Clarence Nelson, Ropers, North Dakota remembers getting off the train at Ropers as a six year old boy with his parents and his brother and two sisters to come to their new farm which his father had rented near Ropers. It was a week before Christmas in 1907 and he had been impressed by the little train called the "Dinky" which ran between Sanborn and McHenry.
His family consisted of William, his father; Minnie, his mother; Elmer, his older brother; Alice, his older sister and Amy, the youngest. The family had come from a little dairy farm in Wisconsin to try their luck on the prairie of Barnes County.
In the spring of 1910 the Nelsons rented a larger farm west of Ropers and the boys went to school in Ropers in the two room brick school. In 1911 he saw for the first time the County Superintendent of Schools, Minnie J. Nielsen, who drove up to the school in a red automobile, wearing gauntlets, and goggles over a cap.
His sister Alice started school in 1910 and later became the postmaster of Ropers for many years before retiring. His sister Doris was born in 1914. The very next year his father came home with a new washer and a gasoline engine to run it with, as well as to power the grain fanner and the water pump for the stock when there was no wind for the windmill.
Gordon was born in 1916, making a total of six children in the Nelson family. In 1917, his father bought a new 1917 Dodge touring car.
By 1917 Ropers was quite a city. It had three grocery stores, a meat market, a hardware store, bank, drugstore, machinery sales. There was a Doctor, three pool halls, a bowling alley, a hotel, garage, livery barn and a lumber yard. Of course, there was a church and a new school with four years of high school. The old two room school building was now used as a hall. There were five grain elevators, a feed mill, a blacksmith shop and even a newspaper. Six passenger trains daily made the depot a busy place, almost as busy as the barbershop on Saturday nights.
In 1920 the seventh and last member of the family was born, a sister named Myrna. In that year Clarence enlisted in the navy, serving the last part of his enlistment on the battleship Texas. Elmer had gone to work for the Northern Pacific Railroad so Clarence returned to the farm.
In 1928 the shift to power machinery began but still the farming was hard, especially on a 1 200 acre spread. In 1936, Clarence suffered an injury to his spine which, despite an operation and treatments in Rochester, left him confined to a wheel chair. His mother passed away in 1941 and his father in 1944. Cordon was drafted in 1944 and after Okinawa, he returned in 1946, only to lose his life when accidentally killed in a gun accident.
Clarence has been confined to a wheelchair for thirty-eight years but has a good outlook on life but has fond memories of the days of his youth.
Source: Barnes County History 1976 Page 169