Little house in the park: Historical Society to unveil restored 1870s Graff Cabin

By: 
Jill Meier, Journal editor
Jill MeierBV Journal 
The 1870s Nels Nelson Graff cabin is now restored and ready to be unveiled to the public. (At left) Brandon Historical Society president Jeremy Risty and Deb Rothenberger discuss details of the cabin’s Oct. 3 open house
Brandon is now home to the “little house in the park.”
 
And appropriately so, the restored home is situated in Pioneer Park on land that was once the property of the home’s original builder, Nels Nelson Graff. 
 
It will be unveiled to the public from 1-2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3. The cabin’s opening will be complimented by a disc golf tournament staged on behalf of the Brandon Historical Society, starting at 11 a.m.
 
“This is a true tiny house,” confirmed BHS president Jeremy Risty, who is one of many to invest countless hours into the cabin’s restoration.
 
The restoration project began four years ago when Dale Ellens wanted to sell the lot the cabin stood on.
 
“But once he sold the lot, the power to preserve the cabin was out of his hands,” Risty said.
 
Ellens offered up the cabin to the BHS, but the big question the all-volunteer group had to make was where to put it. “Pioneer Park made sense,” he said.
 
“This would have been the southern end of Nels Graff’s land,” said BHS member Deb Rothenberger.
 
Receiving the blessing from the Brandon City Council to place the cabin at the park, the BHS went to work – or so they thought.
 
“The biggest part was finding a contractor. It took two years,” Risty said. “For a lot of construction companies, it was too small of a project and it was a little too dicey for some of the smaller contractors.”
 
Fortunately, Joe Bowar, of Garretson, who specializes in historic restoration, came forward.
 
The 150-year-old cabin was sturdily built from oak burr, which was harvested from trees along the Split Rock Creek. On the cabin’s moving day, workers discovered just how solid the logs are 150 years later.
 
“When they were leveling off the bottom board to lay flush on the concrete, they actually had to get a concrete saw because their actual chop saw wouldn’t cut it,” Risty said.
 
When the public visits the cabin, BHS members hope they notice the cabin’s craftsmanship.
 
“This is just a really neat, old building. I hope they notice that we tried to take pains to make it as historically accurate as we could. I mean, obviously this cabin was built in 1870 but was in use all the way up until the 1950s and 60s. It has been modernized a little bit and some other things that are not period appropriate, but we tried to stay as close as we could to the historic roots as we could,” Risty said. “And I hope that they have an appreciation for what creative tough people we descended from.”
 
The cabin’s main floor is about between 150 and 175 square feet. Upstairs, which is not available to the public due to safety issues, is where the Nelson family slept.
 
“So, this is it. This is their living room, this is their dining room, this is everything. It’s the original tiny house,” Risty said.
 
BHS said it’s important to note the city of Brandon fully supported the project from the start.
 
“We’re so grateful for the support we’ve had from the city and the community. We couldn’t do it without so many organizations and people. There are a lot of moving parts, but we have been blessed with support from the community and the city, in particular,” Risty said.
 
Furnishing the cabin with period-appropriate trinkets has also been a job.
 
“A lot of this stuff we had to search for or was either donated or purchased at local flea markets, antique stores,” Risty said.
 
Brandon resident Tim Jorgenson donated the table, which was given to him by someone in the community. The chairs were donated by a BHS member, and John Burkman donated the stove.
 
The antique donations come as no surprise to Risty.
 
“I think that we’re kind of still at that pioneering spirit where they didn’t throw anything away because you didn’t know when you may need it, and I think that kind of mentality is still very much alive and well in South Dakota,” he said.
A butter churn that sits along the wall is well used.
 
“The thing I love about it is the handle and how worn it is,” said Risty, who is still in the hunt for the washtub stand. “I was talking to the guy at the Canton antique store and he said they are exceedingly rare because most of those were scrapped during World War II for metal.”
 
The cabin’s history
 
After acquiring a quarter section of land in 1870 through the Homestead Act of 1862, Scandinavia immigrants Nels Nelson Graff and his wife Elise, built a dugout where they lived the first three years. In 1873, Nelson built the first permanent wooden-structure home in Brandon Township. That was prior to Brandon being platted in 1878. By using the burr oaks growing along the Split Rock Creek, the pioneer built the 14-bu17 foot log cabin with a basement, a loft above the main floor, and a shingled roof about 1,450 northeast of where the cabin stands today.
 
The Graffs and their four sons, Martin (1871), Adolph (aka A.N., 1874), twin Elius and Neil (1881) lived in the log home. Elise died hours after giving birth to the twins.
 
Throughout the years, their descendants lived in and built around the log home located on its original red-rock foundation. 
 
The last resident was Carol Anderson Williams, whose mother, Oral Graff, was the granddaughter of Nels Nelson Graff
 
In 2002, Dale Ellens, great-great-grandson of Nils Olsen, who was Nels’ father, purchased the lot and the home that came with it. After exploring several options of preserving the cabin, he gifted it to the Brandon Historical Society in 2016. The city of Brandon permitted the Society to move the cabin to Pioneer Park, which is on southern end of land Nels homesteaded in 1870.
 
The cabin’s journey to Pioneer Park was made possible through the continued efforts of the Brandon Historical Society and generous donations from many, including Joel Jellema who donated he labor for the concrete pad, which the cabin was placed on at the park. United Concrete in Harrisburg provided the concrete and Brandon Lumber supplied the reinforcement bar and plywood to board up the windows and doors during the cabin’s restoration. On Nov. 11, 2016, Berghorst and Sons, Inc., of Hull, Iowa, moved the cabin.
 
Since that time, led by BHS president Jeremy Risty, volunteers have spent hours refurbishing the cabin. Those efforts included replacing the chinking between the log, a new roof, new flooring and tuckpointing the chimney, replacing windows and doors and landscaping.
 
Heinemann Restoration, of Dell Rapids, chinked the entire interior and exterior of the cabin, and Garretson contractor, Joe Bowar, and dozens of volunteers, guided the cabin’s restoration – inside and outside.
The cabin’s interior received new flooring and floorboards, which Risty and volunteer Matt Christensen pounded in each nail by hand.
 
A shotgun that now hangs on a wall of the cabin was donated by Brandon resident Gene Reiser, who found it on a Sunday afternoon in October 2017, while exploring the area behind the old homestead cabin on Riverwood Circle. Although the cabin had been moved, he was walking lies on a steep incline that leads to a swampy area to the east. The area appears to have been used as a place to dispose of unwanted material back in the day.
 
As Reiser walked the ridge, he spied a long pipe, which he picked up, and noticed that one end was buried in the dirt appeared to have a trigger guard. That led him to believe it was an old shotgun. For unexplained reasons, a large bolt was jammed into the barrel.
 
Through research, Reiser learned the shotgun was a 12-gauge Hopkins & Allen falling block lever action shotgun dating from around 1875 to the early 1900s. Reiser attempted to clean the gun and restore it to working operation, but it was too far gone. Ironically so, he found a gun of the very same make and model online and purchased it so it could be presented side by side with the shotgun found among the weeds.
 
The four-year restoration project has certainly been a labor of love for the BHS.
 
“It feels like it’s been a month, but also it feels like it’s been 40 years instead of four.  Emphasize labor,” Risty jokes.
 
“It’s at the core of our mission, it’s what we do, it’s why we’re here,” he adds. “We felt it was another way to tell the story of our community, because for many people, the story of Brandon has been in the last 40 years or so, when the growth happened. We think that it’s important to tell the story all the way through, and this cabin tells the story of how they lived back then.”
 

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