstead on this site or near it, nor did the subsequent plat map from the 1920s. The 1908 plat map showed that a J.B. Haberman did indeed own the land where this monument is located, but not that the home place was here. And the Nobles County history of that year didn’t mention the Habermans.

But then I found a mention of the Habermans in a Jackson County history. The Jackson county line is just a mile away from this monument. From the Jackson County history, I learned that the J.B. Haberman farmstead was on the other side of the county line, to the west-northwest of this point. From later plat maps, including those from the 1990s, it looks like in subsequent generations a lot of people with the Haberman surname owned land around here. Perhaps they still do. But by the 1990s, the original homesite of J.B. Haberman was not owned by anyone with that surname. The land on which the monument stands was once owned by an Alexander Haberman (one of the other names on the monument) according to a plat map from the 1980s. But no plat map shows that a farmstead ever existed on this 80.

Why am I obsessing over this? Well, I understand that nostagic pull of an old farmstead. I was in this part of the world (Iowa and Minnesota) because on the 4th we attended a family reunion at the farmstead originally owned by my wife’s grandparents. It wasn’t the most convenient place for a large gathering, but the fact that it was the original home trumped other considerations. So if a Haberman farmstead had been at the site of the monument in the photo, I would understand completely, and would enjoy the fact that they were keeping the memory alive. But if it was not the site of a farmstead, it makes me curious as to why this site has so much importance that the family went to the trouble and expense to erect this monument at this exact place. I can imagine a few possible reasons, but I’m a nosy person who likes to understand what it is that makes places important to people.

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