My interview with Stella helped me muster up the courage to make personal contact with a few folks who still lived in Brainerd. A week after I returned to the Kansas City area from Toledo, I received a phone call from Agnes Harder, treasurer of the Frederic Remington Area Historical Society. She was answering a letter I had sent to the society a month earlier, and offered to show me around and be my tour guide should I have time to make a trip down from Kansas City.

I wrangled some time off from my ad agency day job -- just after resigning to accept a new position in the Toledo area -- and made the three-hour trek southwest along I-35 one foggy April morning. As I pulled off the interstate north of El Dorado to hook up with K-196, the fog lifted and the prairie landscape began to shimmer in the gusty, swirling wind.

My route took me Northwest, parallel to the old Missouri Pacific railbed, along K-196. At the Brainerd Feed Store, I hung a right on old familiar Broadway (officially known on the map as Meadowlark Road) and headed north past the old Brainerd Store building to make my way to the Harder house. The home is a clean, modern, brick ranch structure, nestled in a grove of trees at the end of a long, tree-lined gravel driveway. It sits in the middle of a tidy farmstead, with outbuildings that date back to the 1870s, when the family first worked this land immediately northwest of Brainerd.

The Brainerd Connection

Edgar and Agnes (Wiebe) Harder are descended from a long line of Brainerd area Mennonite farmers. Their roots are about as deep as they come in these parts, as is their knowledge of local history.

Edgar's great-great-grandfather, Bernhard Harder, immigrated from West Prussia to Milton Township in summer 1876, with his three sons, Bernhard Jr., John and Gustav, and their families. John, Edgar's great-grandfather, settled on the land due west of Broadway, and built a substantial home near the site of Agnes and Edgar's present dwelling. The Harders were part of a large group of Mennonites who relocated to the area, and were founding members of the Emmaus Mennonite Congregation, about 2.5 miles north of Brainerd on Broadway/Meadowlark Road.

Edgar's grandfather, B.W. Harder, was an Emmaus minister from 1902 to 1939 and was locally famous for cleverly defusing a potentially violent confrontation with an anti-German mob during World War I. When the unruly mob arrived at the Harder farm house intent upon tarring-and-feathering the Mennonite minister as a symbol of its anti-German aggression, Harder cleverly defused the situation by out-Americanizing the "patriots" in a rousing, four-verse rendition of the patriotic song, "America."

Edgar was not the first Harder to marry a Wiebe -- B.W.'s wife, Mina, was a Wiebe, born in West Prussia, and Edgar's Uncle B.G. Harder married Elsie Wiebe. Agnes (Wiebe) Harder was born in 1931 to John and Martha (Claassen) Wiebe and grew up on a farm southeast of Whitewater, attending Whitewater Grade School, Whitewater H.S. and Bethel College in Newton. Edgar, born in 1928, attended Claypool Grade School and Bethel Academy in Newton and Hesston Academy in Hesston, Kansas.

They were married in 1953 in the Emmaus Church, and have worked the ancestral Harder land since 1954, when they took possession of the B.W. Harder home and began farming wheat and raising hogs. In addition to her involvement with the historical society, Agnes serves on several church and community committees in Whitewater and Brainerd. Edgar also has been active in the school boards of the Brainerd and Remington school districts.

In 1985, as part of Brainerd's centennial celebration, Agnes and Edgar scoured the area for old family photos and artifacts of the town's pioneer days. Agnes also conducted many interviews with area residents, compiling her findings in a multimedia slide show, which was presented to the community, along with the text of her History of Brainerd, in summer 1985, at Remington H.S. Many of the slides presented that night are incorporated into the Gallery section of this site.

Brainerd People and Places

Because they have lived in the area most of their lives and also have been quite active in chronicling its history, Agnes and Edgar have equally vivid memories of what they have personally experienced and what they have experienced through the stories of older relatives, historical documents and old photos. Their memories are very place-specific, rooted in recollections of individual buildings, streets and landscape features. After our interviews, Agnes and Edgar marked locations of sites they remembered on a blank map of the 1905 plat, similar to the one marked up by Stella after my interview with her.

Some of their most powerful memories of the community focus on the Brainerd Store. "The grocery was on the north side, and the other side was all the hardware," recalls Edgar, describing a layout akin to that remembered by Stella in our interview. "They had a room in the back where the lived for a while, and then clear in the back was the blacksmith shop. The windows were all at one end. And I remember that they had a wood sidewalk -- wood planks -- for the whole block."

One of Agnes' Wiebe ancestors ran the store for seven years in the early 1900s, and Agnes recently edited a history of the store relayed to her by Edgar's relative, Waldo Harder, in 1985. In it, she describes the store's offerings: "In this store you could buy: groceries, overalls, shirts, denim jackets, cloth for dresses, ribbons, lace, needles, thread, straw hats, shoes, over shoes, rubber boots, kerosene for lamps and lanterns and gasoline from a pump for cars. For the kids: pencils, paper tables, ink, pens and candy."

They both share fond memories of the railroad and the Brainerd grain elevator. Agnes recalls a story she heard from Waldo Harder of kids running on the top of idle box cars, while grain doors borrowed from the railroad cars were repurposed for temporary walks for weddings or for an extra stage for a school play. The depot had a gravity-fed gas pump, and a wooden platform in front with a roof over it.

"There were two different railroad station buildings in Brainerd," said Agnes, in a subsequent e-mail interview on this topic. "The first one I remember was built just like the one in Whitewater. It was approximately 50-60 feet long and in the center along the side was a narrow platform, not very wide, which had a big door that went into the station. It had a bay window on the side so they could see the train come. I know that in the 40's the depot agent and his family lived on one side and the other for freight.

On the west side of Broadway, Edgar recalls at least four or five buildings still standing north of the depot during his childhood. He still finds rocks from the foundations of these homes and businesses mixed in with the soil he plows every year in this part of his farm.

The largest building in town was the grain elevator, an impressive sight that was a landmark on the Harders' horizon until its dismantling in the 1990s. "I remember one time when they brought the grain in with horse and wagon to pick up loads," said Edgar. "They were lined up almost to the highway."

The highway (K-196) wasn't even a highway until 1949, when it was rebuilt to run south of the railroad tracks, he said. "It used to stair-step its way down from Newton to El Dorado, running along the section roads. It was all gravel and sand roads. Oh, that thing was rough -- like a washboard!"

Since neither of the two attended the Brainerd School, that did not figure as prominently in their memories as did some of the original homes that have since burned or crumbled into the weeds. "I used to call Jacob Street "Wall Street" when I was growing up, because I thought all the rich people lived there," Edgar remembers. "And there were a lot of bachelor farmers living on the edge of town in smaller shacks."

Beyond Brainerd

After our drive around Brainerd, Edgar turned the car north for a brief spin through some favorite parts of the countryside surrounding the town. A few miles north of Brainerd, he pointed out a newer single-family home which had been built around a relocated, original, two-room Brainerd house. To the untrained eye, it was just another split-level exurban dwelling, but to Edgar and Agnes, it was evidence of an adaptive, respectful use of the past.

During World War II, Edgar made many trips along these roads to Peabody, in Marion County, north of Brainerd, with his father, John S. Harder. They often made the drive back and forth each day to pick up and drop off a few German POWs, who were leased out to local farmers during their stay at the Peabody POW camp. Because Edgar's father and mother spoke German, they were able to communicate better with the German POWs -- at least as far as work was concerned.

"What I remember the best, as if it were yesterday, was that my Dad was working where he had three of four of them, and he was getting set to take them back to Peabody," Edgar said. "They were walking across the yard, when my mother came with the egg bucket from the chicken house. And this one prisoner walked right up to the egg bucket, grabbed one, cracked it and gulped it down. I can remember that as if it were yesterday."