High on a hilltop on the NW quarter of Section 13, Pilot Mound Township is a small exclusive cemetery. There are only five mounds on a level shelf that would have made an impressive location for a church.
Those graves have been unmarked through all the years since 1882 when sympathetic neighbors assembled to bury the bodies of Helgi and Barbara Olson and their two small daughters. The family had succumbed to typhoid fever and the woman who came to care for them lost her own baby at the same time. (Note. The name of this woman is not known.)
The unfortunate Olson family had arrived there in a covered wagon in 1881. Four young sons survived, Ole, Benjie, Thomas and Henry, but they were too young to handle this catastrophe by themselves. The closest neighbors were Ellef Olson Ellefson, Sigvard Tande, Ole Alfson, Ole O. Groff, and Andrias H. Hegnia. They all did what they could to help the orphans.
The graves were placed about a hundred yards southwest of the log cabin on a five-acre plot of flat land where some of the neighbors had hopes of building a church at some future time. Looking back at this location almost a hundred years later, a visitor can plainly see that the graves were placed in one corner of the plot, as a church cemetery would be located. The location is so beautiful that it is not difficult to imagine a church steeple rising only a few yards away, but this never came to pass.
Time went by and the little cemetery was neither moved nor added to. In 1975 the neighbors decided that a marker of some kind should be erected there. On this marker will be placed the names of all these unfortunate typhoid victims.
The stories of the survivors follow:
Thomas Olson (Taken from his obituary in 1955).
Thomas Olson came to Dakota with his parents when they settled in Griggs County in 1881. His parents and two sisters died from typhoid fever in the summer of 1882 when he was twelve years old. Bennie, one of his three brothers left to live with relatives in Colorado at that time, and the others got along as best they could on their own.
In 1888, Tom hauled mail from Cooperstown to the post office in the Lee Mill on the Sheyenne River near the Nelson County line. He also hauled groceries to the Lee store for Ole Kjorvesestad. Once he tipped over with a load of groceries coming from Cooperstown. He was pinned under the wheels of the wagon and his leg was broken. The injury never healed properly so he limped all the rest of his life. After that, he started to farm.
He was married to Anna Kvale. They had six children, Alfred, Thomas or Thelmer, Mansfield, Helga, Elaine and Odela.
At the time of Tom's death, one brother, Henry, still survived at Retsel, Washington, having gone west some time earlier.
Ole Olson, the fourth, had become quite a familiar figure in Nelson County by that time. He was hired as a coal and water supply man for the railroad at Aneta. He was thoroughly dependable and was always on hand to supply every train as soon as one came to town. He was soft-spoken, easy going and liked by everyone.
He earned the name of Coal Chute Ole because his face, hands and clothes were often perfectly black from coal dust. He was pumping water from a storage tank one day and his clothes caught in the pulley of the pump engine. He lost his life on February 14, 1930.
Source: Griggs County History 1879 - 1976 Page 364