A man is as great as the dreams he dreams,
as the love he loves,
as the value he redeems,
and as the happiness he shares.
A man is as great as the thoughts he thinks,
as the worth he has attained,
as the fountains at which his spirit drinks,
and as the insight he has gained.
A man is as great as the truth he speaks,
as the help he gives,
as the destiny he seeks,
and as the life he lives.
- Charles Mode
___________________________________________________________________________
Charles Mode's name was Karl Charles Mode. But he was always called Charles Mode.
An excerpt from A History of the Charles and Fanny Mode Family
by Charles J. Mode 1981
Sometime in 1903, before the automobile became the predominant means of transportation, a boy aged 15 and a girl aged 11 met at a social gathering for young people on a farm near present-day St. Cloud, Minnesota. Following the gathering, the girl and some of her sisters witnessed what to their eyes was a display of masterful horsemanship as the boy took them home by horse and buggy. It was thus that Charles Mode and Fanny E. Hansen met. On November 11, 1916 they were married near Kenmare, North Dakota in the home of Niels and Anna Christianson, the brother-in-law and sister of the bride. For three years following marriage, they made their home on the Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll, North Dakota; in 1918, they bought land and developed a farm in Excelsior Township five and one-half miles northwest of Steele. They remained in the Steele community for the rest of their lives, raising a family of three children.
Charles Mode, the third son of John Mode and his wife Anna Kajsa, was born on May 14, 1888 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sometime in 1882, shortly after the founding of Steele, John Mode and his bride, Anna Kajsa, immigrated to Minneapolis from Karlstad, the capital of Varmland, a province in western Sweden. Before coming to America, John Mode, the son of the professional soldier Johannes Magnusson Mod, went by the name, Johan Johannesson Mod, indicating he was the son of Johannes. Had John followed conventions of family nomenclature used by many of his fellow Scandinavian immigrants, the Mode family of Steele would have carried the name Johannesson or one of its variants. But, he preferred a name that was more adaptable to the English language. In Swedish, the word, mod, means courage. Variants of the word were used as assumed names in an ancestral line of professional soldiers, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Courage was a needed and admirable quality of one of their descendants, Charles (Charlie) Mode, who, unlike his ancestors, having lived for centuries among the lakes and dense forests of Varmland, chose to make his way on the North Dakota prairies.
Charles Mode first came to North Dakota in the fall of 1910 to work with a boyhood friend, Warren Keeler on a threshing outfit in the Driscoll vicinity. As the young man aged 22, who had grown up in forested Minnesota and was away from home for the first time, disembarked from the train and stood on the Driscoll depot platform, he wondered whether the people of the treeless prairie were as lonely and inhospitable as the prairie seemed to him. Despite outward appearances of loneliness and foreboding, the people were not only in high spirits but also congenial and very sociable.
It was in this atmosphere of congeniality and sociability, that he found the prairies to his liking; so much so that in the fall harvest seasons of 1911-15 he returned from Minnesota to work on a threshing outfit owned and operated by his friends. Warren Keeler and Jim Clark. These years were part of an age when steam provided the power for operating large farm implements. His job in the fall seasons of 1911-14 was to haul by team and wagon as many as twelve tanks of water consumed daily by the steam engine; in the fall of 1915, he operated the threshing machine, a machine that required twelve bundle teams to keep it operating continuously. By the fall of 1915, he decided to stay in North Dakota and set up farming on the rented Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll. The year 1916 was one of bountiful harvests in the Driscoll vicinity. It was with some sense of security that Charles Mode was married in November, after harvesting a flax crop yielding 22 bushels per acre and selling it for $2.40 per bushel.
An urge to own and develop their own farm led Charles and Fanny Mode to buy a quarter section of virgin school land in Excelsior Township in 1918. since by that time no homestead land was available. In the spring of 1919. sod was broken and some farm buildings were erected during the summer and fall. The Mode family lived continuously on this farm from 1919 till 1933. What started out as an operation involving a quarter section, grew to one involving 480 owned and 480 rented acres, at its maximum extent, devoted to crops, hay, and pasture. During the twenties and early thirties, a herd of twenty Holstein milk cows provided a steady source of income, supplemented by sheep, hogs, poultry, and wheat as a cash crop. Acting on the advice of his friend, E. W. Wiley, who originated in New England, Charles Mode also bought draft horses which were shipped to and sold in Ludlow, Vermont, during the years 1927-30. A decreasing demand for draft horses coupled with the great depression led to the discontinuation of this phase of the operations.
Roy Edward Mode, the oldest son of Charles and Fanny, was born on October 24, 1918 on a farm north of Driscoll at the height of an international influenza epidemic. It was on occasion that challenged the courage of his father and the resourceful skills of his mother, there being no physician in attendance because the only one available in Driscoll was already over-extended caring for the desperately ill. At a more tranquil time, a daughter, Helen Emelia Mode, was born on the farm in Excelsior on July 18, 1923. As a sign of growing prosperity and changing times in the late twenties, a son, Charles Junior Mode, was born in the Bismarck Hospital on December 29, 1927. On that occasion two steers, sold at the Steele stockyards, fetched sufficient funds to cover all doctor and hospital bills. Even after having her children, Fanny continued to do some part-time teaching in the Excelsior schools, especially in the early twenties.
A gift of parenthood was also extended to several foster children who lived with the Modes during a decade starting in the mid-thirties and extending into the mid-forties. Those children staying for extended periods were: Eleanor and Tena Gregerson; Leslie, Martha, and Donald Nerby; and Irene and Eddie Oster. At times as many as twelve people required daily meals. What would have been an insurmountable task for many was taken in stride by Fanny Mode as she organized the boys and girls into helping with the cooking, doing the laundry, and attending to other assorted tasks in running the household. The managerial skills learned from her mother, Maren Sophie, and the experience of having grown up in a large family served her well in raising here own and foster children.
A value held in high esteem by Charles and Fanny Mode was a good education for their children. In 1933 they rented their farm in Excelsior Township to the Grenville Selland family and in turn rented the E. W. Wiley farm one-half mile west of Steele, making it possible for their children to attend the Steele school. The family lived on and operated the Wiley farm until 1937, when it was sold to become part of the Sunshine Ranch operations. In the same year, they acquired their home in northwest Steele, where they resided for the rest of their lives. After moving to Steele, Charles Mode and his family continued to operate the farm in Excelsior until 1946, when their youngest child graduated from Steele High School. Having fulfilled his educational mission, Charles Mode sold the farm in Excelsior and retired to Steele at the age of 58.
Loss of eldest son Roy in World War II
After graduating from Steele High School in 1936, Roy Mode took and passed examinations qualifying his to teach in the rural grade schools of Kidder County. He married Vernice L. Pederson of Driscoll, one of his fellow teachers in the one-room schools of Excelsior. While the newlyweds were teaching in a rural consolidated school near Hazen in western North Dakota during the 1941-42 season, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and the United States went to war with the Axis Powers, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan. As part of a wave of patriotism that swept the youth of the country, Roy Mode enlisted in the United States Army as a private in 1942, His leadership abilities were quickly recognized, however, and he was soon sent to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia. After being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, he was engaged in training troops at army bases in Texas and Oklahoma. By the fall of 1944, he had attained the rank of First Lieutenant and was shipped to France, where he joined the Allied Armies for what turned out to be the closing battles of World War II in western Europe.
In the closing weeks of 1944, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to stem the inexorable advance of the Allied Armies into their homeland, massed 500,000 troops and vast quantities of equipment, which, when concentrated on a narrow front, were sufficient to drive a deep wedge through the allied lines into Belgium. The ensuing struggle to eliminate the wedge became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As a commander of a mortar platoon, Roy Mode played an active role in this huge battle. Being in a position of leadership, his life was especially in danger and on January 30, 1945 he was killed in action as the massive battle drew to a close.
Back in Steele, the news of Roy's death was received by the family with a feeling of great sadness and a mixed sense of pride, folly, and irony; a feeling of great sadness because he was survived by a young widow with two infant children and the family had lost a son and brother; a sense of pride, because he had died fighting for his country and the idea of freedom; a sense of folly, because nations ought to settle their differences without resorting to war; and a sense of irony, because he had died in battle with his ethnic cousins, the Germans.
Along with another son of Steele killed in World War IT, the Mode-Shenaan Post for Veterans of Foreign Wars was named in his honor.
Life in Retirement:
Being of a natural restless and ambitious disposition, Charles Mode's retirement lasted only a few months. During the period, 1947-48, he bought nearly three sections of land in the Horsehead Lake vicinity northeast of Steele. Initially, this land was used for growing cash crops of flax, barley, and wheat; but, a high water table also made it ideally suited for growing alfalfa seed, hay, and pasture for grazing beef cattle. As his age advanced, two of the sections were sold but he owned and operated a section on the south shore of Horsehead Lake until 1974 when it was sold shortly before his death. The life of Charles Mode as Charles Mode as. a farmer was a fine example of putting economic and technologic developments to use; for, he accumulated a greater amount of capital after age 58 than before.
Another facet of the life of Charles Mode, a facet that made a profound impression on his children, was that of public servant. As a staunch developer of newly settled Excelsior Township, he served on the school and township boards during the period 1919-33. In the 1934-35 session of the North Dakota State Legislature, he served as an elected representative from Kidder County. During the decade 1941-50, he served two four-year terms on the Board of Kidder County Commissioners as an elected representative from his district. He also served on the County Welfare Board for 23 years. As a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church of Steele, he served on church council and was treasurer for a number of years. In 1967, he became a charter member of the Steele Golden Age Club and served in many capacities in that organization. As chairman of the Kidder County Soliciting Committee, he spent considerable time soliciting funds for the Golden Manor Rest Home at Steele.
Although he took pride in raising the funds, it was his wish that he would not need to use the facility for an extended period.
After inspecting a new paint job on his house from the roof of an attached garage on a Friday and attending a party with his friends on Sunday, he felt ill Monday morning. Upon being taken to the Bismark Hospital by his friend, Clyde Nunn, the illness was diagnosed as a heart attack. On Wednesday, June 11, 1975, he passed away quietly, in the presence of his living children, at the age of 87, his wish of not requiring the services of the Golden Manor being granted. Many friends and relatives attended his funeral. A touching tribute to him was paid by Seniors United in the September 22, 1976 issue of the Steele Ozone.
Charles and Fanny Mode were a living inspiration to their children and grandchildren. Always willing to offer warm counsel, they instilled a sense of striving, purpose, and values.
Charles and Fanny Mode lie in Woodlawn Cemetery remembered by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They knew the awesome cold of winter; they experienced drought, winds, and plagues of grasshoppers that could destroy their crops. Despite such hardships, they loved the prairies on which they lived and raised their family.
as the love he loves,
as the value he redeems,
and as the happiness he shares.
A man is as great as the thoughts he thinks,
as the worth he has attained,
as the fountains at which his spirit drinks,
and as the insight he has gained.
A man is as great as the truth he speaks,
as the help he gives,
as the destiny he seeks,
and as the life he lives.
- Charles Mode
___________________________________________________________________________
Charles Mode's name was Karl Charles Mode. But he was always called Charles Mode.
An excerpt from A History of the Charles and Fanny Mode Family
by Charles J. Mode 1981
Sometime in 1903, before the automobile became the predominant means of transportation, a boy aged 15 and a girl aged 11 met at a social gathering for young people on a farm near present-day St. Cloud, Minnesota. Following the gathering, the girl and some of her sisters witnessed what to their eyes was a display of masterful horsemanship as the boy took them home by horse and buggy. It was thus that Charles Mode and Fanny E. Hansen met. On November 11, 1916 they were married near Kenmare, North Dakota in the home of Niels and Anna Christianson, the brother-in-law and sister of the bride. For three years following marriage, they made their home on the Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll, North Dakota; in 1918, they bought land and developed a farm in Excelsior Township five and one-half miles northwest of Steele. They remained in the Steele community for the rest of their lives, raising a family of three children.
Charles Mode, the third son of John Mode and his wife Anna Kajsa, was born on May 14, 1888 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sometime in 1882, shortly after the founding of Steele, John Mode and his bride, Anna Kajsa, immigrated to Minneapolis from Karlstad, the capital of Varmland, a province in western Sweden. Before coming to America, John Mode, the son of the professional soldier Johannes Magnusson Mod, went by the name, Johan Johannesson Mod, indicating he was the son of Johannes. Had John followed conventions of family nomenclature used by many of his fellow Scandinavian immigrants, the Mode family of Steele would have carried the name Johannesson or one of its variants. But, he preferred a name that was more adaptable to the English language. In Swedish, the word, mod, means courage. Variants of the word were used as assumed names in an ancestral line of professional soldiers, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Courage was a needed and admirable quality of one of their descendants, Charles (Charlie) Mode, who, unlike his ancestors, having lived for centuries among the lakes and dense forests of Varmland, chose to make his way on the North Dakota prairies.
Charles Mode first came to North Dakota in the fall of 1910 to work with a boyhood friend, Warren Keeler on a threshing outfit in the Driscoll vicinity. As the young man aged 22, who had grown up in forested Minnesota and was away from home for the first time, disembarked from the train and stood on the Driscoll depot platform, he wondered whether the people of the treeless prairie were as lonely and inhospitable as the prairie seemed to him. Despite outward appearances of loneliness and foreboding, the people were not only in high spirits but also congenial and very sociable.
It was in this atmosphere of congeniality and sociability, that he found the prairies to his liking; so much so that in the fall harvest seasons of 1911-15 he returned from Minnesota to work on a threshing outfit owned and operated by his friends. Warren Keeler and Jim Clark. These years were part of an age when steam provided the power for operating large farm implements. His job in the fall seasons of 1911-14 was to haul by team and wagon as many as twelve tanks of water consumed daily by the steam engine; in the fall of 1915, he operated the threshing machine, a machine that required twelve bundle teams to keep it operating continuously. By the fall of 1915, he decided to stay in North Dakota and set up farming on the rented Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll. The year 1916 was one of bountiful harvests in the Driscoll vicinity. It was with some sense of security that Charles Mode was married in November, after harvesting a flax crop yielding 22 bushels per acre and selling it for $2.40 per bushel.
An urge to own and develop their own farm led Charles and Fanny Mode to buy a quarter section of virgin school land in Excelsior Township in 1918. since by that time no homestead land was available. In the spring of 1919. sod was broken and some farm buildings were erected during the summer and fall. The Mode family lived continuously on this farm from 1919 till 1933. What started out as an operation involving a quarter section, grew to one involving 480 owned and 480 rented acres, at its maximum extent, devoted to crops, hay, and pasture. During the twenties and early thirties, a herd of twenty Holstein milk cows provided a steady source of income, supplemented by sheep, hogs, poultry, and wheat as a cash crop. Acting on the advice of his friend, E. W. Wiley, who originated in New England, Charles Mode also bought draft horses which were shipped to and sold in Ludlow, Vermont, during the years 1927-30. A decreasing demand for draft horses coupled with the great depression led to the discontinuation of this phase of the operations.
Roy Edward Mode, the oldest son of Charles and Fanny, was born on October 24, 1918 on a farm north of Driscoll at the height of an international influenza epidemic. It was on occasion that challenged the courage of his father and the resourceful skills of his mother, there being no physician in attendance because the only one available in Driscoll was already over-extended caring for the desperately ill. At a more tranquil time, a daughter, Helen Emelia Mode, was born on the farm in Excelsior on July 18, 1923. As a sign of growing prosperity and changing times in the late twenties, a son, Charles Junior Mode, was born in the Bismarck Hospital on December 29, 1927. On that occasion two steers, sold at the Steele stockyards, fetched sufficient funds to cover all doctor and hospital bills. Even after having her children, Fanny continued to do some part-time teaching in the Excelsior schools, especially in the early twenties.
A gift of parenthood was also extended to several foster children who lived with the Modes during a decade starting in the mid-thirties and extending into the mid-forties. Those children staying for extended periods were: Eleanor and Tena Gregerson; Leslie, Martha, and Donald Nerby; and Irene and Eddie Oster. At times as many as twelve people required daily meals. What would have been an insurmountable task for many was taken in stride by Fanny Mode as she organized the boys and girls into helping with the cooking, doing the laundry, and attending to other assorted tasks in running the household. The managerial skills learned from her mother, Maren Sophie, and the experience of having grown up in a large family served her well in raising here own and foster children.
A value held in high esteem by Charles and Fanny Mode was a good education for their children. In 1933 they rented their farm in Excelsior Township to the Grenville Selland family and in turn rented the E. W. Wiley farm one-half mile west of Steele, making it possible for their children to attend the Steele school. The family lived on and operated the Wiley farm until 1937, when it was sold to become part of the Sunshine Ranch operations. In the same year, they acquired their home in northwest Steele, where they resided for the rest of their lives. After moving to Steele, Charles Mode and his family continued to operate the farm in Excelsior until 1946, when their youngest child graduated from Steele High School. Having fulfilled his educational mission, Charles Mode sold the farm in Excelsior and retired to Steele at the age of 58.
Loss of eldest son Roy in World War II
After graduating from Steele High School in 1936, Roy Mode took and passed examinations qualifying his to teach in the rural grade schools of Kidder County. He married Vernice L. Pederson of Driscoll, one of his fellow teachers in the one-room schools of Excelsior. While the newlyweds were teaching in a rural consolidated school near Hazen in western North Dakota during the 1941-42 season, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and the United States went to war with the Axis Powers, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan. As part of a wave of patriotism that swept the youth of the country, Roy Mode enlisted in the United States Army as a private in 1942, His leadership abilities were quickly recognized, however, and he was soon sent to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia. After being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, he was engaged in training troops at army bases in Texas and Oklahoma. By the fall of 1944, he had attained the rank of First Lieutenant and was shipped to France, where he joined the Allied Armies for what turned out to be the closing battles of World War II in western Europe.
In the closing weeks of 1944, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to stem the inexorable advance of the Allied Armies into their homeland, massed 500,000 troops and vast quantities of equipment, which, when concentrated on a narrow front, were sufficient to drive a deep wedge through the allied lines into Belgium. The ensuing struggle to eliminate the wedge became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As a commander of a mortar platoon, Roy Mode played an active role in this huge battle. Being in a position of leadership, his life was especially in danger and on January 30, 1945 he was killed in action as the massive battle drew to a close.
Back in Steele, the news of Roy's death was received by the family with a feeling of great sadness and a mixed sense of pride, folly, and irony; a feeling of great sadness because he was survived by a young widow with two infant children and the family had lost a son and brother; a sense of pride, because he had died fighting for his country and the idea of freedom; a sense of folly, because nations ought to settle their differences without resorting to war; and a sense of irony, because he had died in battle with his ethnic cousins, the Germans.
Along with another son of Steele killed in World War IT, the Mode-Shenaan Post for Veterans of Foreign Wars was named in his honor.
Life in Retirement:
Being of a natural restless and ambitious disposition, Charles Mode's retirement lasted only a few months. During the period, 1947-48, he bought nearly three sections of land in the Horsehead Lake vicinity northeast of Steele. Initially, this land was used for growing cash crops of flax, barley, and wheat; but, a high water table also made it ideally suited for growing alfalfa seed, hay, and pasture for grazing beef cattle. As his age advanced, two of the sections were sold but he owned and operated a section on the south shore of Horsehead Lake until 1974 when it was sold shortly before his death. The life of Charles Mode as Charles Mode as. a farmer was a fine example of putting economic and technologic developments to use; for, he accumulated a greater amount of capital after age 58 than before.
Another facet of the life of Charles Mode, a facet that made a profound impression on his children, was that of public servant. As a staunch developer of newly settled Excelsior Township, he served on the school and township boards during the period 1919-33. In the 1934-35 session of the North Dakota State Legislature, he served as an elected representative from Kidder County. During the decade 1941-50, he served two four-year terms on the Board of Kidder County Commissioners as an elected representative from his district. He also served on the County Welfare Board for 23 years. As a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church of Steele, he served on church council and was treasurer for a number of years. In 1967, he became a charter member of the Steele Golden Age Club and served in many capacities in that organization. As chairman of the Kidder County Soliciting Committee, he spent considerable time soliciting funds for the Golden Manor Rest Home at Steele.
Although he took pride in raising the funds, it was his wish that he would not need to use the facility for an extended period.
After inspecting a new paint job on his house from the roof of an attached garage on a Friday and attending a party with his friends on Sunday, he felt ill Monday morning. Upon being taken to the Bismark Hospital by his friend, Clyde Nunn, the illness was diagnosed as a heart attack. On Wednesday, June 11, 1975, he passed away quietly, in the presence of his living children, at the age of 87, his wish of not requiring the services of the Golden Manor being granted. Many friends and relatives attended his funeral. A touching tribute to him was paid by Seniors United in the September 22, 1976 issue of the Steele Ozone.
Charles and Fanny Mode were a living inspiration to their children and grandchildren. Always willing to offer warm counsel, they instilled a sense of striving, purpose, and values.
Charles and Fanny Mode lie in Woodlawn Cemetery remembered by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They knew the awesome cold of winter; they experienced drought, winds, and plagues of grasshoppers that could destroy their crops. Despite such hardships, they loved the prairies on which they lived and raised their family.
A man is as great as the dreams he dreams,
as the love he loves,
as the value he redeems,
and as the happiness he shares.
A man is as great as the thoughts he thinks,
as the worth he has attained,
as the fountains at which his spirit drinks,
and as the insight he has gained.
A man is as great as the truth he speaks,
as the help he gives,
as the destiny he seeks,
and as the life he lives.
- Charles Mode
___________________________________________________________________________
Charles Mode's name was Karl Charles Mode. But he was always called Charles Mode.
An excerpt from A History of the Charles and Fanny Mode Family
by Charles J. Mode 1981
Sometime in 1903, before the automobile became the predominant means of transportation, a boy aged 15 and a girl aged 11 met at a social gathering for young people on a farm near present-day St. Cloud, Minnesota. Following the gathering, the girl and some of her sisters witnessed what to their eyes was a display of masterful horsemanship as the boy took them home by horse and buggy. It was thus that Charles Mode and Fanny E. Hansen met. On November 11, 1916 they were married near Kenmare, North Dakota in the home of Niels and Anna Christianson, the brother-in-law and sister of the bride. For three years following marriage, they made their home on the Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll, North Dakota; in 1918, they bought land and developed a farm in Excelsior Township five and one-half miles northwest of Steele. They remained in the Steele community for the rest of their lives, raising a family of three children.
Charles Mode, the third son of John Mode and his wife Anna Kajsa, was born on May 14, 1888 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sometime in 1882, shortly after the founding of Steele, John Mode and his bride, Anna Kajsa, immigrated to Minneapolis from Karlstad, the capital of Varmland, a province in western Sweden. Before coming to America, John Mode, the son of the professional soldier Johannes Magnusson Mod, went by the name, Johan Johannesson Mod, indicating he was the son of Johannes. Had John followed conventions of family nomenclature used by many of his fellow Scandinavian immigrants, the Mode family of Steele would have carried the name Johannesson or one of its variants. But, he preferred a name that was more adaptable to the English language. In Swedish, the word, mod, means courage. Variants of the word were used as assumed names in an ancestral line of professional soldiers, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Courage was a needed and admirable quality of one of their descendants, Charles (Charlie) Mode, who, unlike his ancestors, having lived for centuries among the lakes and dense forests of Varmland, chose to make his way on the North Dakota prairies.
Charles Mode first came to North Dakota in the fall of 1910 to work with a boyhood friend, Warren Keeler on a threshing outfit in the Driscoll vicinity. As the young man aged 22, who had grown up in forested Minnesota and was away from home for the first time, disembarked from the train and stood on the Driscoll depot platform, he wondered whether the people of the treeless prairie were as lonely and inhospitable as the prairie seemed to him. Despite outward appearances of loneliness and foreboding, the people were not only in high spirits but also congenial and very sociable.
It was in this atmosphere of congeniality and sociability, that he found the prairies to his liking; so much so that in the fall harvest seasons of 1911-15 he returned from Minnesota to work on a threshing outfit owned and operated by his friends. Warren Keeler and Jim Clark. These years were part of an age when steam provided the power for operating large farm implements. His job in the fall seasons of 1911-14 was to haul by team and wagon as many as twelve tanks of water consumed daily by the steam engine; in the fall of 1915, he operated the threshing machine, a machine that required twelve bundle teams to keep it operating continuously. By the fall of 1915, he decided to stay in North Dakota and set up farming on the rented Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll. The year 1916 was one of bountiful harvests in the Driscoll vicinity. It was with some sense of security that Charles Mode was married in November, after harvesting a flax crop yielding 22 bushels per acre and selling it for $2.40 per bushel.
An urge to own and develop their own farm led Charles and Fanny Mode to buy a quarter section of virgin school land in Excelsior Township in 1918. since by that time no homestead land was available. In the spring of 1919. sod was broken and some farm buildings were erected during the summer and fall. The Mode family lived continuously on this farm from 1919 till 1933. What started out as an operation involving a quarter section, grew to one involving 480 owned and 480 rented acres, at its maximum extent, devoted to crops, hay, and pasture. During the twenties and early thirties, a herd of twenty Holstein milk cows provided a steady source of income, supplemented by sheep, hogs, poultry, and wheat as a cash crop. Acting on the advice of his friend, E. W. Wiley, who originated in New England, Charles Mode also bought draft horses which were shipped to and sold in Ludlow, Vermont, during the years 1927-30. A decreasing demand for draft horses coupled with the great depression led to the discontinuation of this phase of the operations.
Roy Edward Mode, the oldest son of Charles and Fanny, was born on October 24, 1918 on a farm north of Driscoll at the height of an international influenza epidemic. It was on occasion that challenged the courage of his father and the resourceful skills of his mother, there being no physician in attendance because the only one available in Driscoll was already over-extended caring for the desperately ill. At a more tranquil time, a daughter, Helen Emelia Mode, was born on the farm in Excelsior on July 18, 1923. As a sign of growing prosperity and changing times in the late twenties, a son, Charles Junior Mode, was born in the Bismarck Hospital on December 29, 1927. On that occasion two steers, sold at the Steele stockyards, fetched sufficient funds to cover all doctor and hospital bills. Even after having her children, Fanny continued to do some part-time teaching in the Excelsior schools, especially in the early twenties.
A gift of parenthood was also extended to several foster children who lived with the Modes during a decade starting in the mid-thirties and extending into the mid-forties. Those children staying for extended periods were: Eleanor and Tena Gregerson; Leslie, Martha, and Donald Nerby; and Irene and Eddie Oster. At times as many as twelve people required daily meals. What would have been an insurmountable task for many was taken in stride by Fanny Mode as she organized the boys and girls into helping with the cooking, doing the laundry, and attending to other assorted tasks in running the household. The managerial skills learned from her mother, Maren Sophie, and the experience of having grown up in a large family served her well in raising here own and foster children.
A value held in high esteem by Charles and Fanny Mode was a good education for their children. In 1933 they rented their farm in Excelsior Township to the Grenville Selland family and in turn rented the E. W. Wiley farm one-half mile west of Steele, making it possible for their children to attend the Steele school. The family lived on and operated the Wiley farm until 1937, when it was sold to become part of the Sunshine Ranch operations. In the same year, they acquired their home in northwest Steele, where they resided for the rest of their lives. After moving to Steele, Charles Mode and his family continued to operate the farm in Excelsior until 1946, when their youngest child graduated from Steele High School. Having fulfilled his educational mission, Charles Mode sold the farm in Excelsior and retired to Steele at the age of 58.
Loss of eldest son Roy in World War II
After graduating from Steele High School in 1936, Roy Mode took and passed examinations qualifying his to teach in the rural grade schools of Kidder County. He married Vernice L. Pederson of Driscoll, one of his fellow teachers in the one-room schools of Excelsior. While the newlyweds were teaching in a rural consolidated school near Hazen in western North Dakota during the 1941-42 season, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and the United States went to war with the Axis Powers, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan. As part of a wave of patriotism that swept the youth of the country, Roy Mode enlisted in the United States Army as a private in 1942, His leadership abilities were quickly recognized, however, and he was soon sent to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia. After being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, he was engaged in training troops at army bases in Texas and Oklahoma. By the fall of 1944, he had attained the rank of First Lieutenant and was shipped to France, where he joined the Allied Armies for what turned out to be the closing battles of World War II in western Europe.
In the closing weeks of 1944, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to stem the inexorable advance of the Allied Armies into their homeland, massed 500,000 troops and vast quantities of equipment, which, when concentrated on a narrow front, were sufficient to drive a deep wedge through the allied lines into Belgium. The ensuing struggle to eliminate the wedge became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As a commander of a mortar platoon, Roy Mode played an active role in this huge battle. Being in a position of leadership, his life was especially in danger and on January 30, 1945 he was killed in action as the massive battle drew to a close.
Back in Steele, the news of Roy's death was received by the family with a feeling of great sadness and a mixed sense of pride, folly, and irony; a feeling of great sadness because he was survived by a young widow with two infant children and the family had lost a son and brother; a sense of pride, because he had died fighting for his country and the idea of freedom; a sense of folly, because nations ought to settle their differences without resorting to war; and a sense of irony, because he had died in battle with his ethnic cousins, the Germans.
Along with another son of Steele killed in World War IT, the Mode-Shenaan Post for Veterans of Foreign Wars was named in his honor.
Life in Retirement:
Being of a natural restless and ambitious disposition, Charles Mode's retirement lasted only a few months. During the period, 1947-48, he bought nearly three sections of land in the Horsehead Lake vicinity northeast of Steele. Initially, this land was used for growing cash crops of flax, barley, and wheat; but, a high water table also made it ideally suited for growing alfalfa seed, hay, and pasture for grazing beef cattle. As his age advanced, two of the sections were sold but he owned and operated a section on the south shore of Horsehead Lake until 1974 when it was sold shortly before his death. The life of Charles Mode as Charles Mode as. a farmer was a fine example of putting economic and technologic developments to use; for, he accumulated a greater amount of capital after age 58 than before.
Another facet of the life of Charles Mode, a facet that made a profound impression on his children, was that of public servant. As a staunch developer of newly settled Excelsior Township, he served on the school and township boards during the period 1919-33. In the 1934-35 session of the North Dakota State Legislature, he served as an elected representative from Kidder County. During the decade 1941-50, he served two four-year terms on the Board of Kidder County Commissioners as an elected representative from his district. He also served on the County Welfare Board for 23 years. As a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church of Steele, he served on church council and was treasurer for a number of years. In 1967, he became a charter member of the Steele Golden Age Club and served in many capacities in that organization. As chairman of the Kidder County Soliciting Committee, he spent considerable time soliciting funds for the Golden Manor Rest Home at Steele.
Although he took pride in raising the funds, it was his wish that he would not need to use the facility for an extended period.
After inspecting a new paint job on his house from the roof of an attached garage on a Friday and attending a party with his friends on Sunday, he felt ill Monday morning. Upon being taken to the Bismark Hospital by his friend, Clyde Nunn, the illness was diagnosed as a heart attack. On Wednesday, June 11, 1975, he passed away quietly, in the presence of his living children, at the age of 87, his wish of not requiring the services of the Golden Manor being granted. Many friends and relatives attended his funeral. A touching tribute to him was paid by Seniors United in the September 22, 1976 issue of the Steele Ozone.
Charles and Fanny Mode were a living inspiration to their children and grandchildren. Always willing to offer warm counsel, they instilled a sense of striving, purpose, and values.
Charles and Fanny Mode lie in Woodlawn Cemetery remembered by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They knew the awesome cold of winter; they experienced drought, winds, and plagues of grasshoppers that could destroy their crops. Despite such hardships, they loved the prairies on which they lived and raised their family.
as the love he loves,
as the value he redeems,
and as the happiness he shares.
A man is as great as the thoughts he thinks,
as the worth he has attained,
as the fountains at which his spirit drinks,
and as the insight he has gained.
A man is as great as the truth he speaks,
as the help he gives,
as the destiny he seeks,
and as the life he lives.
- Charles Mode
___________________________________________________________________________
Charles Mode's name was Karl Charles Mode. But he was always called Charles Mode.
An excerpt from A History of the Charles and Fanny Mode Family
by Charles J. Mode 1981
Sometime in 1903, before the automobile became the predominant means of transportation, a boy aged 15 and a girl aged 11 met at a social gathering for young people on a farm near present-day St. Cloud, Minnesota. Following the gathering, the girl and some of her sisters witnessed what to their eyes was a display of masterful horsemanship as the boy took them home by horse and buggy. It was thus that Charles Mode and Fanny E. Hansen met. On November 11, 1916 they were married near Kenmare, North Dakota in the home of Niels and Anna Christianson, the brother-in-law and sister of the bride. For three years following marriage, they made their home on the Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll, North Dakota; in 1918, they bought land and developed a farm in Excelsior Township five and one-half miles northwest of Steele. They remained in the Steele community for the rest of their lives, raising a family of three children.
Charles Mode, the third son of John Mode and his wife Anna Kajsa, was born on May 14, 1888 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sometime in 1882, shortly after the founding of Steele, John Mode and his bride, Anna Kajsa, immigrated to Minneapolis from Karlstad, the capital of Varmland, a province in western Sweden. Before coming to America, John Mode, the son of the professional soldier Johannes Magnusson Mod, went by the name, Johan Johannesson Mod, indicating he was the son of Johannes. Had John followed conventions of family nomenclature used by many of his fellow Scandinavian immigrants, the Mode family of Steele would have carried the name Johannesson or one of its variants. But, he preferred a name that was more adaptable to the English language. In Swedish, the word, mod, means courage. Variants of the word were used as assumed names in an ancestral line of professional soldiers, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Courage was a needed and admirable quality of one of their descendants, Charles (Charlie) Mode, who, unlike his ancestors, having lived for centuries among the lakes and dense forests of Varmland, chose to make his way on the North Dakota prairies.
Charles Mode first came to North Dakota in the fall of 1910 to work with a boyhood friend, Warren Keeler on a threshing outfit in the Driscoll vicinity. As the young man aged 22, who had grown up in forested Minnesota and was away from home for the first time, disembarked from the train and stood on the Driscoll depot platform, he wondered whether the people of the treeless prairie were as lonely and inhospitable as the prairie seemed to him. Despite outward appearances of loneliness and foreboding, the people were not only in high spirits but also congenial and very sociable.
It was in this atmosphere of congeniality and sociability, that he found the prairies to his liking; so much so that in the fall harvest seasons of 1911-15 he returned from Minnesota to work on a threshing outfit owned and operated by his friends. Warren Keeler and Jim Clark. These years were part of an age when steam provided the power for operating large farm implements. His job in the fall seasons of 1911-14 was to haul by team and wagon as many as twelve tanks of water consumed daily by the steam engine; in the fall of 1915, he operated the threshing machine, a machine that required twelve bundle teams to keep it operating continuously. By the fall of 1915, he decided to stay in North Dakota and set up farming on the rented Tom Finn farm north of Driscoll. The year 1916 was one of bountiful harvests in the Driscoll vicinity. It was with some sense of security that Charles Mode was married in November, after harvesting a flax crop yielding 22 bushels per acre and selling it for $2.40 per bushel.
An urge to own and develop their own farm led Charles and Fanny Mode to buy a quarter section of virgin school land in Excelsior Township in 1918. since by that time no homestead land was available. In the spring of 1919. sod was broken and some farm buildings were erected during the summer and fall. The Mode family lived continuously on this farm from 1919 till 1933. What started out as an operation involving a quarter section, grew to one involving 480 owned and 480 rented acres, at its maximum extent, devoted to crops, hay, and pasture. During the twenties and early thirties, a herd of twenty Holstein milk cows provided a steady source of income, supplemented by sheep, hogs, poultry, and wheat as a cash crop. Acting on the advice of his friend, E. W. Wiley, who originated in New England, Charles Mode also bought draft horses which were shipped to and sold in Ludlow, Vermont, during the years 1927-30. A decreasing demand for draft horses coupled with the great depression led to the discontinuation of this phase of the operations.
Roy Edward Mode, the oldest son of Charles and Fanny, was born on October 24, 1918 on a farm north of Driscoll at the height of an international influenza epidemic. It was on occasion that challenged the courage of his father and the resourceful skills of his mother, there being no physician in attendance because the only one available in Driscoll was already over-extended caring for the desperately ill. At a more tranquil time, a daughter, Helen Emelia Mode, was born on the farm in Excelsior on July 18, 1923. As a sign of growing prosperity and changing times in the late twenties, a son, Charles Junior Mode, was born in the Bismarck Hospital on December 29, 1927. On that occasion two steers, sold at the Steele stockyards, fetched sufficient funds to cover all doctor and hospital bills. Even after having her children, Fanny continued to do some part-time teaching in the Excelsior schools, especially in the early twenties.
A gift of parenthood was also extended to several foster children who lived with the Modes during a decade starting in the mid-thirties and extending into the mid-forties. Those children staying for extended periods were: Eleanor and Tena Gregerson; Leslie, Martha, and Donald Nerby; and Irene and Eddie Oster. At times as many as twelve people required daily meals. What would have been an insurmountable task for many was taken in stride by Fanny Mode as she organized the boys and girls into helping with the cooking, doing the laundry, and attending to other assorted tasks in running the household. The managerial skills learned from her mother, Maren Sophie, and the experience of having grown up in a large family served her well in raising here own and foster children.
A value held in high esteem by Charles and Fanny Mode was a good education for their children. In 1933 they rented their farm in Excelsior Township to the Grenville Selland family and in turn rented the E. W. Wiley farm one-half mile west of Steele, making it possible for their children to attend the Steele school. The family lived on and operated the Wiley farm until 1937, when it was sold to become part of the Sunshine Ranch operations. In the same year, they acquired their home in northwest Steele, where they resided for the rest of their lives. After moving to Steele, Charles Mode and his family continued to operate the farm in Excelsior until 1946, when their youngest child graduated from Steele High School. Having fulfilled his educational mission, Charles Mode sold the farm in Excelsior and retired to Steele at the age of 58.
Loss of eldest son Roy in World War II
After graduating from Steele High School in 1936, Roy Mode took and passed examinations qualifying his to teach in the rural grade schools of Kidder County. He married Vernice L. Pederson of Driscoll, one of his fellow teachers in the one-room schools of Excelsior. While the newlyweds were teaching in a rural consolidated school near Hazen in western North Dakota during the 1941-42 season, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and the United States went to war with the Axis Powers, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan. As part of a wave of patriotism that swept the youth of the country, Roy Mode enlisted in the United States Army as a private in 1942, His leadership abilities were quickly recognized, however, and he was soon sent to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia. After being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, he was engaged in training troops at army bases in Texas and Oklahoma. By the fall of 1944, he had attained the rank of First Lieutenant and was shipped to France, where he joined the Allied Armies for what turned out to be the closing battles of World War II in western Europe.
In the closing weeks of 1944, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to stem the inexorable advance of the Allied Armies into their homeland, massed 500,000 troops and vast quantities of equipment, which, when concentrated on a narrow front, were sufficient to drive a deep wedge through the allied lines into Belgium. The ensuing struggle to eliminate the wedge became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As a commander of a mortar platoon, Roy Mode played an active role in this huge battle. Being in a position of leadership, his life was especially in danger and on January 30, 1945 he was killed in action as the massive battle drew to a close.
Back in Steele, the news of Roy's death was received by the family with a feeling of great sadness and a mixed sense of pride, folly, and irony; a feeling of great sadness because he was survived by a young widow with two infant children and the family had lost a son and brother; a sense of pride, because he had died fighting for his country and the idea of freedom; a sense of folly, because nations ought to settle their differences without resorting to war; and a sense of irony, because he had died in battle with his ethnic cousins, the Germans.
Along with another son of Steele killed in World War IT, the Mode-Shenaan Post for Veterans of Foreign Wars was named in his honor.
Life in Retirement:
Being of a natural restless and ambitious disposition, Charles Mode's retirement lasted only a few months. During the period, 1947-48, he bought nearly three sections of land in the Horsehead Lake vicinity northeast of Steele. Initially, this land was used for growing cash crops of flax, barley, and wheat; but, a high water table also made it ideally suited for growing alfalfa seed, hay, and pasture for grazing beef cattle. As his age advanced, two of the sections were sold but he owned and operated a section on the south shore of Horsehead Lake until 1974 when it was sold shortly before his death. The life of Charles Mode as Charles Mode as. a farmer was a fine example of putting economic and technologic developments to use; for, he accumulated a greater amount of capital after age 58 than before.
Another facet of the life of Charles Mode, a facet that made a profound impression on his children, was that of public servant. As a staunch developer of newly settled Excelsior Township, he served on the school and township boards during the period 1919-33. In the 1934-35 session of the North Dakota State Legislature, he served as an elected representative from Kidder County. During the decade 1941-50, he served two four-year terms on the Board of Kidder County Commissioners as an elected representative from his district. He also served on the County Welfare Board for 23 years. As a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church of Steele, he served on church council and was treasurer for a number of years. In 1967, he became a charter member of the Steele Golden Age Club and served in many capacities in that organization. As chairman of the Kidder County Soliciting Committee, he spent considerable time soliciting funds for the Golden Manor Rest Home at Steele.
Although he took pride in raising the funds, it was his wish that he would not need to use the facility for an extended period.
After inspecting a new paint job on his house from the roof of an attached garage on a Friday and attending a party with his friends on Sunday, he felt ill Monday morning. Upon being taken to the Bismark Hospital by his friend, Clyde Nunn, the illness was diagnosed as a heart attack. On Wednesday, June 11, 1975, he passed away quietly, in the presence of his living children, at the age of 87, his wish of not requiring the services of the Golden Manor being granted. Many friends and relatives attended his funeral. A touching tribute to him was paid by Seniors United in the September 22, 1976 issue of the Steele Ozone.
Charles and Fanny Mode were a living inspiration to their children and grandchildren. Always willing to offer warm counsel, they instilled a sense of striving, purpose, and values.
Charles and Fanny Mode lie in Woodlawn Cemetery remembered by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They knew the awesome cold of winter; they experienced drought, winds, and plagues of grasshoppers that could destroy their crops. Despite such hardships, they loved the prairies on which they lived and raised their family.
Inscription
Mode
1891 Fanny E. 1965
1888 Charles 1975
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
