History

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Kimberly Mine

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The Hansen home did not have electricity. Annie did install carbide lights (a form of gas lights) in her new house in the 1920’s, but they still also used kerosene lamps regularly. And although the new house was built with indoor plumbing, the pump soon quit working. Water for drinking and washing was carried from the ditch, and an outhouse was built nearby. After moving to the new house, a room of the old house served as an “ice house”.  During the winter, ice was cut from the local ponds and carried back to the ranch to be stored under piles of sawdust, where it would last all summer.

Granddaughter Delores Bowman wrote, "The early years in Boulder were very hard. When they ran out of flour, they would take some wheat and have it ground in Walter Baker's small mill. The flour was coarsely ground and it was hard for Grandma to make good bread. There was not a supermarket, nor for that matter, no store at all to buy bread, or any other foods. The people in Boulder made their own cheese, and Grandma made cottage cheese. They had to grow gardens and orchards, milk cows, raise chickens, beef, pork, and sheep for food to sustain themselves."

Delores also remembered:

• No worn out fabric was ever wasted. What material was not good enough to be made into quilt blocks, was sewn into "rag rugs," to be woven into rugs on Chris and Mary Moosman's loom.

• Before we got electricity, January 1948, we only took a bath on Saturday night. Each of us would get into the warm bath water that had been heating on the "cook" stove. Usually the youngest person would bathe first; followed by the next to youngest, etc., then our Mother, and lastly, our Father. We had to keep adding warm water to the round tin tub so nobody had to take a cold bath.

• We always ate bread and milk at night for supper. Sometimes we had a dish of homegrown home canned peaches with it or in the springtime we ate new green onions or radishes from our garden. Our meals were much simpler then they are today.

• (To make bread) Grandma would have used scalded milk instead of using powdered milk, used lard instead of shortening and everlasting yeast instead of dry yeast. She had to make all of her bread because the store did not have bread for sale. She also had a bread mixer. It was like a metal bucket with a lid on top and a long metal rod down through the lid. It was neat because she didn't have to get her hands dirty from mixing the dough. 

• (Making butter) The butter would then be removed from the churn and "worked" (washed) in cold water, while gradually adding salt, and shaped into round or square shapes. Grandma's churn was glass. I remember helping turn the handle to make butter. I had never seen "Oleo" or margarine till I visited the Johnson cousins in Richfield. 

• Grandma was an excellent pie maker. All of Grandma's food was baked or cooked in or on her coal and wood range. 

Chris and Annie had nine children, including two sets of twins. Christella, the youngest, was born shortly after Chris's death. 

Franklin Cortell Hansen (1901-1997)

Annell Owen Hansen (1903-1903)

Christy Omer Hansen (1903-1957)

Paul Vern Hansen (1906-1988)

Vera Pauline Hansen (1906-1999)

George Hyrum Hansen (1908-1981)

Esther Marie Hansen (1910-1996)

Joseph Reed Hansen (1912-1940)

Annie Christella Hansen (1914-1961)