Last week’s mystery photo Grant County history

Joleen Bland, Othello, identified last week’s mystery photo. Read on.

The mystery photo is a lefsa rolling pin. It is used to roll out the Scandinavian delicacy of lefsa. It is a potato and flour product.

The dough is rolled out into a very thin disk and then baked onto a griddle, flipped with a special lefsa stick and browned on the other side. Lefsa is a special holiday treat and loved by all the Norwegian and Swedish peoples. The baked lefsa is then spread with butter and cinnamon and sugar, rolled up and eaten. It is very good.

The rolling pins can be single grooved or cross cut grooved. The one I have is cross cut as shown in the picture. These rolling pins are usually passed down through family members.

Dennis note: Thanks for responding, Joleen. I looked it up on Google and watched a video showing how to make lefsa. Most interesting.

Aftermath of Civil War directs family to move west

The Grant County Historical Society has compiled several volumes of Grant County history. The books are available for purchase at the Historical Society Museum gift shop in Ephrata.

These are memories of Grant County, compiled from taped interviews by the Grant County Historical Society.

Today we backtrack a bit and then continue Nat Washington’s story about Grand Coulee. He is presenting a great background about his family back east before they moved west. Read on.

My grandfather was really glad when the Civil War was over. He was really like almost everyone else, he was broke.

The property that he inherited had been divided up among other children, his family home, a large home, was too big a house and not enough land and he had to sell it in order to educate his children and it’s an example of someone actually being down on their luck.

Now so many people came from the east to the west to get a new start. And here he was 67 years old and had had that vision that he would get a new start out here in the west. First Dad came out and then my uncle came out and I don’t have the exact dates it was either about 1906 or 1907.

My dad came out because he did the unpardonable thing. The family, as I pointed out, they lost their money during the Civil War, did not recover it and he did the thing that most people shouldn’t do, it was fine to remain in genteel poverty in the Shenandoah Valley with the Southern people, but it just wasn’t right to go out and do what he did.

More from Nat Washington next week.

He went to the University of West Virginia and worked in the mills and worked in the mines in order to get his education. And when he came back, strangely enough, it was one of those things that he just wasn’t quite accepted.

He started to practice law in his hometown and it just didn’t work.