Research Journal: Anna Hanson, Model Student
In 1895, students in the Northfield public schools were asked to write about their favorite of the books they had read during the current school year. Anna Hanson, a fifth grader wrote: “Of all these books I like Little Women the best because it taught me to be good.”
Four years later, in eighth grade, Anna wrote an essay in response to the prompt: “Which famous character would you like to be, and why?” Anna wrote that she would like to have been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “I think it would have been a very grand thing,” she wrote, “to have written some of the most beautiful and interesting poems which he has written, and with which he has left a great monument in the thoughts of the American people.” She concluded:
Longfellow was a great lover of children and he wrote many poems which were accepted by children with great joy, and if I were to become a poet or writer it would be my great desire to write such poems or stories as would cheer the hearts of children.
I would also like to have been so kind as to be loved by the poorer class of people as well as the higher classes as Longfellow was all through his life.
The essay singles out Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, both of which were part of middle school curriculum in Northfield in the 1890s, as poems she would like to have written, and the essay was clearly selected for publication because it modeled so well how students were taught to think about Longfellow.
Who was this model student whose essays were published in the Northfield News? Anna Hanson was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who arrived in Northfield in 1882, five years before Anna was born. She was confirmed and taught Sunday School at St. John’s Lutheran Church, was the valedictorian of the Northfield High School Class of 1903, and a 1907 graduate of St. Olaf College, where she was one of the class orators.
At St. Olaf, Anna was a member of the women’s club Phi Kappa Phi, which in her senior year decided to publish a cookbook to raise funds for a new women’s dormitory. In 1906, the question of whether St. Olaf should continue as a co-educational institution was still being debated at the time among the Lutheran congregations who governed the college. There was a concern among some critics of coeducation that making women more intellectual would make them less marriageable. Given this uncertainty about the future of women’s education, there was a reluctance to take on the expense of building a new Ladies Hall to replace the repurposed 1860 frame schoolhouse that served as a women’s dormitory.
The Phi Kappa Phi Cookbook was conceived to raise funds for the construction of Ladies Hall, but at the same time it wanted to address the concerns of the critics of women’s higher education. Gertrude Hilleboe, the former dean of women at St. Olaf, explained that the compilers of the cookbook “wanted to disarm any criticism that college training would make them less feminine.” The preface of the cookbook begins: “The idea generally prevalent is that the college girl cares but little for the art of cooking. This, however, is not the case among the girls of our own institution, and we hope a few years of college life will never counteract the good influences or training along these lines which they have received in their good Norwegian homes.”
The cookbook contains sections on breads, meats, soups and vegetables, preserves, pickles, cakes and cookies, salads, desserts, confectionery, and drinks. But, as Gertrude Hilleboe wrote, “its real selling point was its last section of twenty-one pages of Norwegian recipes,” including lefse, lutefisk, fish balls, julebrød, rice pudding, meatballs, dumplings, and mushes. The contributors of the individual recipes are anonymous, except for Dr. P.M. Glasoe’s recipe for primost. Glasoe was the head of the St. Olaf chemistry department, and his recipe reads as if he had prepared it in his laboratory. But perhaps the most distinctive recipe in the cookbook is the recipe for corn bread, written in the form of a poem:
Two cups Indian, one of wheat,
One cup sour milk, one cup sweet,
One good egg that well you beat,
Half a cup of molasses too,
With one spoon of butter new;
Salt and soda each a spoon,
Mix up quickly, bake it soon;
Then you’ll have corn bread complete,
Best of all corn bread you meet.
The cookbook sold well. It went into four editions between 1907 and 1920, and Hilleboe observed that “in many a Middle West home you’ll still find well-worn copies of this cookbook.” Meanwhile, bolstered by a pledge of $10,000 by Harald Thorson, enough funds were raised to break ground on the new women’s dormitory, christened Mohn Hall, in the spring of 1911.
After college, and the success of the Phi Kappa Phi Cookbook, Anna Hanson taught English and Norwegian for several years at Augustana Academy in Canton, South Dakota, before marrying Hjalmar Lindstrom, a young lawyer, and settling down in Hayti, South Dakota. In 1919, she was the acting principal of the Hayti schools while the regular principal served in the South Dakota legislature.
In 1924, the Norwegian-American editor of the Northfield News, Herman Roe,
ran into Anna Hanson (Mrs. H.A. Lindstrom) at a picnic in South Dakota and wrote about the encounter in the News:
How many readers remember little Anna Hanson who used to toddle about town in her barefoot days and later graduated from high school and St. Olaf College? Well, Anna was one of the sweetest little girls that ever lived in Northfield. She was a good student and besides she always looked like she came out of a band box… The same mannerisms that made Anna attractive as a Northfield school girl have followed her in her womanhood days and she is a splendid homemaker in one of the neatest homes in South Dakota.
The model student who wrote model essays in grade school became an embodiment of the ideals of the Phi Kappa Phi Cookbook: a college-educated woman who was also a splendid homemaker. She may not have been Longfellow, but the accomplishments of a well-lived ordinary life like Anna Hanson’s are also worth remembering.
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