Thorvald Lende and family moved to Cooperstown in 1919 from their farm in Steele County. He did dray work, hauling coal, and other items for business places and other people for a couple years, keeping four horses in town.
About in 1922 he opened a cream station in the back of the Farmer's Store for a year or so, then moved across the alley and for a short while bought cream in the barn behind Benson's Photography. He bought the place from Benson and rented the entire upstairs to him for his studio at $15.00 a month rent. He moved the station into the front part of the downstairs and did business there. In 1926 he bought two new Model T trucks and did his own trucking. In 1927 he poured a concrete flour on the entire east half of the building, had the cream station back there, and used the front half for candling eggs and other purposes.
Lende bought cream for R.E. Cobb Company in St. Paul, Minnesota and had a big cream business going. The Cobb Company closed up in St. Paul and moved their entire creamery to Valley City, North Dakota where Lende hauled cream. After a few years when the Cobb Company quit in Valley City, he bought cream for North American Creamery at Oakes and Valley City. Lendes used to fill one hundred ten-gallon cream cans on a Saturday and Saturday night, and also bought lots of eggs which had to be candled. The twelve Lende children each had work to do in the cream station. They also had an egg route to neighboring towns and picked up the large thirty-dozen cases of eggs, too. Lendes also bought lots of furs, hides and iron.
Lende bought many carloads of wool and hauled it to Grand Forks and New Rockford. He bought dressed turkeys and shipped barrels of turkeys and chickens to Peter Fox Company in Chicago. Nobody was buying live turkeys so Lendes bought live turkeys and sold to the Fox Company in Portland, North Dakota as they opened a place there.
They used to go to Warroad, Minnesota and get truckloads of fresh fish on lee in summer every week and sell.
They were in big I ton wooden boxes with lee. One winter they bought a carload of frozen herring from Duluth, Minnesota. It was a rough winter with an awful lot of snow and they had to haul it home with a stone boat. Daughter Beatrice Fogderud remembers, "We had that fish all winter, but finally sold it all."
In about 1944 Lende went into the used car business for a few years and other small things until about 1955. He died in 1958.
Source: Cooperstown, North Dakota 1882-1982 Centennial Page 193