A special trunk with special memories

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Thanks to a local locksmith, more is now known about a 146-year-old emigrant sea trunk whose 14 cubic feet of inside storage hadn’t seen the light of day for decades.

The huge trunk was built of one-inch pine boards in 1870 by Nils Pederson Trooien, then living on a farm in the Singsass area of Norway near Trondheim.

He planned his 1871 trip to America well and filled the  trunk with all the most necessary accoutrements and implements needed to start a new life in Dakota Territory half a world away.

A widower, he would leave his 11-year-old son Kornelius behind to make the same journey a year later with Nils’ sister, Kari.

About 60 years ago, the trunk was given to the Brookings County Museum and eventually placed on display in the museum’s 1870’s Sundet log cabin.

Museum officials, inspecting it recently in preparation for moving it into a new museum building made possible by a $100,000 bequest from Nils Trooien’s great-grandson, Trygve A. Trooien, discovered the key to it had been lost.

They wanted to know if there were contents, identification marks or possibly storage trays in the old trunk, so they sought out Brookings locksmith Mike Filholm.

While loading it for the trip from Volga to Brookings, they noticed the trunk’s sturdy and well-crafted construction, not only with the wood, but in its hand-hewn iron strengthening bands, hinges and other embellishments. Clearly, Nels built his trunk for survival during rough handling at sea, a jostling railroad trip and in the covered wagon overland journey that awaited him.

Nels (his Americanized spelling) adhered to the shipping company’s requirements for trunk size, 27 by 45 by 21 inches. He chiseled edges on the top and bottom boards to fit similar edges on the sideboards, insuring a tight seal.

Knowing it would be stacked with dozens of other trunks in the sailing ship’s hold, he fashioned the top lid with wooden support strips placed so that if other trunks were forcefully slid atop his trunk, the lid would be protected from damage or breaching.

The lock on the lid still worked, Filholm discovered, but his traditional locksmith tools and instruments wouldn’t. He rummaged around to find an old hand-made key his father, former Brookings Police Chief Doug Filholm, must have fashioned and hoped it did the trick.

It did.

The lid of Nels P. Trooien’s hand-made trunk was lifted, but representatives of the Brookings County Museum found only cobwebs.

They hadn’t expected much but wanted to be certain. Surely when the late Carl Trooien brought his father’s old trunk to present to the county museum about 60 years ago, it must have been opened and Carl must have left the key.     

He probably also recounted some of the trunk’s history.

After arriving in Quebec, Nels, in his late 30s, and his then nearly new trunk headed by railroad for the Midwest. Somewhere during that time, he met and married a new arrival from the Singsass area named Gjertrude Elevsdatter Busetgjerdet, who was born in 1847.

Nels and Gertrude (her Americanized name) eventually joined with Nels’ sister Kari, 29, and his son Cornelius (his Americanized name) and other emigrants from the Singsass area in Norway. Together they formed a caravan of 11 covered wagons with 30 cattle following in their prairie grass wake. Their trek would be west through Minnesota to the Lake Hendricks area in Dakota Territory.

They arrived at Lake Hendricks on July 14, 1873, to learn that only part of Lake Hendricks was in Dakota Territory. So some of them traveled on a few more miles west to cross over the Minnesota line into Dakota Territory.

Nels and Gertrude homesteaded in the northern Section 8 of Lake Hendricks Township. The family lived in their covered wagon for a time, using the trunk as a table and workbench.

When their son Peter was born in the wagon on Sept. 9, 1873, he was swaddled in blankets and clothing stored in the well-traveled trunk. Peter for a time probably also slept in the trunk.

Despite pioneering hardships, the Trooien family through the years grew, prospered and multiplied, setting successful courses for succeeding generations.

Now, because of the generosity of a great-grandson, the late Trygve Trooien, the same trunk that was packed so carefully 146 years ago with all that Nels owned will become a special part of what is now the Trygve A. Trooien Horse-Drawn Museum.

And from now on, the trunk can be opened at any time.

Locksmith Filholm, a distant Trooien family relative, donated his father’s old key that will henceforth open this irreplaceable part of Brookings County history.