Sept 14, 2013 at 8:30am, Cousin Michael
(as he was know to so many)
gave up his fight with cancer and joined his Mother and Ancestors.

 Michael Erwin Reitmeier

By Mike Christopherson, Managing Editor

The thing that makes the local sugarbeet museum initiative so interesting, John Reitmeier explained Wednesday, is that it encompasses the entire history of sugarbeet farming in Crookston and the Red River Valley.

"Wheat has been farmed for thousands and thousands of years," Reitmeier said while standing in a quonset to get out of the rain at the farm of his father, Willard. "Sugarbeets are a new crop, going back less than 100 years, with inventions and innovations developed in the lifetimes of the people you see here. A lot of the testing and development was conducted right on these very fields."

The "people" that various members of the media could see surrounding Reitmeier were many other Reitmeier men, including great-grandsons, grandsons and sons of Edward H. Reitmeier, who's son Willard is being honored by the local sugarbeet museum initiative.

Although the museum is not yet completed at the former Crookston Implement site on the east edge of town, the eight people behind the project are hosting their inaugural Harvest Festival on Sunday, Sept. 11. In accordance with what they're hoping becomes an annual celebration, they want to honor an individual or farm family each year that have "done a lot to develop this industry," explained Allan Dragseth, who heads up the museum initiative. This first year, Willard Reitmeier, the surviving patriarch of the Edward H. Reitmeier family and second oldest son of Edward H., is being honored.

Willard will be a featured guest at the Harvest Festival, and in Saturday's Ox Cart Days Torchlight Parade he'll be a passenger in a convertible.

Dragseth said the honor doesn't have a specific name yet, and museum leaders aren't in a big hurry to come up with one. "There are so many halls of fame and other awards, we're going to take our time and come up with something that fits," he said.

In the 1920s sugarbeet cultivation was much different than it is today. Beets were handled mostly by hand, pulled from the ground one row at a time, the tops taken off with a machete that had a curved hook at the end, then thrown into rows. Those rows were loaded into carts with pitchfork like shovels and then driven to a rail station where they were again loaded by hand onto rail cars headed to Chaska for processing.

Willard, as a result of the loss of his Wife, Grace, is now living back on the family farm, the farm he developed since his return from World War II. Although he's not circling the fields in any of the newer and bigger equipment, there's still a daily "tour" of the fields, either in his pickup truck or in an antique Harley Davidson golf cart.

Often over the years the story has been told of how the farm wives were as close to farming as the men. In the early years Willard farmed with his next oldest brother Edward, Jr., and the women not only did all the work that's been glorified in historical cookbooks, but Grace and Lucille traded off days of standing on the back of the sugarbeet loader and separating the beets from the clumps of mud that were coming by the conveyer belt. It was one day of cooking for the entire crew along with running a household, followed by a day of throwing mud clumps standing on a moving machine in all kinds of weather. Grace always used to ask, "Which day was the vacation day?"

At the Harvest Festival, there will be shuttle busses to take people from the museum to nearby beet fields and grain fields where they can watch how the labor intensive harvesting used to go. There will be a one row harvester of the same model that the women used to ride along with a large display of equipment from the early days right up to our current, modern times, Dragseth explained.

All of the Reitmeier sons became farmers. The eldest, Arnold became the first sugarbeet "boss" of the family. He passed away in 1953. Other brothers include Willard, Edward, Marvin, Lloyd, Ernest and Erwin (Mike). Now Edward H. Reitmeier's grandsons and great-grandsons are carrying on the tradition.

(Picture: Seated Marvin, Standing John Seated Willard, Lloyd, Justin, Mike (Erwin, Everett, Ronald, Leroy Paul, Standing Lance, Jason)