A little village popped up in New Solum Township to meet the needs of the families in the area. Although this picture was taken after 1912, it gives you an idea of the trees available for lumber. The village had a store, a black smith shop, a dance hall, and a church in town. the church was built under the supervision of Reverend Olaf Anderson. Up the road at the top of the picture, then east, was another church and a cemetery. Most of the ancestors mentioned in this blog are buried in the Rindal Cemetery or the Wildwood Cemetery.

The land where the village formed was a strip of land between two counties. When the area was surveyed, the land was missed. In discovering the error, the land was "a strip of land between....", then, shortened to strip. Everyone knew what it meant, it was a piece of unsurveyed land that no one had bothered to add to or subtract from a county. When it was added to Marshall County, the town retained the name.

My grandfather told the story about how when the train approached the strip of land, he would announce "STRIP! Don't forget your parcels. When the children's grandfather told the story, he would blush.

The gold mine was in an article in the Rosewood News, which is a gossip column in the Thief River Falls Times.

"A writer on the Warren Sheaf in their last issue asks if we remember back in our piping days when our name was Strip and when the passenger brakeman announced the proverbial “Strip! Don’t forget your parcels“Now the daughters of Eve would blush and look out of the window and feel embarrassed.

Yes, brother, we remember the good and pre-war days, when most of us wished we could have “Stripped” in the blazing July and August sun and taken a shower bath instead of as in the year 1924 when winter coats are worn during mid-summer. In those were the piping days with a free corn cob pipe with every quarter purchased of “The Smoke”. There is the Camel and Chesterfield day when the emblem of honor is a round cardboard with a cotton cord dangling down from the breast pocket of a khaki shirt. It is twelve years this month since we “Stripped out of Strip” and went into the “The woods of the Roses” and the credit for the change of the name we believe must rightfully be given to Herbert Carlson and Enoch Nelson, two of the “Strip Progressives” in those days. Both of these men have now left the good old burg. Herbert is now located somewhere on the Pacific Coast, busy saving up on his first million and eventually eyeing the kind that blushed at the brakeman, “Strip” And Enoch, good old soul, peace to you."

And peace to all who enter into the Old Trunk and Worn Shoes blog.

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