In 1882 my great great grandfather David Lewis lived in Sun Prairie Wisconsin. He went west and homesteaded in Mina South Dakota, with his son James Harry.
If you stayed on the land for 7 years, and farmed it and built a house, you got a quarter section for free. 1/4 of a square mile. So they both had a quarter section.
And James Harry had 8 children and the Lewis family was a big force there in little Mina by 1923, when my father was born.
The Depression hit in 1929, and even worse, the Dust Bowl. Dad said it didn't rain for 3 years and even worse, it didn't snow. An agricultural catastrophe.
The Lewis families packed up and left, went west to Seattle and east to St. Paul.
I went to Mina in the year 2000 to see the old Lewis homestead. Hell, I was even thinking I might try to buy one of the old farm houses, and just move in.
It was gone! During the Dust Bowl, the houses were sold, they jacked them up and put them on wheels and moved them away.
All that was left was the foundation, it was made of rocks piled up.
And the well. Six feet diameter, and sixty feet deep, brick lined. That was something, to think of great grandfather James Harry digging that well by hand in 1883.
My grandfather Frank Lewis was the station master at the silo at the railroad tracks in Ree Heights SD. I went over there and his office, although it closed fifty years ago, is still there. I walked in the door and grandpa Frank's leather chair was still there, the scale is still there. The only remnants of the Lewis family in South Dakota.
